And now, there is STILL no incentive for them to upgrade their networks, since they roughly match the performance of cable modems. What they gain is freedom from direct competition. The only thing holding their prices down at all now is the cable companies. And the cable companies already creep their price up every few months.
Is it "socialist" to ask for fair access and competition on lines my tax dollars helped pay for? The ONLY portion of the network Covad uses is the high-frequency part of the local loop. They have their own data backbones and switches. All they want is a way to connect that to your house, on a part of the phone line (which you already pay the phone company for) that they are not using unless you already have DSL. And they have to pay the same amount the phone companies charge their own DSL divisions for each line.
I don't know all the details for sure, but the two folks I know at Covad are saying that it can't be VOIP or VoDSL, it has to be traditional voice service. The way the FCC's crack-addled thinking goes is something along the lines of "why should Covad be allowed to sell only the GOOD half of the phone line? let's force them to pay for the crappy half, too!"
Never mind that the crappy half is already strung to every house everywhere, and the running redundant phone wires is both wasteful and counterproductive.
I've posted this before, but this time gets a disclaimer. This one isn't quite a dupe, since we got a new link. New article, new take on the subject, blahblahblah. But I make my offer anyway:
For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of/. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
This offer will be repeated (as is fitting) with each dupe.
Yeah, yeah, I know you can get the Whole Can of Coke upgrade, and usually the Multiple Bags of Peanut-and-Cracker-Crumb Snacktastic Combo upgrade as well. And if the attendant is nice, you might even get TWO Cokes, and enough peanuts to actually make a makeshift peanut butter sandwich. You might watch the two-coke thing, unless your bladder is impervious to the mighty diuretic powers of caffeine.
But unless you fly overseas or coast-to-coast, there just aren't any meals anymore. Which isn't *all* bad-- now that the Department of Homeland Waiting at the Airport has given us more time to pick something up at the airport sub shop, you get better food for less.
Fair enough, everybody's different. It just looked to me like the poster's point got missed altogether. Before reading that post, I was pretty much settled on buying a 16:9, but my mind has been changed. Get what's best for you.
I was referring to RPTV's in general on the price, though-- stores around here have 4:3 sets starting at $1500, and 16:9 sets starting at $1800. That's a chunk. From Best Buy:
Buy what you like. I was only trying to underscore the original poster's comment that for widescreen viewing, 4:3 TVs are very nearly as good as the 16:9 sets. They will probably be heavier, too. And if the "black bars" give you fits, by all means, move on to widescreen.
The obvious caveat that nobody has pointed out to going 4:3 is that some of these sets will not "squeeze" the image (full res in the letterbox) like some of the Sony sets (including the one listed here) do.
Agreed. Despite regular 4- and 5-hour flights, I have yet to actually get any meal on an airline flight. I didn't think they even served them anymore.
"Yes, I'd like two tickets to San Francisco, and would like to request that my Peanut-Based Snack Medley and One Quarter-Can of Coke on Ice be pork-free."
Run through the original poster's math again yourself. He has tried, very carefully, to show you that a 32" 4:3 TV shows WIDESCREEN movies (letterboxed) only 2% (or about half an inch) smaller than a 30" 16:9 TV. Ignoring 4:3 programming altogether, the two are nearly identical FOR WIDESCREEN PROGRAMMING. That "little stripe" you mention is complete crap. Even if the movie is wider than 16:9 (meaning the 16:9 TV has to letterbox it somewhat as well) his math holds, and the images will be roughly the same size on the 32" 4:3 and the 30" 16:9. The SAME SIZE. The SAME WIDTH AND HEIGHT.
The smart buy right now, even for widescreen movie buffs, is to pick the widescreen HDTV size they like, and buy a 3:4 HDTV that can display a widescreen image the same size. The 3:4s are significantly cheaper, can display the widescreen image the same size, and finally, will not take a huge punishment on displaying older 3:4 content. The converse is not true.
