Oh, you mean like cell phones? That'll work. I'm sure every tube rider would be completely happy to keep their cell phones, laptops and PDAs at home and buy another set for the office or school.
Oh. OK. So, not being executed is the gold standard of good treatment by police now? What if they beat him senseless in the process? Still OK because they didn't kill him? Broke a couple of bones, still all right? Permanently crippled someone, still A-OK because they're not dead?
The bottom line is a lot of police forces around the planet are turning into bands of thugs, and the reason they're getting away with it is exactly comments from people like "it's not so bad, they didn't kill him like the other bloke"
MythTV is great if all you want to do is CAPTURE video. I also want to playback the captured video __ON MY TV___. TiVo can do this. If you read the MythTV HOWTO and even go down the path of trying to deploy one of these, you will quickly find that TV output has pretty much been ignored. What cards really actually work? What driver building hell do I have to go through to get s-video or composite out to actually work? at a normal NTSC scan rate?
????? And I say this with the greatest respect: What load of asinine blather is this? TV out with a cheap Nvidia card equipped with an S-video plug took me like 15 minutes to get going. I had a couple of little hiccups setting up my Myth box, but I'll tell you, TV output wasn't one of them. Stick to mainstream hardware and you'll be fine.
Care to share the details of what hardware, OS, and recording software?
Sure. MythTV is the software, but I used the Knoppmyth version of it to make the install go quicker. I also used standardized hardware to lessen the screwing around factor and just get it up and running. From a blank hard drive to recording TV took me about 3 hours. Hardware is as follows:
Hauppauge WinPVR-250 capture card Generic GeForce FX-5200 video card (chosen for the S-video out, Nvidia chipset to lessen the screwing around, and the passive heatsink) 80 GB Seagate EIDE hard drive Asus mainboard and an Athlon 1600XP CPU 512 MB DDR SDRAM.
Brief notes on the above:
- 256 MB of memory works all right as well which is what I started with. I went to 512 after a bit of tinkering and just left it in the system as RAM was cheap like chips at that time, but saw no real gain in performance. Not that there was an issue in performance to begin with. - More hard drive space is better. If I was to do it over again (and I probably will in the next few months) I'd use at least a 200GB hard drive. OS and swap (MythTV buffer space, not OS swap) chew up about 12 GB, which left only about 66 GB of usable space for programs. Decent quality programs eat 2.2GB/hour, so I have only enough room for about 32 hours of TV. A 200GB drive would yield almost 90 hours.
Build a Myth box for your sister or mom. I built one last year in October. Since I built it, I have had to do literally ZERO low-level maintenance on it. The only gotcha I found was it tended to freak out a bit if it ran out of hard drive space, which happened twice since I used a relatively puny drive. But in that respect, it's not a lot different than other PVRs. Just make sure there's space, and life's wonderful. It even handled unexpected power outages with aplomb, including the time I unplugged its UPS to move it to a different plug and the UPS turned out to have a dead battery. As soon as the Myth box was plugged back in, it auto booted and came right up and automatically went back to recording the program it was storing when the plug got pulled.
One more note: Using the web interface to manage all of it extends its usefulness by a factor of 100. I never do any of my program management from the TV interface itself with the remote. Much faster and easier to use a browser. You can search programs easily, alter recording schedules and formats, and delete unwanted shows all from the browser. Very slick.
Once the box was up and running, I'd have no reservations whatsoever about handing it off to one of my non-tech family members. And these relations are the same ones who have trouble with the concept of a directory on a disk.
I've been seeing this kind of reaction to it all night. Oh Noes!!!! Nintendo changed the controller. They just dug their grave!!!11!1One!!
Stop and think for one minute. Why do we even have game pads today? Because Nintendo bucked the trend of everyone and their dog with joysticks and made a gamepad for the Famicom/NES. What about analog sticks? Nintendo again with the N64.
Nintendo has made dramatic changes to the way we play our games twice now, and both times the industry fell right in step behind them imitating at their first opportunity. Who's to say they aren't doing it a third time here?
I'd tend to give a game company who's been around longer than half the population of this website the benefit of a doubt.
While the "Overcooked Celery" may be a home-build legend, the reports from a year later were that such systems tended to suffer from premature failure, and the Mhz benchmarking overstated the actual performance. Meaning it wasn't really as good as the real thing. YMMV.
