I've lived in the US all my life and your perception of our health care system seems completely out of whack based on my experience.
Doctors in the US definitely make extra visits for patients and put patients on medications that treat symptoms rather than curing the cause, because the financial incentive rewards doctors for doing that. More visits = more money. Patients pick doctors based on location and health insurance coverage, and only sometimes based on word of mouth. Patients stick with the same doctor unless they are sure they are being given bad care, because it's such a pain to have to fill out all those forms and get x-rays and so forth all over again.
You got lucky in the US hospitals you've been to. The experience of going to the vet or in my own analogy, being a car that's being taken to the mechanic, is typical of my US medical experiences.
The grass may seem greener here but it isn't. The US healthcare system is a disaster; doctors and patients hate it. You just got lucky.
Yet another example of software that won't run unless you have local admin privileges: Microsoft Outlook 2000 (on Win2k, at least). The first time you run it after installing it, you have to be logged in as an administrative user. This fairly well sucks because if you just run the Office installer and then log out and let the primary user of the machine (who is not a local admin) start using their computer, they will swiftly run into problems getting Outlook to start. IIRC, the error message isn't very useful. It's not a big problem because you just learn to either run Outlook yourself immediately after installing Office and rebooting, or do that and then image it so you never have to do it again. But I think it's noteworthy that it's not just random rogue apps that need local admin access for seemingly non-administrative things.
My solution in the past to this and all the other software that for one reason or another needs admin privs is to just make the user a member of the local admin group. No, it's not ideal, and I guess I could have spent hours putzing around with registry keys and resource kits and trying to avoid this but it's just not worth it. Installing a self-updating virus app makes the majority of scary issues like this go away. At a company where someone I know works in the IT department, they have an ultra-locked-down standard desktop image, and it's a pain in the butt because they have to hold the user's hand all the time and users can't even change their desktop image. I guess it's a matter of how many users you have, how different their PCs' setups need to be (vs. one universal image) and how much you trust them to not hose their own machines.
I wonder which would require more administrative overhead: - a policy of not letting users be local admins on their machines (accompanied by all the administrator laying-on-of-hands that this policy would require) or - a policy of users being local admins + an antivirus app + solving the occasional problem with a user screwing up their own machine or needing a machine rebuilt because some exploit used their local admin status to do somehing that a non-admin can't do, including possibly needing to reimage their machine and restore from backup. Basically it's a question of risking a few big inconveniences vs. guaranteeing a larger number of little inconveniences.
Anybody got experience with this?
I suspect that there's a certain amount of overhead that's required to make the no-local-admin solution work, and if you have enough users, it'll actually save you support time because once you set it all up and image it and document the problems that will occur, you won't have to spend as much time as you would have to spend undoing the horrible things that users have done with all their adminny powers.
I think you might be missing the point. The parent poster was responding to an argument that goes something like "but look at all the things that an album's sales revenues have to pay for" such as advertising etc., as justification for the high price of a CD. So it is fair to compare a DVD of a movie to the soundtrack of that same movie since the costs to make and promote the music are shared by the DVD, and any box-office profits are in some part due to the soundtrack.
Also, your assertion that actors get paid whether or not a movie is successful is only partly correcct - often their pay is based partly on a lump sum and partly on box office sales. The idea that musicians need a paycheck more than actors is interesting, but you undermine that argument by pointing out that musicians can tour (and sell tickets, t-shirts, etc.) as opposed to just relying on box office sales. Of course it's more complicated than that since there are endorsements too.
Anyway, the point is, if you want to defend CD prices based on the cost of producing and promoting a CD, you have to compare that to a DVD, and the enormously larger cost of producing and promoting a film. DVDs are cheaper.
BTW, for those readers who haven't looked themselves, CD duplication costs less than $1/CD in volume, including liner notes, jewel cases, etc. Studio time costs about $50-$100/hr. Bear those costs in mind when you're adding up the actual cost of making a CD vs. the "actual cost" of paying the record company.
>I was thinking of the classic bump and theft actually. Bump into a person, while they are stunned, take their crap, say pardon me and move on.
