Eh. On the one hand, yes, political correctness sucks.
On the other hand, comparing the configuration problems inherent to OpenOffice with the Trail of Tears is pretty obnoxious. I mean, what next, "Linux Networking: 9/11 All Over Again"?
I really don't think this is a case of being overly politically correct. It's more that the author of the article used an entirely inappropriate title, given the subject. Comparing computer configuration problems with the death of thousands is, well, shitty.
I've been watching this project with anticipation for years, but it's always been "almost ready". That, and the guys running it had what seemed an unnatural fear of open source. Their argument against in in the past was basically "we don't want outside help, so no open source". As if opening the source meant they had to accept changes. It was very strange.
So yeah. Yay! Maybe we'll see a finished game finally. It definately has the potential to be a kickass game.
Re:You don't have to answer the phone!
on
5 Predictions for 2012
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I'm in your cube and you answer the phone I will talk to your boss about that, unless you are in customer service they can get voicemail and you will call back.
So, you're basically saying you're a colossal prick at work? Because, frankly, my boss (and probably any boss that you've ever told about someone answering their fucking phone) doesn't give a shit that you were miffed at my answering the phone. Sure, I'm going to look at the caller ID quickly to make sure I need to answer, but quite frankly, unless you're the owner of the company, I guarantee you that there are people way more important than you who require my attention at times.
I mean, christ, acting like you claim to act where I work would get you fired for being a pain in the ass who feels that nothing is more important than paying attention to you. Management has better things to do than listen to you complain that someone did their job by answering a call from a co-worker who needed to contact them for business reasons. Who the fuck do you think you are? I can just imagine it. "Answer that phone and I'll report you to the boss! And then I'll go cry to mommy that you didn't pay attention to me!! Waaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaaaa!".
There's a serious difference between the Sony business model and the MS/Nintendo business model that you're missing.
Yes, Sony has a higher up front cost. That's because Sony produces the hardware. It's like buying a house versus renting. It may cost sony $2B in research and development, but after that initial investment they own the fabs, they own the production facilities, and therefore they don't have to keep paying 3rd parties for hardware.
MS and Nintendo, on the other hand, currently buy their parts from other companies. This reduces up front cost, but it means that they are forever paying more for their components. No matter how cheap it becomes to create those components, MS and Nintendo can only get them as cheap as their creators are willing to sell them.
Sony cuts out the middleman. Instead of renting, it buys the house and becomes it's own landlord. MS and Nintendo are renting, and paying the mortgage for the landlords (3rd party hardware developers). This is why Sony's business model is superior. They pay more to begin with, but in the end they reap the benefits of that initial outlay.
So I'm supposed to take estimations by people not involved in the production of the chips over the fiscal reports of the company in question? Either Sony is cooking their books, or the estimations by Microprocessor Report are wrong. I tend to think the latter.
Yeah, because the part where nintendo representatives admitted that they were selling the Gamecube at a slight loss at release time must not mean anything, right?
Production costs go down over time. However, I highly doubt that the Gamecube cost $90 to make. Where was this said? I'd love to see some links.
Sony does not sell the PS2 near cost. They sell it to make a profit, and a healthy one at that. This is possible mainly due to the fact that Sony makes almost all of the components, and so they can control prices. Also, if anything, production costs have gone down for these components since the PS2's inception. Making $50+ per console is not "selling near cost".
Nintendo sells near cost, but like I said, they make far more on games. Most people I know who own 6 Gamecube games own 3 that were made by Nintendo. That means that they have made the profit equivalent of 15 game sales for the XBox or the PS2, assuming no Sony or MS produced games (which is generally true).
Microsoft sells nowhere near cost, but on the other end of the spectrum. They were selling between $50 and $100 below cost before they were forced to drop the price of the XBox by $100 due to Sony's price drop. This happened way before MS wanted to drop that price. They had hoped (from what we know from interviews) to hold at $300 for at least a year to a year and a half after releasing the XBox, but ended up dropping to $200 after only about 7 or 8 months. At this point, they're selling at least $70 below cost, and that doesn't count as "near cost" in my book.
Given that his reasoning is based of official Sony stock reports, I'm more likely to accept it as fact than the word of random idiots on the 'net who think they know everything there is to know about the console market. But hey, that's just me.
