I guess the thing about MTBF if it's just a huge number that manufacturers throw out there because consumers don't understand what it really means.
It's like writing "100% Juice" on the front of a Cranberry Cocktail bottle -- the statement is true, but 90% of consumers don't get that it's 80% APPLE/GRAPE juice plus 20% cranberry. But does it help sell Cranberry Cocktail? Hell, yes!
Is the MTBF of a drive real? Probably pretty close. Does it mean anything for the consumer? Not even close. Does it help sell drives? Hell, yes!
Actually, in your car example, you would have to know the service life of the starter and replace it every time the service life expired for the MTBF to apply.
The thing about MTBF is it's pretty useless because most of the time we don't care if something breaks down... we just repair it.
For example, you don't go replacing the starter on a regular basis because if it goes out you just replace it -- no harm done. You don't replace your hard drive on a regular basis because if it goes out you buy a new one and restore your backups.
MTBFs apply more to things like 747s, where you DO replace certain parts on a regular basis because if, say, the turbines in the jet failed, you might die.
NASA cares about MTBFs. You can bet that when a component in a schematic call-out says, "replace every 5 flights", they do it. The MTBF for the shuttle may be very high, but the service life of an o-ring might only be 2 months.
The problem is that MTBF doesn't do anything for the average consumer. It's a worthless metric for them.
Now suppose you need a hard drive to go into a U2 bomber...
You can bet the builder of that plane is going to find out what both the service life AND MTBF of that hard drive is, and that hard drive will get replaced every so many years, and the MTBF will go into the equation for the reliability of that plane.
In fact, all components that go into the hard drive have an MTBF, and it is those MTBFs that all get stuck in a big calculation to get the resultant MTBF.
Nothing in the definition of MTBF says anything about replacing the entire unit not being permitted.
Single capacitors/resistors/etc. have MTBFs.
If you want to calculate the MTBF of your computer, you will need the MTBF of the hard drive, the processor, memory, motherboard... etc.
It makes perfect sense to talk about the MTBF of the drive by itself. So long as you replace it on a regular basis, copying the data each time, you can expect performance on average to the MTBF.
All this is just confusion, admittedly happily encouraged by the hardware manufactures.
MTBF is NOT and has NOTHING to do with the expected time before a drive fails.
MTBF is the expected time between failures in a SYSTEM which is REGULARLY MAINTAINED.
What does regularly maintained mean? It means that when a component reaches the end of its SERVICE LIFE that component is REPLACED.
TO WHIT: If at the end of the warranty period of your drive you replace said drive with a new burned-in hard drive, copying the data from old drive to new drive, and you keep doing this over and over again, on average it will take the MTBF before you encounter a failure.
Also, MTBF figures are notoriously inaccurate as they are arrived at using a formula which takes into account the MTBF of each component that goes into a system -- components which often have incorrect MTBF times.
Example: An electrolytic capacitor might have an MTBF of 100,000 years, assuming you replace it with a new tested electrolytic capacitor of the same type every year before all the electrolyte evaporates!
Knowing the MTBF without knowing the service life of the component or the burn-in procedures for a component is meaningless.
...having said that the experiment has merit. It would be a massive advance (massive disappointment for some -- a huge relief for others) to disprove string theory. Many physicists (including myself) think string theory is a waste of time and resources to be filed away with the multi-universe view of quantum physics.
This is more than just "can't prove" in the "you can't prove you're alive" sense. It's more in line with the "you can't prove God exists" sense.
If you think gravity causes objects to attract one another, you can test the theory by putting two objects near each other and measuring their force upon one another. A big part of your experiment is showing that it isn't an electrical or magnetic field that is causing the attraction. You show that the two objects attract one another in some new way outside of the other known mechanisms. You haven't exactly proven that gravity exists, but you've shown a property that is consistent with your theory and cannot be explained by other means.
This string theory experiment is more akin to saying you're going to test the theory of gravity by showing energy is conserved when the two objects approach each other. You know that your theory of gravity requires the conservation of energy, so you check to see if energy is conserved. If energy isn't conserved, you know your theory is wrong.
The problem is, even if it turns out energy is conserved, it didn't show your theory was right or can't be explained by some other theory. There are a other mechanisms that cause attraction which also exhibit conservation of energy, not just gravity.