That was true for some of the earlier 300As as they weren't PII 450s. The PII 450s were pressed into service off the Malaysian lines and a few others sporadically when the Celerons were wildly more popular than Intel had thought and they were short on parts. The performance differential was indeed there, but it was slight in most cases, and it sure as hell wasn't a $550 difference. The reason of course was the cache. The PII-into-Celerons has 3/4 of it deactivated at the plany by burning it out with a laser, so any cache-intensive op suffered. But a lot of the only people who cared at the time were gamers, and a lot of the games back then relied more on raw clock and the video card than the CPU cache.
Since then, they've exploited any opporutnity where high-end parts have high yeilds (see Northwood.)
This is largely true, but look at the insane price difference between the regular P4s and P4EEs (nicknamed Expensive Edition). And on the other side of the coin, in a few cases Intel has been downright reckless with their heat margins and stability. I remember when they had to pull their 1.13 GHz PIIIs shortly after introducing them on the market due to "thermal issues" and didn't return them until well after the P4s and Athlons were up past 1.5 - 2 GHz.
As has been mentioned, if one gets too greedy then they leave the door wide open for someone else (AMD) to come in and eat their lunch.
That is only a reality when they have a competitor who could produce, both in quality and quantity. I love AMD to death, and have for years, but they really didn't have anything that could stand up to Intel's best until the K7/Athlons got to market. Everything previously they did was cheaper, but also a lot behind Intel. The AMD "Super 7" platform was an excellent example of that, trying to keep up with the PII parts on what was essentially the old Pentium architecture. They had the MHz, but not the comparative clock for clock performance, and even the most deluded AMD fanboy could see it plainly. And Cyrix wasn't even on the same page. Hell, they were barely on the same planet.
Shareholders ALSO tend to get pissed when companies kill off the golden goose.
You'd be hard pressed to back that up with empirical evidence from business in the last couple of decades, at least here in North America. Most shareholders are not in a given company for the long term, and couldn't give a rat's ass how the company's health will be in 5 years, as long as they can do profit taking on the stock over the next 2. If the company shows a huge profit by selling off a division or two (like their R&D, or a reliable but unexciting source of income), those fair-weather stockholders rejoice and then cash out after the bump. The ones who don't tend to be the ones who weren't paying as close attention, and they get screwed. For a perfect example of that behavior, Check out HP under Carly Fiorina. All in the name of trying to drive the stock back up in the middle of the dot-com implosion with good numbers, she essentially threw away everything that HP previously used to long-term advantage. Anything that wasn't making money at THAT moment, went. They laid off thousands of career HP engineers, ditched entire divisions - especially R&D, saw the dot com crash as a bizarre opportunity to reduce competition in the marketplace by buying a rival (Compaq) in a move that many now say was a calculated move to scramble the company up so much that nobody could tell how badly she was screwing it up until years after the fact. She had no long term plans, her short term plans amounted to "hit her numbers so she got her bonuses at year's end", and for 4 years it worked. Then the smoke cleared at last from both the Compaq acquisition and integration, and many of the other bold moves, and the board threw her out on her ass in February of this year. But the damage is already done. HP is a pale shadow of its former self and will take years to recover. If it ever does. And for the first 3 years of that carnage, the shareholders were content.
And on a side note, I'd like to hear about the last salary increase you turned down...
Do you really wish to? A few times I and others at a couple of companies have all taken pay cuts so that the doors stayed open and we at least had paychecks coming in and the company afloat instead of being out on the street with no income stream at all. A lot of that was during the dot com meltdown as well, so jobs were largely as scarce as hens' teeth. Then there's the company I am at now which was started by myself and a few friends from other companies where we'd all worked together. Things are all right now, but there were definitely times when we all went a month or a month and a half with no paycheck to get it all off the ground. Deciding to live on Mr. Noodles for a couple of weeks so that we could afford to take a client out for a working lunch so they'd have no idea how threadbare we actually were at the time, etc.