Don't you think they'd notice that the music had suddenly stopped at exactly the same time that you bumped into them?
"What iPod? Oh, this one in my hand? No, no, this one is mine. Uh, yeah, I always carry it around without any headphones. Yours is, um, back there on the sidewalk somewhere, I think."
The parent post that you replied to said this: > I understand the logic of why they do it. But the fact that "we" as the public go along with that escapes me. (my emphasis)
And then you explained in detail "why they do it."
>I'll call the cops, just as a record label would call the cops if you broke into their building and destroyed all their copies of the latest britney spears album.
But think of the cred you'd get for doing it! No jury would convict you...
Rapists probably have had consensual sex less often than their victims have.
Do you need a particular song more than the person who created it needs to be paid for their work? (Fuck them, they should have to entertain you for free!) Do you hate all musicians that much? Maybe you should start listening to music made by respectable musicans...
...because muggers always ask for your digital camera, your PDA, and your MP3 player.
"Hold still, I'm going to pat you down and then use the wand to find any other electronic valuables on your person. Don't try to hit me and escape or anything."
An alternative to carrying a firearm everywhere is to just keep stuff concealed.
Stealing something out of a car is easier because the car is just sitting there (maybe with an alarm sounding) and you can take the radio using regular old tools.
Mugging someone requires a weapon (unless you are really physically intimidating) and that you look like you could chase that person down if they ran. (I assume that threatening someone with a deadly weapon carries a larger sentence than stealing a $100 car stereo.) A grab-and-run theft requires that the person be holding the object in a snatchable place (not in their pocket) and that you could get away from them and anyone that might try to stop your escape.
My car was broken into three times in the last few years and yet I've never been mugged or even felt threatened by someone on the street.
If you're wishing that there were a device that did what the headline suggests that this hack does (that is, play AVIs and stuff without a PC doing all the work) then you might want to look into this.
I bought an early release of the BroadQ QCast software (which I believe is now sold as the Mad Catz GameShark Media Player) for the PS2. It's pretty interesting - you have to get the PS2 network adapter so that your PS2 has ethernet, and then you also have to run the Java based streaming server app on the server that has all your media files on it. Once you've done that, you run this software and it lets you browse and play your audio and video media.
Initially I was pretty disappointed in the video performance. Basically most of the movies I had wouldn't play (either due to codec incompatibility, or the codec not being able to keep up with the frame rate) and especially because there was no fast-forward or rewind. A later release fixed most of those issues including the FF/RW.
It's still kinda cool but I'm sort of over my movie-ripping phase and back to DVDs so I don't use it that much. To be honest it's fairly cumbersome to get it all set up, so unless you really want to watch a lot of non-DVD digital video on your TV, it's probably not worth it. But you might find that this is a good audio solution with the bonus of movie playback.
Tom's Hardware has a review that's concurrent with my initial experiences: http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/0 03/qcast/qcast -3.html
>they could have spent far less on AMD gear and attained the same level of performance.
From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher: He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.
So, in fact AMD's best price was about twice as much as Apple's standard educational price.
>Most computers, even servers, don't get put into supercomputing clusters, so they're not built for that.
And yet, VT found that the G5 desktop had better price/performance at standard educational prices than any of the offerings from the PC vendors they were talking to at the same time (HP, Intel, and AMD).
The impressive fact is not the overall performance of the VT G5 cluster, but that the price-performance ratio was better if they bought G5s at the standard Apple educational price (not some insane 1-time giveaway deal cooked up just for VT) than if they bought systems from HP, IBM, Intel, or AMD.
From How Virginia Tech built a supercomputer: "Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."
From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher: He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.
When Dell built a similar cluster for more than half the price ($3M vs. $5.2M for VT's), they got a cluster with less than 1/4 of the performance.
Of course, this "performance" is measured by a benchmark, and all benchmarks lie, and single-computer desktop usage doesn't look like large-scale cluster usage, but the fact is, this was not a matter of somebody deciding to buy Apple and blindly throwing a bunch of cash at it. The Apple offering had better price/performance for their needs.