This experiment just tests some key things that must be true in order for string theory to be true. It does not test any actual observable unique to the theory.
It's like trying to prove that God doesn't exist by showing that he doesn't make a personal appearance in the next hour. The fact that no bushes burn doesn't really disprove God -- it's just a precondition for him not to exist.
I can't see any application for which this is an advantage, not even astronomy. In astronomy I guess you could argue that you want a highly efficient detector because you need to harvest every photon you can... but a larger detector also means a larger dark current, so that seems to be going the opposite direction you need to be going.
For any other normal application this has got to be the stupidest thing I've read in a while.
This device will throw away >99% of the available light. So instead of shooting f8/125 portraits you'll be shooting f1.4/4 blur-blobs. Yeah, that's what every photographer wants.
I have solved this problem. (Please don't laugh.) However, I have no idea who to contact about this.
I have devised a system which permits the following:
*Non-forgeable secure voter receipts *Receipts do not revel vote choices *Receipts can prove you voted and for whom if necessary *Not vulnerable to single-point software/hardware exploits *Supplies a verifiable electronic (and paper if need be) trail *Permits voters to verify that their vote was counted correctly without revealing who they voted for *Paper trail does not compromise privacy *3rd party verification *Voter privacy *Recounts/Auditing possible *Voter fraud can be detected
I have even written up a draft paper on it describing the system. Now what?
The whole point of consoles is that they are supposed to be cheaper and easier to design for than computers. 10 years ago there were so many video card manufacturers it was really hard to know if anything was going to be compatible. These days there are really just two video card vendors, and they both cater to DX and OGL. Is it really harder to write games for Windows than for the PS3? If a gamer has to lay out $900 for the next-gen console, is he really saving money over buying a full-fledged PC?
It's crazy, but console makers are rapidly introducing so many features they will soon be full fledged PCs, and cell-phone makers are slowly starting to fill in the niche that consoles are leaving behind.
I just can't imagine if IBM had this on the back burner that they wouldn't have informed Apple of it before they jumped ship. "Oh, yes, Mr. Jobs, I understand you taking your $Ms off to Intel. No hard feelings, mate. You just come on back if you ever wanna play with us again, OK? Oh, Steve? Steve? Darn, he hung up. Oh well, I guess he probably wasn't too interested in this new technology that will make our chips 2x faster in three year's time.."
Maybe they hadn't invented this at that time, but I doubt it. It was probably already working in lab deep underground. Even if that were true, I'm sure at some point Intel gave Steve a call to let him know what was going on. If this morning Mr. Jobs woke up and pooped his pants because of what he read in the business section of the WSJ about IBMs new technology, I'll be very surprised.
When it's about software and Palladium, dirty scumbag consumers have no business getting direct access. When it's the MPAA touting HDCP or AACS, which might mean Windows can't play the multimedia game, suddenly Mr. Gates is all for Consumer rights.
Where have all the flowers gone? Where's the Spy vs. Spy of this gaming generation? How about the JumpMan? M.U.L.E.? Paradroids? Marble Madness?
How many gamers today even know what these games are?
I like a little FPS now and then, but it saddens me greatly that today's gamers can't seem to enjoy anything but. My favorite PC games used to be the Sierra/Lucasgame adventures. Now I'm lucky if a "decent" game comes along once every two years.
What irritates me is that the game engines are there to make something more interesting. Why not make a 1st person adventure game? Not one with shooting and slashing, but one where you have an inventory and have to push things around. How about Space Quest 3D?
How about a multiplayer 3D game where the participants have to activate multiple devices in separate areas to continue in the game? (I.E., player 1 has to stand on door trigger A so player 2 can press button B that turns off a laser so player 3 can...)
Personally I think 3D has ruined gaming. It seems as though the simulation games (Starcraft, warcraft, Civ., etc.) are the only ones that get the fact that "2D" (really 3-d with the camera pointed down) is worth anything any more.
What a shame.
And it really comes down to the gun. Give me a game in 3D that doesn't involving pressing the gun trigger (don't get me wrong -- I love counterstrike) and you can probably win me over. I mean, look at the Sims! Look at DDR! You don't have to have a machine gun or a rocket launcher to get a fun game.
Are we destined to rarely see a new Dig Dug? Ultima III? Original Zelda? Beach head? Frogger? (Oh, wait, this one WAS done in 3-D, and it was pretty fun!)