Uhh, no, if you read it you'd notice that of $175 they were making per console, roughly $120 was from the console itself. $55 was from software and accessories.
Sony is not stupid. They do not sell at a loss. Sega sold at a loss and is now defunct as a hardware business. Nintendo sold the Gamecube at a slight loss but most accounts have them as about even now. Microsoft has billions it can throw down the drain, and so it sells at a loss.
Also, just a FYI, when Nintendo sells at a small loss it is almost meaningless to them, and I'll tell you why:
When a game is sold for $50, maybe $20 of it is profit. Of that, typically the console maker gets $5, and the game producer gets $15. However, Nintendo is in a special position in that it makes most of the really popular games for it's own console. Thus, if they sell at a $20 loss (which is about twice what most people estimated), but you buy the Gamecube and a single Nintendo produced game (which I guarantee you will), they've broken even, because they get all $20 of profit.
Microsoft, on the other hand, does not produce the games. Therefore, even if you are nice and say they're only losing $30 per console (which is way below most estimates), they need to sell 6 games just to break even. How many people do you know who have 6 XBox games? I don't know any. Every person I know with an XBox has less than 5 games, and typically has bought a single extra controller. Every person I know with a Gamecube has at least 5-6 games and most of them also buy 3 extra controllers due to the number of good 4 player games.
Something tells me MS is the only company really digging itself into a hole in the console business right now.
To sum it up, most people (at this point) believe that Sony still makes at least $50 per console sold, Nintendo is just about breaking even, and Microsoft is still losing at least $70 per console sold. (this is taking into account drops in production prices, drops in sale prices, etc).
Yeah, and I'm right now typing this from a Dual Athlon MP2000+ that cost me about $1k to put together. Trying to deny that macs aren't expensive is just stupid; I really love OSX, but I can't justify spending $2500 on a box just to get the performance I get right now for $1000.
I think Penny Arcade has a strip that sums up your feelings pretty well. If nothing else, it helps to point out the childishness of a lot of the namecalling surrounding Microsoft. Try showing it to the next person who tries to be cool by spelling Microsoft with a '$', or any other such stupidity. With any luck, they'll see how foolish they sound, and if they don't, you can just laugh at their stupidity. It's a win-win situation;)
I'd like to second this sentiment. I actually went to the site wanting to hear this band, because I'm always interested in hearing new music. Unfortunately, I was immediately whisked away to Macromedia's site, without any warning.
Note to the band: Guess what? You just lost a potential listener. Lose the goddamn flash, or at least lose the stupid flash detection. All I wanted was to download a sample of your music, so that I could decide for myself if I liked your music enough to want to buy a CD. Instead, you've pissed me off, and I don't even know what the name of you band is, because I was taken away from your site before I was even able to read the goddamn URL. Way to go!
I mean, I have a short script that I wrote that checks to see if there are any updates, and emails me the results. I have it run every night on my domain box, and thus, every morning, I find out if there are needed upgrades. At that point, I can go check out why the upgrades are needed, and perform the udpate manually.
However, I would never have apt upgrade my system without me being there, and I highly doubt anyone else with any brains would. So please, stop spouting bullshit about how the "typical Debian user" does something that retarded, because I've never met a single person who has done that, and I've known a lot of people running Debian.
Warchalk marks are not public because the people who would benefit from the information (ie. the network owners) most likely aren't going to know what the hell the information means. The may be in public places, but nobody (aside from a few geeks) is going to know what they say.
I mean, this is like saying "Of course I told the network owner about the problem! I wrote out the pertinent information very clearly on the wall, in sanskrit!"
Iconography is not inherently more understandable. It is more understandable when the icons used are well known and useful. Warchalking marks fall into neither of these. They are not (and most likely never will be) well known, and for most people, they are of no use.
I mean, I'm the kind of person who could benefit from an intentionally open network, but you know what? I'm never going to take the time to learn yet another "standard" written by someone who felt the need to make things much more complex than is necessary. However, if I was in the city, and I saw a sign that said "If you'd like to use my wireless node, the info is: blah blah blah", that'd be easy to use, obvious, and useful to even those who aren't inherently technical people.