Intel has and always will gouge people if they can get away with it. Explanations of "but it goes to cover ops and R&D" don't cut it with me any more. Maybe back in the heady days of the 386s and 486s I bought that, but there was one thing Intel pulled that made it abundantly clear that they're just raking it in hand over fist as much as the market will bear, not recouping dev costs. That thing was the Mendoceno Celeron 300A. I recall buying one for $135 CDN when the Pentium II 450 was being sold for $650 CDN or more. But they're different parts, what the hell are you babbling about, you say? No they were not. In fact, a lot of the Malaysian 300As were perfectly functional PII 450s that had a bunch of their cache burned out and their clock dropped to 66MHz instead of 100, as mine was, and as a result would run perfectly fine when clocked up to 450 MHz without even needing to change the heatsink and fan from the stock one. So if Intel could afford to sell a chip that they had to do MORE work on (burning out the cache) for $500 less, what did that say for their profit margins on the PII 450? Bottom line. Intel is not your friend. They're a business. If they think they can get a $300 profit on a part even after their R&D costs, they'll do it in a heartbeat. And moreover, their shareholders would be howling for their blood if they had the opportunity and didn't.
I never really saw Bester do anything particularly evil, he was just protecting his people
Mmmm. There was that one scene where they were Bester and some other telepath were transporting a couple of criminals back from B5 to Earth, I believe it was. After they hit hyperspace, Bester dumped them out the airlock instead of taking them back. When the other telepath asked him about it he told her not to worry about it as they were "just mundanes" i.e. not telepaths. That struck me as being quite the epitome of evil, killing someone just because they weren't the same as you. I think there's a word for that..
Because the bad guys would NEVER use encryption or even just offhand references to something in their planning that they transmit over an open, public medium, right?
Let's see... when your dot-com stock tanked, you had nothing. When your house value tanks, you still have a house -- albeit with an upside down equity position -- but you don't lose the asset.
That depends on a lot. If you're in a position like the current batch of lemmings buying houses in Vancouver, for example, you're spending $350,000 - $400,000 on a house, (with only $50,000 down, or less!) and you have a 5% mortgage fixed for the next 5 years. A few years down the road, the bubble bursts, your house is suddenly worth $200,000 instead, and your mortgage refinancing is right around the corner. Oh, and interest rates aren't 5% anymore. Now they're 9% (or maybe worse. A buddy of mine carried at 14% mortgage for 2 years in Vancouver in the early 90's). You were barely able to afford your house when you were paying 5% interest, and now you have to refinance at something you cannot possibly afford. Also, the bank REALLY wants to talk to you about that extra $140,000 that's on the mortgage which is no longer reflected in your house's value.
And deity help you if in those intervening years your house rose in value and you decided to take out an equity loan on the increased value. Because that is suddenly no longer backed up by anything anymore either, and you can be sure they'll want to be taken care of as well.
All that has to be done is include a unique ID on the card that contacts a central server to check how many subs have been purchased
Oh yes, because all of the Subways around where I work will immediately set aside a whole whack of cash to implement this new system. Maybe it'll even solve that nasty turnover problem they currently have where all of their staff seems to only last about 2 months, so they're forever retraining everyone on how to use the cash register.
Or, ya know. Not. They've got bigger fish to fry. Hell, half the time their staff couldn't reliably operate the sub-club coupon dispenser, and that was a purely mechanical device.
Somehow I don't think "central server" and persistent connection are going to be features of this new system. At least not if they want to keep their franchisees.
Sigh. You are either being deliberately obtuse, or talking to you is a waste of effort. But let it never be said that I won't take a moment to attempt to educate someone.
- When you take some THING that there is only a finite amount of, like a Rolex, or a car, or money (even in "bits" form in a bank computer), it is THEFT.
- When you make a copy of something like software, music, or video entertainment, in effect increasing the total population of thing X in the world, it is copyright infringment. You didn't deprive anyone of their copy of X, you just made another one.
And since the money is probably in the form of bits on a computer, I really didn't steal anything - I just caused some bits to be flipped.
Bullshit. That is the textbook definition of theft. If I own a store and have enough "bits" in the bank to go and buy myself, say, 3 cars, but then you pull your little trick and after the dust settles I only have enough bits to buy 2 cars, and you have enough bits in your bank account to buy a car where before you didn't, you have committed theft. End of story.