Some times I think what we really need is a SourceForge team to rewrite all the classics with modern graphics and sound.
But I guess modern gamers just wouldn't get trying to take over another robot not by shooting it, but rather by maximizing your circuit takeovers from sending your energy bolts down the right branched pathways.
Oh well, I guess this officially makes me an old-fogey.
Where have all the good games gone? Gone to bit buckets, every one.
NM, I did a little more reading, and it's not possible to TM something in relation to it's dictionary definition. The easy example I found was 'Coke', which is a form of coal, but which is also a trademark of Coca-Cola. In this case, it wouldn't be possible to trademark Tiger if what you were selling was miniaturized tamed tigers.
In this case, the question is, do the two companies sell closely enough related products that someone might become confused. I don't think that's the case. Noone is going to go looking for Tiger Direct, where you buy cheap computer stuff, for the Tiger OS. Trademark law was not set up to protect your Google ranking, unfortunately for Tiger Direct.
A better question might be, why does Tiger Direct care? Anyone actually looking to buy computer equipment is probably not going to do a search for the word Tiger. Anyone who knows the company already will just type in Tiger Direct. Noone is going to "accidentally" find Tiger direct by doing a search for the word Tiger. Therefore, it seems to me that, if anything, this would help them, not hur them. There name is now vaguely associated with Apple, who doesn't really compete with them. How can that be a bad thing?
It seems to me, the best thing Tiger Direct could do would be to drop the lawsuit, asking Apple to make them a premere distributer of the Tiger OS at slightly discounted prices in exchange.
I'm not a lawyer, but I seem to remember reading that it is not possible to trademark common words. Tiger is certainly a common word, so doesn't that mean this case has no merit automatically?
1) No company or person will ever put it's complete existance completely in the hands of another company. You might hire someone to work on your system, but you'll be darn sure if they go out of business you can go to someone else.
2) Those of us who tinker, LIKE TO TINKER. How many hundreds of thousands of people are out there who enjoy tweaking every last setting?
3) The entire population is becoming MORE educated about computers, not less so. The market of people who would want these kinds of services mostly comprises older people weren't sucking on a mouse when they were two years old. Most young adults today have no qualms about working on their system.
4) Most systems aren't that critical. If my gaming computer fails, a reformat isn't going to make me go bankrupt. Noone will pay for services they don't need.
Just in: In ten years, noone will drive their own cars anymore! Cars should run perfectly, as long as they're not abused or crashed into anything by their owners. Since people hate taking their car to the mechanic so much, we predict all cars will be driven by car specialists to make life easier for the average american.
In other news, around the same time, Americans will stop cooking for themselves and eat out exclusively! We've determined that the risk of being cut by a knife and the hours spent preparing food just aren't worth it.
Finally, in a sign of the times, major Arcade game companies have announced a comeback. "People just don't want to be bothered with putting a DVD in their PS2. We found that the average american would rather pay $1 per game to play in an arcade, where you just walk from machine to machine. It's so much easier, and you never have to worry about maintenance, or deal with equipment repairs."
Someone will just play the cd using their super-linear ultra high fidelity audiophile 28 bit audio card, and plug the output into their ultra linear ultra high fidelity audiophile 28 bit digitizer, and then downsample the whole audiophile quality album into a very non-audiophile 128kbps MP3. If you can hear it or see, there's a way to copy it. Even if you have to whip out the ole' cam-corder.
If you don't like censorship and can have the resources to really help, perhaps the best thing to do would be to mirror the GOP site to make sure it doesn't go down.
I plan to vote Kerry, but I won't stand for censorship.
Well, first, I back up my data regularly, so if a drive fails, I just restore it. (Imagine that. Backups. Who would have thought?) I've been a hard-core computer user for the last 27 years. Dealing with failed hard drives is just part of life. If I were really worried about it, I WOULD go raid-5... but it's not that hard to restore my data, and I'd rather not buy another drive or more expensive controller. (The one I'm using now is was on the mobo!)
Secondly, the differences ARE real. There are people out there who spend $1000 to update their computers so they can move from 60FPS to 68FPS when playing DOOM 3. If spending $1K is perfectly reasonable to get an extra 8 frames per second, why would you scoff at someone for spending an extra $300 to eliminate 30 seconds of boot time each time they hit the 'ON' switch, or 7 seconds each time they start photoshop?