I can't remember who makes it but there is a 3rd party bracket you can get that lets you fit 2 more drives in the G5 desktop case. I think I saw it in the back of Macworld.
> If you want very specialized fast floating point performance for certain scientific applications, Itanium is where it's at.
Then why did VT actually go through the trouble of pricing out a cluster and find that G5s had the best price/performance? It's fun to speculate and all, but they actually priced it out and in reality the G5 systems had better price/performance.
Or were you referring to single-CPU performance?
>If you want the fastest computing cluster, you'd probably have to go with UVA's Mac cluster.
>Apple uses the same components as every single other PC vendor.
True for: - RAM - HD
Sort-of true for: - video cards (different BIOS, but same otherwise AFAIK) - optical drives (different firmware in some cases, special supplier agreements in some cases)
False for: - CPU - Mobo - I/O chips (many of them are Apple ASICs) - Power supply - LCD screens (if applicable) - Mouse & Keyboard - Case
Apparently you've never ever looked inside a Mac before, or you'd know this. A G5 desktop is not an Opteron machine with a Gigabyte mobo and Antec power supply in a generic white-box case with an off-the-shelf Logitech KB and mouse, or something like that. A Powerbook is not a Dell Latitude with a different badge on it.
>Apple uses the same "cheap, generic components" and charges you more for them.
I guess cheap is a matter of opinion, but hardly generic. Take a Mac apart sometime. The stuff has brand names on it. Sony, IBM, ATI, Matsushita, Apple, etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived in the US all my life and your perception of our health care system seems completely out of whack based on my experience.
Doctors in the US definitely make extra visits for patients and put patients on medications that treat symptoms rather than curing the cause, because the financial incentive rewards doctors for doing that. More visits = more money. Patients pick doctors based on location and health insurance coverage, and only sometimes based on word of mouth. Patients stick with the same doctor unless they are sure they are being given bad care, because it's such a pain to have to fill out all those forms and get x-rays and so forth all over again.
You got lucky in the US hospitals you've been to. The experience of going to the vet or in my own analogy, being a car that's being taken to the mechanic, is typical of my US medical experiences.
The grass may seem greener here but it isn't. The US healthcare system is a disaster; doctors and patients hate it. You just got lucky.
Your reply to my post has nothing to do with my post. It's you who look stupid.
Yet another example of software that won't run unless you have local admin privileges: Microsoft Outlook 2000 (on Win2k, at least). The first time you run it after installing it, you have to be logged in as an administrative user. This fairly well sucks because if you just run the Office installer and then log out and let the primary user of the machine (who is not a local admin) start using their computer, they will swiftly run into problems getting Outlook to start. IIRC, the error message isn't very useful. It's not a big problem because you just learn to either run Outlook yourself immediately after installing Office and rebooting, or do that and then image it so you never have to do it again. But I think it's noteworthy that it's not just random rogue apps that need local admin access for seemingly non-administrative things.
My solution in the past to this and all the other software that for one reason or another needs admin privs is to just make the user a member of the local admin group. No, it's not ideal, and I guess I could have spent hours putzing around with registry keys and resource kits and trying to avoid this but it's just not worth it. Installing a self-updating virus app makes the majority of scary issues like this go away. At a company where someone I know works in the IT department, they have an ultra-locked-down standard desktop image, and it's a pain in the butt because they have to hold the user's hand all the time and users can't even change their desktop image. I guess it's a matter of how many users you have, how different their PCs' setups need to be (vs. one universal image) and how much you trust them to not hose their own machines.
I wonder which would require more administrative overhead:
- a policy of not letting users be local admins on their machines (accompanied by all the administrator laying-on-of-hands that this policy would require) or
- a policy of users being local admins + an antivirus app + solving the occasional problem with a user screwing up their own machine or needing a machine rebuilt because some exploit used their local admin status to do somehing that a non-admin can't do, including possibly needing to reimage their machine and restore from backup.
Basically it's a question of risking a few big inconveniences vs. guaranteeing a larger number of little inconveniences.
Anybody got experience with this?