To sum up concisely: 3:4 HDTVs can display 16:9 (and wider) content as well as 16:9 HDTVs if they are only a few inches larger in diagonal measurement. (In this case, a whopping two inches.)
I worded my post poorly at the beginning. Faster video cards obviously scale better with CPU speed.
However, if you look at the chart, you'll find that even the midrange GF4 Ti4200 scales all the way up to the fastest CPU speed they tested. The lowly GF4MX cards do not scale as well at high detail, although in the medium detail chart, even the low-end cards can be seen pushing all the way out to the edge of the CPU scale.
My only point was that it is a balancing act, and it's not always the graphics card's fault. If your system is imbalanced, fix the slow part, be it CPU, video, RAM, disk, or whatever.
1. They didn't exactly "pay" for the lines. They were granted priceless government right-of-way in addition to extensive government subsidies. "Subsidies" means "Your tax dollars paid for a private monopoly to build these lines.
2. If it breaks, it is SBC's job to fix it. Problem is, they don't. They've left my line unusable for DSL (although Covad has told them how to fix it repeatedly) for three years. The state of Indiana has repeatedly sanctioned them for being lax with line maintenance, and after several years, has lambasted them again for not even living up to their promises to fix things when they were punished the first time. It's not just DSL-- people here were living with broken phone lines for months without fixes from Ameritech/SBC.
If they can't live up to the deal made that granted them all this money and a monopoly in the first place, they don't deserve to have it.
So what if they do? Come get me Michael!!! Knock me down for offering to help! Lord knows I can't live without my sweet, sweet Karma always sitting at the top mark.
Note that not only did I hit +5, but I did it in around 15 minutes, and that the guy who offered to take the night shift got to +5 within a half-hour of me posting the first comment.
Hire us both! Together, we can make slashdot a better place.
I will be happy to provide employment references, work experience, CmpE degree and certification information, my grades from my college writing courses (it IS a proofreading job, after all), and a picture of me soldering things into the back of a remote control and modifying my Tivo.
I'm sure Mr. Crash will be able provide similar nerdly slashdot-qualifying credentials.
In particular, the charts on this page that indicate that the GeForce4 Ti4600 scales up with CPUs all the way to the fastest CPU that was available when the article was written.
Faster graphics cards will only be further limited by the CPU, achieving a smaller percentage of their full potential.
The PC architecture is a little less imbalanced than you think. Spending extra money on a video card your CPU can't feed triangles too fast enough is a complete waste of money, too. Sucker.
For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of/. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
Why Covad, despite having the technical knowledge, equipment, and personnel to do so, was not allowed to fix the shoddy SBC telephone line that connects my apartment to the CO? There are an unholy number of bridge taps, load coils, and a couple of LONG unterminated pairs connected to my line which make it impossible for me to get DSL from anyone, including SBC. And it's SBC's fault it's screwed up in the first place. All fixable, but in the three years I've lived here, SBC has not lifted a finger to fix things up.
The Covad tech apologized for not being able to set up DSL for me due to the poor condition of the line, but lamented that under the current rules, SBC *WILL NOT ALLOW* Covad to fix the lines themselves. If SBC wants a monopoly on my g*ddamn phonelines, they had better be able to do this "upkeep" your mom claims they are doing. They've not been doing it on my lines, and they've been shirking their maintenance duties for years in Indiana. They have been sanctioned repeatedly for it by our state government. This is as close as you can get to a government stating "You, SBC, are guilty of sucking."
Your Mother is either not in a position to know what's actually going on, or is part of the marketing machine that tries to make their competition out to be bad guys. They are not. They are fighting like hell just for the chance to be ALLOWED to clean up the unholy clusterfuck of a mess incumbents like SBC have made of the phone system. Which was given to them in the form of right-of-way and tax-funded subsidies in the first place. It is not theirs to lock up, no matter how much they repeat that to themselves, your mother, and their potential customers.