I don't know about you, but staring at a screen waiting for a program to start isn't my idea of a great time, even if it IS only for 7 seconds. Is that a waste of money? A waste of power? If you think so, fine. I'm more than happy to let that "power" go to waste 99.9% of the time so I can regain 10 minutes of my life each time I sit down to use my computer.
Perhaps my desire for quick response partially stems from my days of using my C=64, when all I had to do was flip the switch and within 2 seconds the word "READY." appeared. Or perhaps it's from the days of DOS 4, when it took longer for the BIOS to the POST than it did to boot the OS. For whatever the reason, I'm impatient, and I've found spending $300 is well worth it to me.
But the bottom line is, some of use use the technology and love it. Some of you don't. That's fine: but don't go around telling people it's a "waste of money and worthless" just because you don't use it.
A common misconception is that striping beyond 2 drives is "worthless." That simply isn't true: remember that the inside of the drives, close to the spindles, has a transfer rate that is nearly half what it is on the outside cylindars. By striping 4 drives togeather, about half the bandiwdth is wasted near the FRONT of the drive, but near the tail, it's almost all being used. The effect is that the drive feels uniformly quick no matter what part of the drive you are reading from!
I personally jumped from a single drive to a 4-drive SATA raid-0 system, composed of 120GB drives from two different manufacturers.
The system screams.
I can't tell you how nice it is to have my computer boot in half the time... how your system feels like you always wished it would feel. You can add all the memory you want, all the processing power you want, but if you can't feed the computer, it's all pointless.
The only thing I wish now was that my system had a faster and/or wider bus that would allow me to take advantage of all the currently unused bandwidth available from the four drives.
I live in Albuquerque, which is the big city that Rio Rancho lies on the outskirts of. ("I KNEW I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque!")
For years, trying to get high speed internet access in this city/state was like getting teeth pulled. While everyone else was first getting high speed internet access, we were left in the dark even though we had Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Labs, the University of New Mexico, and Intel all in the same area. While everyone else was getting DSL, our local telephone company dragged their feet on the issue. (To this day, in the middle of Metro Albuquerque, I STILL couldn't get DSL at my home, even if I wanted to!) Several years went by with them promising us high speed internet access... but they were all empty promises.
It wasn't until @Home brought us internet cable that we were finally able to join the high-speed era and get away from our 36K modems. (The networks were too noisy for 56K to work.)
It makes me happy to know that New Mexico is finally on the leading edge of something involving internet access, but I imagine this will make QWest very unhappy in that city... I suspect many people won't bother to get DSL from them, but will instead opt for the new wireless option so they can take their laptops with them everywhere they go.
"...happen to be within 80,000 years of us, yet no race is more than 80,000 years ahead?..."
Just because someone is much more advanced, doesn't mean we should have heard from them by now.
"All conspiracy theories aside," if there WAS someone that advanced they probably sent out probes 1000-100,000's of years ago, and they've long since passed us by. In which case, they probably concluded they were the only intellegent life and stopped bothering to send out probes. Heck, maybe they have a SETI team that gets laughed at every 1000 years when they send out probes. "We've been sending out probes for the last million years, and noones ever radioed back, and here you go wasting another quadzillion megabucks trying to find someone who isn't even out there."
Really, there's no reason to believe that in the tiny fraction of a moment WE'VE been able to detect an ovature from another planet that the other race has even bothered to try.
It's FAR more likely that the LESS advanced race would contact the MORE advanced race. Why? Because as soon as the less advanced race is capable of doing so, they start trying to contact/listen for the more advanced race, while the more advanced race has been listening for 1000's of years but probably doesn't even bother trying to contact anyone execpt for every 100 years or so.
The whole, "we haven't been contacted so it can't be possible," idea is just shortsighted.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the thing about MTBF if it's just a huge number that manufacturers throw out there because consumers don't understand what it really means.
It's like writing "100% Juice" on the front of a Cranberry Cocktail bottle -- the statement is true, but 90% of consumers don't get that it's 80% APPLE/GRAPE juice plus 20% cranberry. But does it help sell Cranberry Cocktail? Hell, yes!
Is the MTBF of a drive real? Probably pretty close. Does it mean anything for the consumer? Not even close. Does it help sell drives? Hell, yes!
Actually, in your car example, you would have to know the service life of the starter and replace it every time the service life expired for the MTBF to apply.