Largely it's apples to oranges. Software piracy is not theft of a physical item, it's copyright infringement. The general lack of morals is the same, but at the end of the day if someone pirates XP, Microsoft doesn't have one less copy in their inventory that they can sell, whereas the jewelry store down the street will have one less Rolex.
I used to work at a software company that made contact management software. We had a mechanism built right into the main function of the software that specifically handled notes based on phone calls. The first iteration of that function we did in 1992.
True. At the same time, it also doesn't have any "fluff" divisions to drag it down, unlike Sony(film division) or Microsoft(err, Xbox division just posted another huge loss;) ). Every time the "Nintendo is DOOOOOMED!!111" stories come around, people seem to forget that 1) they are still making profit, and have been for years, and 2) they also have been doing this for a LOT longer than all of their competitors. They've been pumping out games for almost 25 years. Sony's only been around for 10, and Microsoft less than 5 in this space. As for what will support Nintendo if they fail to show a profit? Dunno. Maybe some of those profits they've been keeping in the bank from the last 25 years? That *is* why responsible corporations keep a portion of their profits as "retained earnings", after all. Microsoft has several billion in the bank for rainy days, I'd be shocked if Nintendo didn't have enough to carry them for a year or two as well.
Oh yes, a free economy. Because that works out so very well doesn't it? In a free economy, corporations do whatever it takes in the short term to improve the bottom line, even at the expense of the long term. Just ask HP how cutting all their research a couple of years back is working out for those 10,000 people they freshly laid off. Better yet, for a succinct reasoning of why true free markets would be a disaster for everyone, check out the definition of the "tragedy of the commons".
Corporations will stop polution when you stop buying their shit.
Yeah. That'll happen soon in America. I watched that "30 days" show last week when they took a couple of NYC dwellers out to an off-the-grid community to see if they could live sustainably for a month. Just listening to them whine for the first 20 minutes of the show was ample evidence of why the only thing that's going to get any significant number of people in the US to do anything along the lines of "green living" is a $10 gallon of gas, complete with the commensurate rise in pricing of all other goods. But of course by then it'll be too damn late to set up an infrastructure easily.
The entire character seems to be pandering to the same crowd that 7-of-9 was in Voyager.
Yeah, because that's never been done on SG-1 before, right?
Claudia Black's character in SG-1 is a con artist, and uses the sex appeal to help work it. Nothing wrong with that as motivation for her to dress like that. As for worst episode of season 8, I'm going to have to go with the "holodeck malfunction"-esque plot of the one where Teal'c is trapped in that game. Or, from a "what the hell are you on?!" moment bad, Carter playing along with RepliCarter enough to give the replicators the ability to resist the Ancient weapon was terrible. That SHOULD have been, Teal'c and Carter step through the gate to to meet RepliCarter, Teal'c raises gun, BOOM! end of that threat.
It "felt" like Battlestar Galactica? WTF? Where was the shakycam? The holocaust of humanity and the desparate clawing of the few survivors to exist?
Claudia Black's characters are ever so slightly different...
Well, one was a straight-laced, take-no-crap ex-military warrior type (Aeryn Sun on Farscape), and the other is an irreverent, joking, good-life loving con woman (Vala on SG-1). Yeah. Exactly alike. Carbon copies! I mean, they both have black hair and all, how different can they be?
Personally, I LIKED the new SG-1 opener. Season 8 was getting quite stale. The new characters should bring it some life. And the interplay between Jackson and Vala was quite enjoyable.
Seeing as how it's from the Inquirer and all... IF it's real
You DO know that the Inquirer site in question is NOT the American rag that prints things on the Sasquatch's illegitimate chilrden with Elvis and all that, but rather a British IT/Tech news site?
The fake news mag is spelled Enquirer, not Inquirer. And technically it's known as the National Enquirer.
Just tired of explaining this to people when they ask about an article from the Inq.
where a pizza can get to your house faster than an ambulance
Ah, yes, but that's because our health care doesn't cost us anything. The reason the US ambulances are so fast is because they can smell your money, and they're trying to stay ahead of the pack of lawyers chasing them.
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Oh, you mean like cell phones? That'll work. I'm sure every tube rider would be completely happy to keep their cell phones, laptops and PDAs at home and buy another set for the office or school.