To me, warchalking is just another geek attempt at being "cool" and "elite", as if knowing what chalk marks on the wall mean somehow makes someone a better person. That might not be the intent, but it's how it comes off to most people who aren't into it. It's an unnecessarily complex method of conveying information when there are already good methods of doing conveying such information.
You're a locksmith, and you're out doing some shopping. While stopping in a cafe, you happen to notice that the lock on their front door is a model of lock that you know from experience is easy to jimmy. However, instead of telling the owner, you go outside, step into an alley, and pull out some chalk. You then proceed to write out some marks on the wall that inform others who are knowledgeable about the marks exactly how to break into this cafe.
Tell me again how this sort of activity is "well meaning"? Oh, that's right, it's the cafe owner's fault for not realizing the lock could be a problem. You're not doing anything wrong at all by intentionally telling only those with an interest in abusing this information about it, really.
So you're saying that, because it's too hard to tell someone about the problem, it's better to share that information covertly to others who will abuse it?
This isn't like revealing security problems in software publicly for all to see. Warchalking is in no way going to help the problem, because the covert nature of it pretty much precludes any possibility of the owner of the network finding out about the problem. It'd be one thing to send a letter to them, or, alternately, try to publicize the problem somewhere. However, warchalking does not take a public approach. All it does is make the problem worse, by inviting unscrupulous people to come in and abuse the network.
Maybe I'm crazy, but every single article I've ever read about warchalking has implied to me that the purpose of warchalking was to break into networks not owned by you. This includes articles both by people for and by people against the practice. I have never heard of using warchalking in order to tell people about an intentionally accessible network.
In fact, to me, that makes absolutely no sense. Why not just put up a flyer? Why use obscure chalk marks on the wall that can wash away? The only benefit that warchalking marks have over a flyer is that most people won't recognize them. The only reason that you wouldn't want people to recognize the marks is if you don't want the people running the network to realize that it is open.
Might I also add that if you did "invent" warchalking, you chose just about the worst name possible. Every technical person I know who has heard that word immediately associates it with the term "wardialing". Wardialing is not a benevolent act, and in fact, is about as rude and hostile as possible. Perhaps you need to think a little more about these things next time around, and perhaps you need to talk to the people out there warchalking, because I've never been given any impression by their words and actions excepting that all they want is a free ride on a network that isn't theirs to play with.
OK, these "wireless activists" go around searching for insecure wireless networks, and when they find them, instead of telling the owners of said networks about the problem, they covertly mark the information down so that others can use that network illegally.
I think I'm going to have to call bullshit on your claim that it takes 2 minutes for an IDE drive to close a CD, and 1.5 minutes just to start burning. As I stated earlier in this thread, I recently replaced my 8x SCSI CD-R with a 32x10x40 Sony IDE CD-RW. It takes more like 20 seconds to start writing, and 30 seconds at most to close the CD. It also cost me all of $70, and I have no problems using other applications while burning.
I think this is somewhat true, but not so much that it changes my original point. Although the majority of drive wear is going to be on spin-up and spin-down, I just tend to doubt that a person who turns their system on once a day, uses it for a few hours, and then turns it off is incurring more drive wear than I am leaving a system on 24/7.
I'm mainly replying re: reliability, as I don't feel like arguing about why IDE drives use SCSI emulation and such.
I'll grant you that higher end SCSI drives are more reliable. However, in my experience, most SCSI drives that are priced at a level that home users can buy them are not much more reliable than consumer IDE drives. Over the years, I've had just as many SCSI drives die as IDE drives, and I use more IDE drives than SCSI, so at least in my experience, IDE has a lower percentage of drive failure.
On top of this, it is once again a matter of not needing the level of reliability that they offer. Most of my computers are left on 24 hours a day, yet despite that, my IDE drives typically last long enough that I replace them with new drives long before they burn out. (we're talking 2-3 years that I typically keep a drive before I upgrade and replace it). What's important to note about this is that I'm not your typical computer user. Most people don't leave their systems on 24/7, and so they're going to have even longer lives than my drives, which survive just fine. What would be the point of SCSI in their situations, or in mine?