The thing about MTBF is it's pretty useless because most of the time we don't care if something breaks down... we just repair it.
For example, you don't go replacing the starter on a regular basis because if it goes out you just replace it -- no harm done. You don't replace your hard drive on a regular basis because if it goes out you buy a new one and restore your backups.
MTBFs apply more to things like 747s, where you DO replace certain parts on a regular basis because if, say, the turbines in the jet failed, you might die.
NASA cares about MTBFs. You can bet that when a component in a schematic call-out says, "replace every 5 flights", they do it. The MTBF for the shuttle may be very high, but the service life of an o-ring might only be 2 months.
The problem is that MTBF doesn't do anything for the average consumer. It's a worthless metric for them.
Now suppose you need a hard drive to go into a U2 bomber...
You can bet the builder of that plane is going to find out what both the service life AND MTBF of that hard drive is, and that hard drive will get replaced every so many years, and the MTBF will go into the equation for the reliability of that plane.
MTBF for a single part makes perfect sense.
In fact, all components that go into the hard drive have an MTBF, and it is those MTBFs that all get stuck in a big calculation to get the resultant MTBF.
Nothing in the definition of MTBF says anything about replacing the entire unit not being permitted.
Single capacitors/resistors/etc. have MTBFs.
If you want to calculate the MTBF of your computer, you will need the MTBF of the hard drive, the processor, memory, motherboard... etc.
It makes perfect sense to talk about the MTBF of the drive by itself. So long as you replace it on a regular basis, copying the data each time, you can expect performance on average to the MTBF.
Your SYSTEM is your COMPUTER. You maintain it by replacing the hard drive and transferring the data as I said in the original post.
Sorry for the bad URL... try:
http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/VAVR-5WGTSB_R0_EN.pdf
All of this is WRONG.
All this is just confusion, admittedly happily encouraged by the hardware manufactures.
MTBF is NOT and has NOTHING to do with the expected time before a drive fails.
MTBF is the expected time between failures in a SYSTEM which is REGULARLY MAINTAINED.
What does regularly maintained mean? It means that when a component reaches the end of its SERVICE LIFE that component is REPLACED.
TO WHIT: If at the end of the warranty period of your drive you replace said drive with a new burned-in hard drive, copying the data from old drive to new drive, and you keep doing this over and over again, on average it will take the MTBF before you encounter a failure.
Also, MTBF figures are notoriously inaccurate as they are arrived at using a formula which takes into account the MTBF of each component that goes into a system -- components which often have incorrect MTBF times.
Example: An electrolytic capacitor might have an MTBF of 100,000 years, assuming you replace it with a new tested electrolytic capacitor of the same type every year before all the electrolyte evaporates!
Knowing the MTBF without knowing the service life of the component or the burn-in procedures for a component is meaningless.
For more info see: http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/VAVR-5WGTSB_R0_EN.pdf&revid=607475614&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=3&usg=AFQjCNFpbPO04_wdZ8-aD-sN5yDKUViCsQ
This has been hashed and rehashed over and over.
...having said that the experiment has merit. It would be a massive advance (massive disappointment for some -- a huge relief for others) to disprove string theory. Many physicists (including myself) think string theory is a waste of time and resources to be filed away with the multi-universe view of quantum physics.
This is more than just "can't prove" in the "you can't prove you're alive" sense. It's more in line with the "you can't prove God exists" sense.
If you think gravity causes objects to attract one another, you can test the theory by putting two objects near each other and measuring their force upon one another. A big part of your experiment is showing that it isn't an electrical or magnetic field that is causing the attraction. You show that the two objects attract one another in some new way outside of the other known mechanisms. You haven't exactly proven that gravity exists, but you've shown a property that is consistent with your theory and cannot be explained by other means.
This string theory experiment is more akin to saying you're going to test the theory of gravity by showing energy is conserved when the two objects approach each other. You know that your theory of gravity requires the conservation of energy, so you check to see if energy is conserved. If energy isn't conserved, you know your theory is wrong.
The problem is, even if it turns out energy is conserved, it didn't show your theory was right or can't be explained by some other theory. There are a other mechanisms that cause attraction which also exhibit conservation of energy, not just gravity.
This experiment just tests some key things that must be true in order for string theory to be true. It does not test any actual observable unique to the theory.