"But they should have to build their own lines, too!" you whine. That, my friend, is impossible. The right-of-way has been granted, and it is being held rather tightly by the incumbents. Call up your local government and just TRY to get approval to run some cable on a couple of telephone poles, or to dig a miles-long trench for some fiber. I'm sure they'll sign you right up as Mr. New Phone Company. Nobody new can run their own lines. Thank god for wireless, and here's to hoping it crushes SBC in the coming years.
I'm sorry for the harshness, but after SBC has fought and fought to avoid upgrading the lines to my area, and actively prevented the Covad techs from cleaning up FOR them, I have no respect for them.
I sincerely hope the government takes the lines back and kicks the lazy bastards out, since SBC and their ilk are clearly not capable of keeping things running.
You are correct, sir. I also noticed on re-reading the article that the library eventually purchased a third company's product. Which makes me wonder why there's any complaint at all, now.
50% would have been a reduction for me. I typically got somewhere between 5 and 10 telemarketing calls a day, and receive a genuine call via my landline once a day.
So we're looking at more like 80-90% of my calls being telemarketing. Heck, I usually had 2 or 3 telemarketing messages on my machine when I got home.
Then Indiana's Do Not Call list went into effect. I got two more calls, both of which I promptly reported as violations, and have received none since.
I'm posting this yet again. Even in the article summary you can clearly see that nobody is trying to get this for free. They are trying to BUY the database for their library, and the companies are refusing to sell.
Your comparison is invalid. No one wants this stuff for free. They are trying to BUY the database for the library, with a limited number of concurrent users, and neither company will sell it to them, even though they sell to universities, individuals, and companies. To use your analogy, you have ponied up 50 cents for the paper, but the paper company refuses to sell to you despite selling to your neighbors.
Read a bit before you post, for pete's sake. Oh, wait... this is slashdot.
The submitter said nothing about it being free. They are trying to BUY copies of this system for their libraries, and it will be deployed with a limit on the number of concurrent users, but neither company will sell it to them-- despite, in at least one of the cases, having a product that fits the bill *exactly* but is only sold to universities.
These to companies have a lock on the electronic info, it would seem. Yes, you could go back to paper-- but I'd like to see you run a search through books as efficiently as you could through the DB. Especially if you are a single, average person trying to defend themselves in court.
The lazy guy will just sit back and do zip and get the salary, just like he will with the hourly wage. If he does less work, pay him less, or fire him. The Hourly/Salary distinction is irrelevant.
If he's clearly being lazy to gain more overtime, you could always forbid him overtime... but it still seems simpler to just pay him commensurate with what he accomplishes. If he does 50% less work than Mr. Super Productive, then set his salary at the right level. Tell him why. Be willing to adjust when productivity goes up. I'll bet half the time you get more productive workers, and half the time you get people who are content to do less for less. By paying him less of a salary, his overtime pay goes down proportionally.
Hourly keeps employers honest. Salary is a crappy, crappy system that allows them to milk extra hours out of their employees without paying.
You, sir, are clinically insane. What are you playing that needs that beast to run? I spent $900 in august on this config:
KT-400 Mobo w/RAID/5.1 Audio/Ethernet Athlon XP2000+ Gainward "Golden Sample" (guaranteed overclock-- it hits very near 4600 speeds) GF4 Ti4200 128MB VIVO Chieftec AL case Antec 435W PSU 2xMaxtor 80GB 7200RPM HDD 512MB PC2700 RAM (could have used 2100, but wanted an upgrade path to the 333MHz FSB Athlons) Lite-on 40X CD-RW
etc, etc...
Plays shit fine (Battlefield 1942, UT2003, etc...). If you have to have El Grande Monitor, I would have still only paid $1790. What on earth are you playing that needs $510 worth of hard drives? And $600 for a CPU? Man. Mine was $95, and it performs roughly 2/3 as well as yours. Meaning for yours to be a good deal, it ought to have cost about $150. $160 sound card? Mine was free. $400 video card?!?! This one's the worst. Buy a $150 video card now, wait, and buy another one. In short order, what $150 gets you will be faster than what $400 gets you now. You will spend less and have a better machine with a little planning ahead.