A final note: realize that I'm not a SCSI hater. I used SCSI for a long time. When I started using it, it was orders of magnitude better than IDE, and I felt the price was worth it. However, nowadays, I just don't think that's true anymore, outside of specific instances of businesses needing high speed, high reliability servers.
My reputation? What the hell are you talking about?
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't buy computer components in order to get into online pissing matches about who has the fastest, most "1337" system. I buy components that suit my needs for a reasonable price. SCSI comes nowhere close to being reasonably priced, and I'd argue that pretty much nobody on a single user desktop system needs the speed that SCSI has.
If I were building a server right now, would I use SCSI? Maybe. That really depends on what the server is doing. If I were building a desktop right now, would I use SCSI? Absolutely not. The performance increase doesn't even begin to justify the price increase for 99.99% of users. To quote you, "it's pretty simple".
The fact is, SCSI is overpriced. It has always been overpriced, and people have always known it. The only reason that it was still popular despite the price gouging was the fact that nothing else could even begin to approach the performance that it had.
Thankfully, times have changed. I'm not saying that ATA drives have yet surpassed SCSI. I'm sure that SCSI3 is probably still the fastest thing out there. But, realistically, who cares? Aside from large scale servers that absolutely need to have that kind of speed, nobody wants SCSI. Don't believe me? Go over to PriceWatch, and try to find a SCSI CD-R or CD-RW. I tried to replace my aging 8x SCSI CD-R recently, and ended up buying an IDE CD-RW, because all that was available in SCSI was outdated crap. Nobody makes SCSI devices targeted at anything other than servers anymore, and while it may be true that SCSI was never really aimed at consumers, at least there used to be a decent selection of devices to choose from. Nowadays, there is nothing.
What it comes down to is this: SCSI is pointless in consumer-land, and even in the land of high end home users. Nobody wants to pay exorbitant prices for a technology that is only marginally better than ATA. Given the choice of paying about $1.40 per gigabyte for ATA, or paying $5.00 per gigabyte for SCSI, I'm going to go with ATA, and so is everyone else.
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Eh. On the one hand, yes, political correctness sucks.
On the other hand, comparing the configuration problems inherent to OpenOffice with the Trail of Tears is pretty obnoxious. I mean, what next, "Linux Networking: 9/11 All Over Again"?
I really don't think this is a case of being overly politically correct. It's more that the author of the article used an entirely inappropriate title, given the subject. Comparing computer configuration problems with the death of thousands is, well, shitty.
I've been watching this project with anticipation for years, but it's always been "almost ready". That, and the guys running it had what seemed an unnatural fear of open source. Their argument against in in the past was basically "we don't want outside help, so no open source". As if opening the source meant they had to accept changes. It was very strange.
So yeah. Yay! Maybe we'll see a finished game finally. It definately has the potential to be a kickass game.
If I'm in your cube and you answer the phone I will talk to your boss about that, unless you are in customer service they can get voicemail and you will call back.
So, you're basically saying you're a colossal prick at work? Because, frankly, my boss (and probably any boss that you've ever told about someone answering their fucking phone) doesn't give a shit that you were miffed at my answering the phone. Sure, I'm going to look at the caller ID quickly to make sure I need to answer, but quite frankly, unless you're the owner of the company, I guarantee you that there are people way more important than you who require my attention at times.
I mean, christ, acting like you claim to act where I work would get you fired for being a pain in the ass who feels that nothing is more important than paying attention to you. Management has better things to do than listen to you complain that someone did their job by answering a call from a co-worker who needed to contact them for business reasons. Who the fuck do you think you are? I can just imagine it. "Answer that phone and I'll report you to the boss! And then I'll go cry to mommy that you didn't pay attention to me!! Waaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaaaa!".
There's a serious difference between the Sony business model and the MS/Nintendo business model that you're missing.
Yes, Sony has a higher up front cost. That's because Sony produces the hardware. It's like buying a house versus renting. It may cost sony $2B in research and development, but after that initial investment they own the fabs, they own the production facilities, and therefore they don't have to keep paying 3rd parties for hardware.
MS and Nintendo, on the other hand, currently buy their parts from other companies. This reduces up front cost, but it means that they are forever paying more for their components. No matter how cheap it becomes to create those components, MS and Nintendo can only get them as cheap as their creators are willing to sell them.