It's like trying to prove that God doesn't exist by showing that he doesn't make a personal appearance in the next hour. The fact that no bushes burn doesn't really disprove God -- it's just a precondition for him not to exist.
I can't see any application for which this is an advantage, not even astronomy. In astronomy I guess you could argue that you want a highly efficient detector because you need to harvest every photon you can... but a larger detector also means a larger dark current, so that seems to be going the opposite direction you need to be going.
For any other normal application this has got to be the stupidest thing I've read in a while.
This device will throw away >99% of the available light. So instead of shooting f8/125 portraits you'll be shooting f1.4/4 blur-blobs. Yeah, that's what every photographer wants.
I have solved this problem. (Please don't laugh.) However, I have no idea who to contact about this.
I have devised a system which permits the following:
*Non-forgeable secure voter receipts
*Receipts do not revel vote choices
*Receipts can prove you voted and for whom if necessary
*Not vulnerable to single-point software/hardware exploits
*Supplies a verifiable electronic (and paper if need be) trail
*Permits voters to verify that their vote was counted correctly without revealing who they voted for
*Paper trail does not compromise privacy
*3rd party verification
*Voter privacy
*Recounts/Auditing possible
*Voter fraud can be detected
I have even written up a draft paper on it describing the system. Now what?
The whole point of consoles is that they are supposed to be cheaper and easier to design for than computers. 10 years ago there were so many video card manufacturers it was really hard to know if anything was going to be compatible. These days there are really just two video card vendors, and they both cater to DX and OGL. Is it really harder to write games for Windows than for the PS3? If a gamer has to lay out $900 for the next-gen console, is he really saving money over buying a full-fledged PC?
It's crazy, but console makers are rapidly introducing so many features they will soon be full fledged PCs, and cell-phone makers are slowly starting to fill in the niche that consoles are leaving behind.
I just can't imagine if IBM had this on the back burner that they wouldn't have informed Apple of it before they jumped ship. "Oh, yes, Mr. Jobs, I understand you taking your $Ms off to Intel. No hard feelings, mate. You just come on back if you ever wanna play with us again, OK? Oh, Steve? Steve? Darn, he hung up. Oh well, I guess he probably wasn't too interested in this new technology that will make our chips 2x faster in three year's time. ."
Maybe they hadn't invented this at that time, but I doubt it. It was probably already working in lab deep underground. Even if that were true, I'm sure at some point Intel gave Steve a call to let him know what was going on. If this morning Mr. Jobs woke up and pooped his pants because of what he read in the business section of the WSJ about IBMs new technology, I'll be very surprised.
Well isn't THAT the pot calling the kettle black.
When it's about software and Palladium, dirty scumbag consumers have no business getting direct access. When it's the MPAA touting HDCP or AACS, which might mean Windows can't play the multimedia game, suddenly Mr. Gates is all for Consumer rights.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Where's the Spy vs. Spy of this gaming generation?
How about the JumpMan?
M.U.L.E.?
Paradroids?
Marble Madness?
How many gamers today even know what these games are?
I like a little FPS now and then, but it saddens me greatly that today's gamers can't seem to enjoy anything but. My favorite PC games used to be the Sierra/Lucasgame adventures. Now I'm lucky if a "decent" game comes along once every two years.
What irritates me is that the game engines are there to make something more interesting. Why not make a 1st person adventure game? Not one with shooting and slashing, but one where you have an inventory and have to push things around. How about Space Quest 3D?
How about a multiplayer 3D game where the participants have to activate multiple devices in separate areas to continue in the game? (I.E., player 1 has to stand on door trigger A so player 2 can press button B that turns off a laser so player 3 can...)
Personally I think 3D has ruined gaming. It seems as though the simulation games (Starcraft, warcraft, Civ., etc.) are the only ones that get the fact that "2D" (really 3-d with the camera pointed down) is worth anything any more.
What a shame.
And it really comes down to the gun. Give me a game in 3D that doesn't involving pressing the gun trigger (don't get me wrong -- I love counterstrike) and you can probably win me over. I mean, look at the Sims! Look at DDR! You don't have to have a machine gun or a rocket launcher to get a fun game.
Are we destined to rarely see a new Dig Dug?
Ultima III?
Original Zelda?
Beach head?
Frogger? (Oh, wait, this one WAS done in 3-D, and it was pretty fun!)