I suspect that there's a certain amount of overhead that's required to make the no-local-admin solution work, and if you have enough users, it'll actually save you support time because once you set it all up and image it and document the problems that will occur, you won't have to spend as much time as you would have to spend undoing the horrible things that users have done with all their adminny powers.
I think you might be missing the point. The parent poster was responding to an argument that goes something like "but look at all the things that an album's sales revenues have to pay for" such as advertising etc., as justification for the high price of a CD. So it is fair to compare a DVD of a movie to the soundtrack of that same movie since the costs to make and promote the music are shared by the DVD, and any box-office profits are in some part due to the soundtrack.
Also, your assertion that actors get paid whether or not a movie is successful is only partly correcct - often their pay is based partly on a lump sum and partly on box office sales. The idea that musicians need a paycheck more than actors is interesting, but you undermine that argument by pointing out that musicians can tour (and sell tickets, t-shirts, etc.) as opposed to just relying on box office sales. Of course it's more complicated than that since there are endorsements too.
Anyway, the point is, if you want to defend CD prices based on the cost of producing and promoting a CD, you have to compare that to a DVD, and the enormously larger cost of producing and promoting a film. DVDs are cheaper.
BTW, for those readers who haven't looked themselves, CD duplication costs less than $1/CD in volume, including liner notes, jewel cases, etc. Studio time costs about $50-$100/hr. Bear those costs in mind when you're adding up the actual cost of making a CD vs. the "actual cost" of paying the record company.
Wow, a /. AC said it and provided no links or examples whatsoever, so it must be true!
>I was thinking of the classic bump and theft actually. Bump into a person, while they are stunned, take their crap, say pardon me and move on.
Don't you think they'd notice that the music had suddenly stopped at exactly the same time that you bumped into them?
"What iPod? Oh, this one in my hand? No, no, this one is mine. Uh, yeah, I always carry it around without any headphones. Yours is, um, back there on the sidewalk somewhere, I think."
You're not good at reading, it seems.
The parent post that you replied to said this:
> I understand the logic of why they do it. But the fact that "we" as the public go along with that escapes me.
(my emphasis)
And then you explained in detail "why they do it."
Mod parent up!
>I'll call the cops, just as a record label would call the cops if you broke into their building and destroyed all their copies of the latest britney spears album.
But think of the cred you'd get for doing it! No jury would convict you...
Muggers probably need money more than muggees do.
Rapists probably have had consensual sex less often than their victims have.
Do you need a particular song more than the person who created it needs to be paid for their work? (Fuck them, they should have to entertain you for free!) Do you hate all musicians that much? Maybe you should start listening to music made by respectable musicans...
...because muggers always ask for your digital camera, your PDA, and your MP3 player.
"Hold still, I'm going to pat you down and then use the wand to find any other electronic valuables on your person. Don't try to hit me and escape or anything."
An alternative to carrying a firearm everywhere is to just keep stuff concealed.
Stealing something out of a car is easier because the car is just sitting there (maybe with an alarm sounding) and you can take the radio using regular old tools.
Mugging someone requires a weapon (unless you are really physically intimidating) and that you look like you could chase that person down if they ran. (I assume that threatening someone with a deadly weapon carries a larger sentence than stealing a $100 car stereo.) A grab-and-run theft requires that the person be holding the object in a snatchable place (not in their pocket) and that you could get away from them and anyone that might try to stop your escape.
My car was broken into three times in the last few years and yet I've never been mugged or even felt threatened by someone on the street.
>Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up.
Wrong. The operating system, office suite, web browser, mail app, IM client, graphics program, etc. etc. are free now.
If you're wishing that there were a device that did what the headline suggests that this hack does (that is, play AVIs and stuff without a PC doing all the work) then you might want to look into this.
0 03/qcast/qcast -3.html
I bought an early release of the BroadQ QCast software (which I believe is now sold as the Mad Catz GameShark Media Player) for the PS2. It's pretty interesting - you have to get the PS2 network adapter so that your PS2 has ethernet, and then you also have to run the Java based streaming server app on the server that has all your media files on it. Once you've done that, you run this software and it lets you browse and play your audio and video media.