Sony cuts out the middleman. Instead of renting, it buys the house and becomes it's own landlord. MS and Nintendo are renting, and paying the mortgage for the landlords (3rd party hardware developers). This is why Sony's business model is superior. They pay more to begin with, but in the end they reap the benefits of that initial outlay.
So I'm supposed to take estimations by people not involved in the production of the chips over the fiscal reports of the company in question? Either Sony is cooking their books, or the estimations by Microprocessor Report are wrong. I tend to think the latter.
Yeah, because the part where nintendo representatives admitted that they were selling the Gamecube at a slight loss at release time must not mean anything, right?
Production costs go down over time. However, I highly doubt that the Gamecube cost $90 to make. Where was this said? I'd love to see some links.
they are selling these things near cost
Who is "they"?
Sony does not sell the PS2 near cost. They sell it to make a profit, and a healthy one at that. This is possible mainly due to the fact that Sony makes almost all of the components, and so they can control prices. Also, if anything, production costs have gone down for these components since the PS2's inception. Making $50+ per console is not "selling near cost".
Nintendo sells near cost, but like I said, they make far more on games. Most people I know who own 6 Gamecube games own 3 that were made by Nintendo. That means that they have made the profit equivalent of 15 game sales for the XBox or the PS2, assuming no Sony or MS produced games (which is generally true).
Microsoft sells nowhere near cost, but on the other end of the spectrum. They were selling between $50 and $100 below cost before they were forced to drop the price of the XBox by $100 due to Sony's price drop. This happened way before MS wanted to drop that price. They had hoped (from what we know from interviews) to hold at $300 for at least a year to a year and a half after releasing the XBox, but ended up dropping to $200 after only about 7 or 8 months. At this point, they're selling at least $70 below cost, and that doesn't count as "near cost" in my book.
Given that his reasoning is based of official Sony stock reports, I'm more likely to accept it as fact than the word of random idiots on the 'net who think they know everything there is to know about the console market. But hey, that's just me.
Uhh, no, if you read it you'd notice that of $175 they were making per console, roughly $120 was from the console itself. $55 was from software and accessories.
Sony is not stupid. They do not sell at a loss. Sega sold at a loss and is now defunct as a hardware business. Nintendo sold the Gamecube at a slight loss but most accounts have them as about even now. Microsoft has billions it can throw down the drain, and so it sells at a loss.
Also, just a FYI, when Nintendo sells at a small loss it is almost meaningless to them, and I'll tell you why:
When a game is sold for $50, maybe $20 of it is profit. Of that, typically the console maker gets $5, and the game producer gets $15. However, Nintendo is in a special position in that it makes most of the really popular games for it's own console. Thus, if they sell at a $20 loss (which is about twice what most people estimated), but you buy the Gamecube and a single Nintendo produced game (which I guarantee you will), they've broken even, because they get all $20 of profit.
Microsoft, on the other hand, does not produce the games. Therefore, even if you are nice and say they're only losing $30 per console (which is way below most estimates), they need to sell 6 games just to break even. How many people do you know who have 6 XBox games? I don't know any. Every person I know with an XBox has less than 5 games, and typically has bought a single extra controller. Every person I know with a Gamecube has at least 5-6 games and most of them also buy 3 extra controllers due to the number of good 4 player games.
Something tells me MS is the only company really digging itself into a hole in the console business right now.
No, Sony does not and never has sold at a loss. Please stop perpetuating this myth.
Info here.
To sum it up, most people (at this point) believe that Sony still makes at least $50 per console sold, Nintendo is just about breaking even, and Microsoft is still losing at least $70 per console sold. (this is taking into account drops in production prices, drops in sale prices, etc).
Yeah, and I'm right now typing this from a Dual Athlon MP2000+ that cost me about $1k to put together. Trying to deny that macs aren't expensive is just stupid; I really love OSX, but I can't justify spending $2500 on a box just to get the performance I get right now for $1000.