Large parts of your system have no real impact on gaming performance, too. Why those HDDs? Are you really running so many games you needed 400GB? Would fast drives at 40 or 80GB not do the trick? And why a $120 case? Aluminum cases with plenty of fans abound in the $60 range.
You entirely missed the point of the original post. You have done exactly as he said, and paid 4 or 5 times more for a 30% performance increase. Can you not wait 3 months for the prices to come down? I really, sincerely, hope that you are being paid to play games professionally. Otherwise, i cannot imagine how you justify this to yourself.
If you could reign in your need to have the "latest and greatest right now" when you build your system, you would have the money to build a whole new machine 4 times in the time period where you would normally only be building one. In 6 months, when you are still sitting on your $3600 boondoggle, I will be building a system better than it for 1/4 as much, and still have enough left (by your budget) to do it twice more.
You seem to "get it" when it comes to the game prices-- you wait until they're $20 to purchase. So why are you not waiting on the hardware? If you're not playing the very newest games, why are you buying bleeding-edge hardware?
That debit cards enjoy the same protection as credit cards has not always been true and may not always be the case. The law is different for debit cards that work as credit cards, but Visa and Mastercard have voluntarily limited debit card liability to the same $50 as their credit cards. Expect that to change if they lose too much to fraud.
The law for debit/check cards matches that for regular ATM cards. $50 if reported in 2 days, $500 from 2-60, and all of it for >60 days. No liability for additional transactions once the bank has been notified.
Slashdot Mirror
And now, there is STILL no incentive for them to upgrade their networks, since they roughly match the performance of cable modems. What they gain is freedom from direct competition. The only thing holding their prices down at all now is the cable companies. And the cable companies already creep their price up every few months.
Is it "socialist" to ask for fair access and competition on lines my tax dollars helped pay for? The ONLY portion of the network Covad uses is the high-frequency part of the local loop. They have their own data backbones and switches. All they want is a way to connect that to your house, on a part of the phone line (which you already pay the phone company for) that they are not using unless you already have DSL. And they have to pay the same amount the phone companies charge their own DSL divisions for each line.
I don't know all the details for sure, but the two folks I know at Covad are saying that it can't be VOIP or VoDSL, it has to be traditional voice service. The way the FCC's crack-addled thinking goes is something along the lines of "why should Covad be allowed to sell only the GOOD half of the phone line? let's force them to pay for the crappy half, too!"
Never mind that the crappy half is already strung to every house everywhere, and the running redundant phone wires is both wasteful and counterproductive.
I've posted this before, but this time gets a disclaimer. This one isn't quite a dupe, since we got a new link. New article, new take on the subject, blahblahblah. But I make my offer anyway:
/. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of
Note that volunteers for the night shift and hangover/holiday time have already been obtained.
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
This offer will be repeated (as is fitting) with each dupe.
Yeah, yeah, I know you can get the Whole Can of Coke upgrade, and usually the Multiple Bags of Peanut-and-Cracker-Crumb Snacktastic Combo upgrade as well. And if the attendant is nice, you might even get TWO Cokes, and enough peanuts to actually make a makeshift peanut butter sandwich. You might watch the two-coke thing, unless your bladder is impervious to the mighty diuretic powers of caffeine.
But unless you fly overseas or coast-to-coast, there just aren't any meals anymore. Which isn't *all* bad-- now that the Department of Homeland Waiting at the Airport has given us more time to pick something up at the airport sub shop, you get better food for less.
Fair enough, everybody's different. It just looked to me like the poster's point got missed altogether. Before reading that post, I was pretty much settled on buying a 16:9, but my mind has been changed. Get what's best for you.