Initially I was pretty disappointed in the video performance. Basically most of the movies I had wouldn't play (either due to codec incompatibility, or the codec not being able to keep up with the frame rate) and especially because there was no fast-forward or rewind. A later release fixed most of those issues including the FF/RW.
It's still kinda cool but I'm sort of over my movie-ripping phase and back to DVDs so I don't use it that much. To be honest it's fairly cumbersome to get it all set up, so unless you really want to watch a lot of non-DVD digital video on your TV, it's probably not worth it. But you might find that this is a good audio solution with the bonus of movie playback.
Tom's Hardware has a review that's concurrent with my initial experiences:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/
>they could have spent far less on AMD gear and attained the same level of performance.
From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.
So, in fact AMD's best price was about twice as much as Apple's standard educational price.
>Most computers, even servers, don't get put into supercomputing clusters, so they're not built for that.
And yet, VT found that the G5 desktop had better price/performance at standard educational prices than any of the offerings from the PC vendors they were talking to at the same time (HP, Intel, and AMD).
The impressive fact is not the overall performance of the VT G5 cluster, but that the price-performance ratio was better if they bought G5s at the standard Apple educational price (not some insane 1-time giveaway deal cooked up just for VT) than if they bought systems from HP, IBM, Intel, or AMD.
From How Virginia Tech built a supercomputer:
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."
From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.
When Dell built a similar cluster for more than half the price ($3M vs. $5.2M for VT's), they got a cluster with less than 1/4 of the performance.
Of course, this "performance" is measured by a benchmark, and all benchmarks lie, and single-computer desktop usage doesn't look like large-scale cluster usage, but the fact is, this was not a matter of somebody deciding to buy Apple and blindly throwing a bunch of cash at it. The Apple offering had better price/performance for their needs.
I can't remember who makes it but there is a 3rd party bracket you can get that lets you fit 2 more drives in the G5 desktop case. I think I saw it in the back of Macworld.
> If you want very specialized fast floating point performance for certain scientific applications, Itanium is where it's at.
Then why did VT actually go through the trouble of pricing out a cluster and find that G5s had the best price/performance? It's fun to speculate and all, but they actually priced it out and in reality the G5 systems had better price/performance.
Or were you referring to single-CPU performance?
>If you want the fastest computing cluster, you'd probably have to go with UVA's Mac cluster.
I think you meant VT. VT and UVA are arch-rivals.
>Apple uses the same components as every single other PC vendor.
True for:
- RAM
- HD
Sort-of true for:
- video cards (different BIOS, but same otherwise AFAIK)
- optical drives (different firmware in some cases, special supplier agreements in some cases)
False for:
- CPU
- Mobo
- I/O chips (many of them are Apple ASICs)
- Power supply
- LCD screens (if applicable)
- Mouse & Keyboard
- Case
Apparently you've never ever looked inside a Mac before, or you'd know this. A G5 desktop is not an Opteron machine with a Gigabyte mobo and Antec power supply in a generic white-box case with an off-the-shelf Logitech KB and mouse, or something like that. A Powerbook is not a Dell Latitude with a different badge on it.
>Apple uses the same "cheap, generic components" and charges you more for them.
I guess cheap is a matter of opinion, but hardly generic. Take a Mac apart sometime. The stuff has brand names on it. Sony, IBM, ATI, Matsushita, Apple, etc. etc.
I think that httptunnel and stunnel would do this.
TCP over PPP over TCP has serious performance problems, though.
Maybe you just need a new job.
Oh come on. Everyone knows that if Linux were as popular as Windows, there would be as many /. headlines about Linux as there are about Microsoft.
>Microsoft probably can come up with the worlds greatest search engine.
Well, they have a long way to go. Check out the incredibly dumb MSN search page that I got a couple of years ago.
No, it's not a fake; this really happened one day (3/30/02) when I was using IE.
>My friends are impressed when I show them a full movie on my PDA
which is the only reason you would want to do such a thing.
Ooo yeah! Check it out, widescreen at 160x90! Awesome! Does it have a 5mm subwoofer to go with the 3mm speaker too?
Spymac has the photo.