I think Penny Arcade has a strip that sums up your feelings pretty well. If nothing else, it helps to point out the childishness of a lot of the namecalling surrounding Microsoft. Try showing it to the next person who tries to be cool by spelling Microsoft with a '$', or any other such stupidity. With any luck, they'll see how foolish they sound, and if they don't, you can just laugh at their stupidity. It's a win-win situation ;)
I'd like to second this sentiment. I actually went to the site wanting to hear this band, because I'm always interested in hearing new music. Unfortunately, I was immediately whisked away to Macromedia's site, without any warning.
Note to the band: Guess what? You just lost a potential listener. Lose the goddamn flash, or at least lose the stupid flash detection. All I wanted was to download a sample of your music, so that I could decide for myself if I liked your music enough to want to buy a CD. Instead, you've pissed me off, and I don't even know what the name of you band is, because I was taken away from your site before I was even able to read the goddamn URL. Way to go!
Exactly who the hell puts apt in a cron job?
I mean, I have a short script that I wrote that checks to see if there are any updates, and emails me the results. I have it run every night on my domain box, and thus, every morning, I find out if there are needed upgrades. At that point, I can go check out why the upgrades are needed, and perform the udpate manually.
However, I would never have apt upgrade my system without me being there, and I highly doubt anyone else with any brains would. So please, stop spouting bullshit about how the "typical Debian user" does something that retarded, because I've never met a single person who has done that, and I've known a lot of people running Debian.
Warchalk marks are not public because the people who would benefit from the information (ie. the network owners) most likely aren't going to know what the hell the information means. The may be in public places, but nobody (aside from a few geeks) is going to know what they say.
I mean, this is like saying "Of course I told the network owner about the problem! I wrote out the pertinent information very clearly on the wall, in sanskrit!"
Iconography is not inherently more understandable. It is more understandable when the icons used are well known and useful. Warchalking marks fall into neither of these. They are not (and most likely never will be) well known, and for most people, they are of no use.
I mean, I'm the kind of person who could benefit from an intentionally open network, but you know what? I'm never going to take the time to learn yet another "standard" written by someone who felt the need to make things much more complex than is necessary. However, if I was in the city, and I saw a sign that said "If you'd like to use my wireless node, the info is: blah blah blah", that'd be easy to use, obvious, and useful to even those who aren't inherently technical people.
To me, warchalking is just another geek attempt at being "cool" and "elite", as if knowing what chalk marks on the wall mean somehow makes someone a better person. That might not be the intent, but it's how it comes off to most people who aren't into it. It's an unnecessarily complex method of conveying information when there are already good methods of doing conveying such information.
Bad analogy. A better one is as follows:
You're a locksmith, and you're out doing some shopping. While stopping in a cafe, you happen to notice that the lock on their front door is a model of lock that you know from experience is easy to jimmy. However, instead of telling the owner, you go outside, step into an alley, and pull out some chalk. You then proceed to write out some marks on the wall that inform others who are knowledgeable about the marks exactly how to break into this cafe.
Tell me again how this sort of activity is "well meaning"? Oh, that's right, it's the cafe owner's fault for not realizing the lock could be a problem. You're not doing anything wrong at all by intentionally telling only those with an interest in abusing this information about it, really.
So you're saying that, because it's too hard to tell someone about the problem, it's better to share that information covertly to others who will abuse it?
This isn't like revealing security problems in software publicly for all to see. Warchalking is in no way going to help the problem, because the covert nature of it pretty much precludes any possibility of the owner of the network finding out about the problem. It'd be one thing to send a letter to them, or, alternately, try to publicize the problem somewhere. However, warchalking does not take a public approach. All it does is make the problem worse, by inviting unscrupulous people to come in and abuse the network.
Maybe I'm crazy, but every single article I've ever read about warchalking has implied to me that the purpose of warchalking was to break into networks not owned by you. This includes articles both by people for and by people against the practice. I have never heard of using warchalking in order to tell people about an intentionally accessible network.
In fact, to me, that makes absolutely no sense. Why not just put up a flyer? Why use obscure chalk marks on the wall that can wash away? The only benefit that warchalking marks have over a flyer is that most people won't recognize them. The only reason that you wouldn't want people to recognize the marks is if you don't want the people running the network to realize that it is open.