I was referring to RPTV's in general on the price, though-- stores around here have 4:3 sets starting at $1500, and 16:9 sets starting at $1800. That's a chunk. From Best Buy:
Mitsubishi 50" 4:3, $1800
Mitsubishi 48" 16:9, $2000
Samsung 54" 4:3, $1600
Samsung 55" 16:9, $2200
Sony 43" 4:3, $1600
Sony 46" 16:9, $1900
Sony 53" 4:3, $2000
Sony 51" 16:9, $2200
Buy what you like. I was only trying to underscore the original poster's comment that for widescreen viewing, 4:3 TVs are very nearly as good as the 16:9 sets. They will probably be heavier, too. And if the "black bars" give you fits, by all means, move on to widescreen.
The obvious caveat that nobody has pointed out to going 4:3 is that some of these sets will not "squeeze" the image (full res in the letterbox) like some of the Sony sets (including the one listed here) do.
Agreed. Despite regular 4- and 5-hour flights, I have yet to actually get any meal on an airline flight. I didn't think they even served them anymore.
"Yes, I'd like two tickets to San Francisco, and would like to request that my Peanut-Based Snack Medley and One Quarter-Can of Coke on Ice be pork-free."
Run through the original poster's math again yourself. He has tried, very carefully, to show you that a 32" 4:3 TV shows WIDESCREEN movies (letterboxed) only 2% (or about half an inch) smaller than a 30" 16:9 TV. Ignoring 4:3 programming altogether, the two are nearly identical FOR WIDESCREEN PROGRAMMING. That "little stripe" you mention is complete crap. Even if the movie is wider than 16:9 (meaning the 16:9 TV has to letterbox it somewhat as well) his math holds, and the images will be roughly the same size on the 32" 4:3 and the 30" 16:9. The SAME SIZE. The SAME WIDTH AND HEIGHT.
The smart buy right now, even for widescreen movie buffs, is to pick the widescreen HDTV size they like, and buy a 3:4 HDTV that can display a widescreen image the same size. The 3:4s are significantly cheaper, can display the widescreen image the same size, and finally, will not take a huge punishment on displaying older 3:4 content. The converse is not true.
To sum up concisely: 3:4 HDTVs can display 16:9 (and wider) content as well as 16:9 HDTVs if they are only a few inches larger in diagonal measurement. (In this case, a whopping two inches.)
I worded my post poorly at the beginning. Faster video cards obviously scale better with CPU speed.
However, if you look at the chart, you'll find that even the midrange GF4 Ti4200 scales all the way up to the fastest CPU speed they tested. The lowly GF4MX cards do not scale as well at high detail, although in the medium detail chart, even the low-end cards can be seen pushing all the way out to the edge of the CPU scale.
My only point was that it is a balancing act, and it's not always the graphics card's fault. If your system is imbalanced, fix the slow part, be it CPU, video, RAM, disk, or whatever.
1. They didn't exactly "pay" for the lines. They were granted priceless government right-of-way in addition to extensive government subsidies. "Subsidies" means "Your tax dollars paid for a private monopoly to build these lines.
2. If it breaks, it is SBC's job to fix it. Problem is, they don't. They've left my line unusable for DSL (although Covad has told them how to fix it repeatedly) for three years. The state of Indiana has repeatedly sanctioned them for being lax with line maintenance, and after several years, has lambasted them again for not even living up to their promises to fix things when they were punished the first time. It's not just DSL-- people here were living with broken phone lines for months without fixes from Ameritech/SBC.
If they can't live up to the deal made that granted them all this money and a monopoly in the first place, they don't deserve to have it.
So what if they do? Come get me Michael!!! Knock me down for offering to help! Lord knows I can't live without my sweet, sweet Karma always sitting at the top mark.
Note that not only did I hit +5, but I did it in around 15 minutes, and that the guy who offered to take the night shift got to +5 within a half-hour of me posting the first comment.
Hire us both! Together, we can make slashdot a better place.
I will be happy to provide employment references, work experience, CmpE degree and certification information, my grades from my college writing courses (it IS a proofreading job, after all), and a picture of me soldering things into the back of a remote control and modifying my Tivo.