Some times I think what we really need is a SourceForge team to rewrite all the classics with modern graphics and sound.
But I guess modern gamers just wouldn't get trying to take over another robot not by shooting it, but rather by maximizing your circuit takeovers from sending your energy bolts down the right branched pathways.
Oh well, I guess this officially makes me an old-fogey.
Where have all the good games gone?
Gone to bit buckets, every one.
"Noone is going to go looking for Tiger Direct, where you buy cheap computer stuff, for the Tiger OS."
that was supposed to read..
Noone is going to go looking for Tiger Direct, where you buy cheap computer stuff, and confuse that with the Tiger OS.
NM, I did a little more reading, and it's not possible to TM something in relation to it's dictionary definition. The easy example I found was 'Coke', which is a form of coal, but which is also a trademark of Coca-Cola. In this case, it wouldn't be possible to trademark Tiger if what you were selling was miniaturized tamed tigers.
In this case, the question is, do the two companies sell closely enough related products that someone might become confused. I don't think that's the case. Noone is going to go looking for Tiger Direct, where you buy cheap computer stuff, for the Tiger OS. Trademark law was not set up to protect your Google ranking, unfortunately for Tiger Direct.
A better question might be, why does Tiger Direct care? Anyone actually looking to buy computer equipment is probably not going to do a search for the word Tiger. Anyone who knows the company already will just type in Tiger Direct. Noone is going to "accidentally" find Tiger direct by doing a search for the word Tiger. Therefore, it seems to me that, if anything, this would help them, not hur them. There name is now vaguely associated with Apple, who doesn't really compete with them. How can that be a bad thing?
It seems to me, the best thing Tiger Direct could do would be to drop the lawsuit, asking Apple to make them a premere distributer of the Tiger OS at slightly discounted prices in exchange.
-cwm9
I'm not a lawyer, but I seem to remember reading that it is not possible to trademark common words. Tiger is certainly a common word, so doesn't that mean this case has no merit automatically?
-cwm9
This will never happen.
1) No company or person will ever put it's complete existance completely in the hands of another company. You might hire someone to work on your system, but you'll be darn sure if they go out of business you can go to someone else.
2) Those of us who tinker, LIKE TO TINKER. How many hundreds of thousands of people are out there who enjoy tweaking every last setting?
3) The entire population is becoming MORE educated about computers, not less so. The market of people who would want these kinds of services mostly comprises older people weren't sucking on a mouse when they were two years old. Most young adults today have no qualms about working on their system.
4) Most systems aren't that critical. If my gaming computer fails, a reformat isn't going to make me go bankrupt. Noone will pay for services they don't need.
Just in: In ten years, noone will drive their own cars anymore! Cars should run perfectly, as long as they're not abused or crashed into anything by their owners. Since people hate taking their car to the mechanic so much, we predict all cars will be driven by car specialists to make life easier for the average american.
In other news, around the same time, Americans will stop cooking for themselves and eat out exclusively! We've determined that the risk of being cut by a knife and the hours spent preparing food just aren't worth it.
Finally, in a sign of the times, major Arcade game companies have announced a comeback. "People just don't want to be bothered with putting a DVD in their PS2. We found that the average american would rather pay $1 per game to play in an arcade, where you just walk from machine to machine. It's so much easier, and you never have to worry about maintenance, or deal with equipment repairs."
Bunk. Pure bunk.
Someone will just play the cd using their super-linear ultra high fidelity audiophile 28 bit audio card, and plug the output into their ultra linear ultra high fidelity audiophile 28 bit digitizer, and then downsample the whole audiophile quality album into a very non-audiophile 128kbps MP3. If you can hear it or see, there's a way to copy it. Even if you have to whip out the ole' cam-corder.
If you don't like censorship and can have the resources to really help, perhaps the best thing to do would be to mirror the GOP site to make sure it doesn't go down.
I plan to vote Kerry, but I won't stand for censorship.
Well, first, I back up my data regularly, so if a drive fails, I just restore it. (Imagine that. Backups. Who would have thought?) I've been a hard-core computer user for the last 27 years. Dealing with failed hard drives is just part of life. If I were really worried about it, I WOULD go raid-5... but it's not that hard to restore my data, and I'd rather not buy another drive or more expensive controller. (The one I'm using now is was on the mobo!)