Might I also add that if you did "invent" warchalking, you chose just about the worst name possible. Every technical person I know who has heard that word immediately associates it with the term "wardialing". Wardialing is not a benevolent act, and in fact, is about as rude and hostile as possible. Perhaps you need to think a little more about these things next time around, and perhaps you need to talk to the people out there warchalking, because I've never been given any impression by their words and actions excepting that all they want is a free ride on a network that isn't theirs to play with.
OK, these "wireless activists" go around searching for insecure wireless networks, and when they find them, instead of telling the owners of said networks about the problem, they covertly mark the information down so that others can use that network illegally.
...
How the hell is this in any way "well meaning"?!
I swear, only on slashdot
I think I'm going to have to call bullshit on your claim that it takes 2 minutes for an IDE drive to close a CD, and 1.5 minutes just to start burning. As I stated earlier in this thread, I recently replaced my 8x SCSI CD-R with a 32x10x40 Sony IDE CD-RW. It takes more like 20 seconds to start writing, and 30 seconds at most to close the CD. It also cost me all of $70, and I have no problems using other applications while burning.
I think this is somewhat true, but not so much that it changes my original point. Although the majority of drive wear is going to be on spin-up and spin-down, I just tend to doubt that a person who turns their system on once a day, uses it for a few hours, and then turns it off is incurring more drive wear than I am leaving a system on 24/7.
I'm mainly replying re: reliability, as I don't feel like arguing about why IDE drives use SCSI emulation and such.
I'll grant you that higher end SCSI drives are more reliable. However, in my experience, most SCSI drives that are priced at a level that home users can buy them are not much more reliable than consumer IDE drives. Over the years, I've had just as many SCSI drives die as IDE drives, and I use more IDE drives than SCSI, so at least in my experience, IDE has a lower percentage of drive failure.
On top of this, it is once again a matter of not needing the level of reliability that they offer. Most of my computers are left on 24 hours a day, yet despite that, my IDE drives typically last long enough that I replace them with new drives long before they burn out. (we're talking 2-3 years that I typically keep a drive before I upgrade and replace it). What's important to note about this is that I'm not your typical computer user. Most people don't leave their systems on 24/7, and so they're going to have even longer lives than my drives, which survive just fine. What would be the point of SCSI in their situations, or in mine?
A final note: realize that I'm not a SCSI hater. I used SCSI for a long time. When I started using it, it was orders of magnitude better than IDE, and I felt the price was worth it. However, nowadays, I just don't think that's true anymore, outside of specific instances of businesses needing high speed, high reliability servers.
My reputation? What the hell are you talking about?
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't buy computer components in order to get into online pissing matches about who has the fastest, most "1337" system. I buy components that suit my needs for a reasonable price. SCSI comes nowhere close to being reasonably priced, and I'd argue that pretty much nobody on a single user desktop system needs the speed that SCSI has.
If I were building a server right now, would I use SCSI? Maybe. That really depends on what the server is doing. If I were building a desktop right now, would I use SCSI? Absolutely not. The performance increase doesn't even begin to justify the price increase for 99.99% of users. To quote you, "it's pretty simple".
Pretty much nothing is happening with SCSI.
The fact is, SCSI is overpriced. It has always been overpriced, and people have always known it. The only reason that it was still popular despite the price gouging was the fact that nothing else could even begin to approach the performance that it had.
Thankfully, times have changed. I'm not saying that ATA drives have yet surpassed SCSI. I'm sure that SCSI3 is probably still the fastest thing out there. But, realistically, who cares? Aside from large scale servers that absolutely need to have that kind of speed, nobody wants SCSI. Don't believe me? Go over to PriceWatch, and try to find a SCSI CD-R or CD-RW. I tried to replace my aging 8x SCSI CD-R recently, and ended up buying an IDE CD-RW, because all that was available in SCSI was outdated crap. Nobody makes SCSI devices targeted at anything other than servers anymore, and while it may be true that SCSI was never really aimed at consumers, at least there used to be a decent selection of devices to choose from. Nowadays, there is nothing.
What it comes down to is this: SCSI is pointless in consumer-land, and even in the land of high end home users. Nobody wants to pay exorbitant prices for a technology that is only marginally better than ATA. Given the choice of paying about $1.40 per gigabyte for ATA, or paying $5.00 per gigabyte for SCSI, I'm going to go with ATA, and so is everyone else.