I'm sure Mr. Crash will be able provide similar nerdly slashdot-qualifying credentials.
You are correct. It's a duplicate post to a duplicate story. I will continue to post it in duplicate stories until they hire me.
Your statement is flat-out untrue. Most current games are CPU-limited, even with the best video cards.
0
See this article on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=165
In particular, the charts on this page that indicate that the GeForce4 Ti4600 scales up with CPUs all the way to the fastest CPU that was available when the article was written.
Faster graphics cards will only be further limited by the CPU, achieving a smaller percentage of their full potential.
The PC architecture is a little less imbalanced than you think. Spending extra money on a video card your CPU can't feed triangles too fast enough is a complete waste of money, too. Sucker.
For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of /. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
Why Covad, despite having the technical knowledge, equipment, and personnel to do so, was not allowed to fix the shoddy SBC telephone line that connects my apartment to the CO? There are an unholy number of bridge taps, load coils, and a couple of LONG unterminated pairs connected to my line which make it impossible for me to get DSL from anyone, including SBC. And it's SBC's fault it's screwed up in the first place. All fixable, but in the three years I've lived here, SBC has not lifted a finger to fix things up.
The Covad tech apologized for not being able to set up DSL for me due to the poor condition of the line, but lamented that under the current rules, SBC *WILL NOT ALLOW* Covad to fix the lines themselves. If SBC wants a monopoly on my g*ddamn phonelines, they had better be able to do this "upkeep" your mom claims they are doing. They've not been doing it on my lines, and they've been shirking their maintenance duties for years in Indiana. They have been sanctioned repeatedly for it by our state government. This is as close as you can get to a government stating "You, SBC, are guilty of sucking."
Your Mother is either not in a position to know what's actually going on, or is part of the marketing machine that tries to make their competition out to be bad guys. They are not. They are fighting like hell just for the chance to be ALLOWED to clean up the unholy clusterfuck of a mess incumbents like SBC have made of the phone system. Which was given to them in the form of right-of-way and tax-funded subsidies in the first place. It is not theirs to lock up, no matter how much they repeat that to themselves, your mother, and their potential customers.
"But they should have to build their own lines, too!" you whine. That, my friend, is impossible. The right-of-way has been granted, and it is being held rather tightly by the incumbents. Call up your local government and just TRY to get approval to run some cable on a couple of telephone poles, or to dig a miles-long trench for some fiber. I'm sure they'll sign you right up as Mr. New Phone Company. Nobody new can run their own lines. Thank god for wireless, and here's to hoping it crushes SBC in the coming years.
I'm sorry for the harshness, but after SBC has fought and fought to avoid upgrading the lines to my area, and actively prevented the Covad techs from cleaning up FOR them, I have no respect for them.
I sincerely hope the government takes the lines back and kicks the lazy bastards out, since SBC and their ilk are clearly not capable of keeping things running.
Funny, according to the article one of the companies sells to university libraries with no problem...
You are correct, sir. I also noticed on re-reading the article that the library eventually purchased a third company's product. Which makes me wonder why there's any complaint at all, now.
50% would have been a reduction for me. I typically got somewhere between 5 and 10 telemarketing calls a day, and receive a genuine call via my landline once a day.
So we're looking at more like 80-90% of my calls being telemarketing. Heck, I usually had 2 or 3 telemarketing messages on my machine when I got home.
Then Indiana's Do Not Call list went into effect. I got two more calls, both of which I promptly reported as violations, and have received none since.
I'm posting this yet again. Even in the article summary you can clearly see that nobody is trying to get this for free. They are trying to BUY the database for their library, and the companies are refusing to sell.
Your comparison is invalid. No one wants this stuff for free. They are trying to BUY the database for the library, with a limited number of concurrent users, and neither company will sell it to them, even though they sell to universities, individuals, and companies. To use your analogy, you have ponied up 50 cents for the paper, but the paper company refuses to sell to you despite selling to your neighbors.