Secondly, the differences ARE real. There are people out there who spend $1000 to update their computers so they can move from 60FPS to 68FPS when playing DOOM 3. If spending $1K is perfectly reasonable to get an extra 8 frames per second, why would you scoff at someone for spending an extra $300 to eliminate 30 seconds of boot time each time they hit the 'ON' switch, or 7 seconds each time they start photoshop?
I don't know about you, but staring at a screen waiting for a program to start isn't my idea of a great time, even if it IS only for 7 seconds. Is that a waste of money? A waste of power? If you think so, fine. I'm more than happy to let that "power" go to waste 99.9% of the time so I can regain 10 minutes of my life each time I sit down to use my computer.
Perhaps my desire for quick response partially stems from my days of using my C=64, when all I had to do was flip the switch and within 2 seconds the word "READY." appeared. Or perhaps it's from the days of DOS 4, when it took longer for the BIOS to the POST than it did to boot the OS. For whatever the reason, I'm impatient, and I've found spending $300 is well worth it to me.
But the bottom line is, some of use use the technology and love it. Some of you don't. That's fine: but don't go around telling people it's a "waste of money and worthless" just because you don't use it.
A common misconception is that striping beyond 2 drives is "worthless." That simply isn't true: remember that the inside of the drives, close to the spindles, has a transfer rate that is nearly half what it is on the outside cylindars. By striping 4 drives togeather, about half the bandiwdth is wasted near the FRONT of the drive, but near the tail, it's almost all being used. The effect is that the drive feels uniformly quick no matter what part of the drive you are reading from!
I personally jumped from a single drive to a 4-drive SATA raid-0 system, composed of 120GB drives from two different manufacturers.
The system screams.
I can't tell you how nice it is to have my computer boot in half the time... how your system feels like you always wished it would feel. You can add all the memory you want, all the processing power you want, but if you can't feed the computer, it's all pointless.
The only thing I wish now was that my system had a faster and/or wider bus that would allow me to take advantage of all the currently unused bandwidth available from the four drives.
Proper, yes, but you know, Rio Rancho isn't that far from Albuquerque, and hot air balloons, being what they are, tend to drift a little. ;-)
I live in Albuquerque, which is the big city that Rio Rancho lies on the outskirts of. ("I KNEW I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque!")
For years, trying to get high speed internet access in this city/state was like getting teeth pulled. While everyone else was first getting high speed internet access, we were left in the dark even though we had Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Labs, the University of New Mexico, and Intel all in the same area. While everyone else was getting DSL, our local telephone company dragged their feet on the issue. (To this day, in the middle of Metro Albuquerque, I STILL couldn't get DSL at my home, even if I wanted to!) Several years went by with them promising us high speed internet access... but they were all empty promises.
It wasn't until @Home brought us internet cable that we were finally able to join the high-speed era and get away from our 36K modems. (The networks were too noisy for 56K to work.)
It makes me happy to know that New Mexico is finally on the leading edge of something involving internet access, but I imagine this will make QWest very unhappy in that city... I suspect many people won't bother to get DSL from them, but will instead opt for the new wireless option so they can take their laptops with them everywhere they go.
Not that I care. Serves the phone company right.
-Chiem
"...happen to be within 80,000 years of us, yet no race is more than 80,000 years ahead? ..."
Just because someone is much more advanced, doesn't mean we should have heard from them by now.
"All conspiracy theories aside," if there WAS someone that advanced they probably sent out probes 1000-100,000's of years ago, and they've long since passed us by. In which case, they probably concluded they were the only intellegent life and stopped bothering to send out probes. Heck, maybe they have a SETI team that gets laughed at every 1000 years when they send out probes. "We've been sending out probes for the last million years, and noones ever radioed back, and here you go wasting another quadzillion megabucks trying to find someone who isn't even out there."
Really, there's no reason to believe that in the tiny fraction of a moment WE'VE been able to detect an ovature from another planet that the other race has even bothered to try.
It's FAR more likely that the LESS advanced race would contact the MORE advanced race. Why? Because as soon as the less advanced race is capable of doing so, they start trying to contact/listen for the more advanced race, while the more advanced race has been listening for 1000's of years but probably doesn't even bother trying to contact anyone execpt for every 100 years or so.
The whole, "we haven't been contacted so it can't be possible," idea is just shortsighted.