Read a bit before you post, for pete's sake. Oh, wait... this is slashdot.
The submitter said nothing about it being free. They are trying to BUY copies of this system for their libraries, and it will be deployed with a limit on the number of concurrent users, but neither company will sell it to them-- despite, in at least one of the cases, having a product that fits the bill *exactly* but is only sold to universities.
These to companies have a lock on the electronic info, it would seem. Yes, you could go back to paper-- but I'd like to see you run a search through books as efficiently as you could through the DB. Especially if you are a single, average person trying to defend themselves in court.
but I still have time to squeeze in this post.
The lazy guy will just sit back and do zip and get the salary, just like he will with the hourly wage. If he does less work, pay him less, or fire him. The Hourly/Salary distinction is irrelevant.
If he's clearly being lazy to gain more overtime, you could always forbid him overtime... but it still seems simpler to just pay him commensurate with what he accomplishes. If he does 50% less work than Mr. Super Productive, then set his salary at the right level. Tell him why. Be willing to adjust when productivity goes up. I'll bet half the time you get more productive workers, and half the time you get people who are content to do less for less. By paying him less of a salary, his overtime pay goes down proportionally.
Hourly keeps employers honest. Salary is a crappy, crappy system that allows them to milk extra hours out of their employees without paying.
You, sir, are clinically insane. What are you playing that needs that beast to run? I spent $900 in august on this config:
KT-400 Mobo w/RAID/5.1 Audio/Ethernet
Athlon XP2000+
Gainward "Golden Sample" (guaranteed overclock-- it hits very near 4600 speeds) GF4 Ti4200 128MB VIVO
Chieftec AL case
Antec 435W PSU
2xMaxtor 80GB 7200RPM HDD
512MB PC2700 RAM (could have used 2100, but wanted an upgrade path to the 333MHz FSB Athlons)
Lite-on 40X CD-RW
etc, etc...
Plays shit fine (Battlefield 1942, UT2003, etc...). If you have to have El Grande Monitor, I would have still only paid $1790. What on earth are you playing that needs $510 worth of hard drives? And $600 for a CPU? Man. Mine was $95, and it performs roughly 2/3 as well as yours. Meaning for yours to be a good deal, it ought to have cost about $150. $160 sound card? Mine was free. $400 video card?!?! This one's the worst. Buy a $150 video card now, wait, and buy another one. In short order, what $150 gets you will be faster than what $400 gets you now. You will spend less and have a better machine with a little planning ahead.
Large parts of your system have no real impact on gaming performance, too. Why those HDDs? Are you really running so many games you needed 400GB? Would fast drives at 40 or 80GB not do the trick? And why a $120 case? Aluminum cases with plenty of fans abound in the $60 range.
You entirely missed the point of the original post. You have done exactly as he said, and paid 4 or 5 times more for a 30% performance increase. Can you not wait 3 months for the prices to come down? I really, sincerely, hope that you are being paid to play games professionally. Otherwise, i cannot imagine how you justify this to yourself.
If you could reign in your need to have the "latest and greatest right now" when you build your system, you would have the money to build a whole new machine 4 times in the time period where you would normally only be building one. In 6 months, when you are still sitting on your $3600 boondoggle, I will be building a system better than it for 1/4 as much, and still have enough left (by your budget) to do it twice more.
You seem to "get it" when it comes to the game prices-- you wait until they're $20 to purchase. So why are you not waiting on the hardware? If you're not playing the very newest games, why are you buying bleeding-edge hardware?
That debit cards enjoy the same protection as credit cards has not always been true and may not always be the case. The law is different for debit cards that work as credit cards, but Visa and Mastercard have voluntarily limited debit card liability to the same $50 as their credit cards. Expect that to change if they lose too much to fraud.
The law for debit/check cards matches that for regular ATM cards. $50 if reported in 2 days, $500 from 2-60, and all of it for >60 days. No liability for additional transactions once the bank has been notified.