Oh. OK. So, not being executed is the gold standard of good treatment by police now? What if they beat him senseless in the process? Still OK because they didn't kill him? Broke a couple of bones, still all right? Permanently crippled someone, still A-OK because they're not dead?
The bottom line is a lot of police forces around the planet are turning into bands of thugs, and the reason they're getting away with it is exactly comments from people like "it's not so bad, they didn't kill him like the other bloke"
MythTV is great if all you want to do is CAPTURE video. I also want to playback the captured
video __ON MY TV___. TiVo can do this. If you read the MythTV HOWTO and even go down the
path of trying to deploy one of these, you will quickly find that TV output has pretty much
been ignored. What cards really actually work? What driver building hell do I have to go
through to get s-video or composite out to actually work? at a normal NTSC scan rate?
????? And I say this with the greatest respect: What load of asinine blather is this? TV out with a cheap Nvidia card equipped with an S-video plug took me like 15 minutes to get going. I had a couple of little hiccups setting up my Myth box, but I'll tell you, TV output wasn't one of them. Stick to mainstream hardware and you'll be fine.
Care to share the details of what hardware, OS, and recording software?
Sure. MythTV is the software, but I used the Knoppmyth version of it to make the install go quicker. I also used standardized hardware to lessen the screwing around factor and just get it up and running. From a blank hard drive to recording TV took me about 3 hours. Hardware is as follows:
Hauppauge WinPVR-250 capture card
Generic GeForce FX-5200 video card (chosen for the S-video out, Nvidia chipset to lessen the screwing around, and the passive heatsink)
80 GB Seagate EIDE hard drive
Asus mainboard and an Athlon 1600XP CPU
512 MB DDR SDRAM.
Brief notes on the above:
- 256 MB of memory works all right as well which is what I started with. I went to 512 after a bit of tinkering and just left it in the system as RAM was cheap like chips at that time, but saw no real gain in performance. Not that there was an issue in performance to begin with.
- More hard drive space is better. If I was to do it over again (and I probably will in the next few months) I'd use at least a 200GB hard drive. OS and swap (MythTV buffer space, not OS swap) chew up about 12 GB, which left only about 66 GB of usable space for programs. Decent quality programs eat 2.2GB/hour, so I have only enough room for about 32 hours of TV. A 200GB drive would yield almost 90 hours.
Build a Myth box for your sister or mom. I built one last year in October. Since I built it, I have had to do literally ZERO low-level maintenance on it. The only gotcha I found was it tended to freak out a bit if it ran out of hard drive space, which happened twice since I used a relatively puny drive. But in that respect, it's not a lot different than other PVRs. Just make sure there's space, and life's wonderful. It even handled unexpected power outages with aplomb, including the time I unplugged its UPS to move it to a different plug and the UPS turned out to have a dead battery. As soon as the Myth box was plugged back in, it auto booted and came right up and automatically went back to recording the program it was storing when the plug got pulled.
One more note: Using the web interface to manage all of it extends its usefulness by a factor of 100. I never do any of my program management from the TV interface itself with the remote. Much faster and easier to use a browser. You can search programs easily, alter recording schedules and formats, and delete unwanted shows all from the browser. Very slick.
Once the box was up and running, I'd have no reservations whatsoever about handing it off to one of my non-tech family members. And these relations are the same ones who have trouble with the concept of a directory on a disk.
I've been seeing this kind of reaction to it all night. Oh Noes!!!! Nintendo changed the controller. They just dug their grave!!!11!1One!!
Stop and think for one minute. Why do we even have game pads today? Because Nintendo bucked the trend of everyone and their dog with joysticks and made a gamepad for the Famicom/NES. What about analog sticks? Nintendo again with the N64.
Nintendo has made dramatic changes to the way we play our games twice now, and both times the industry fell right in step behind them imitating at their first opportunity. Who's to say they aren't doing it a third time here?
I'd tend to give a game company who's been around longer than half the population of this website the benefit of a doubt.
While the "Overcooked Celery" may be a home-build legend, the reports from a year later were that such systems tended to suffer from premature failure, and the Mhz benchmarking overstated the actual performance. Meaning it wasn't really as good as the real thing. YMMV.
That was true for some of the earlier 300As as they weren't PII 450s. The PII 450s were pressed into service off the Malaysian lines and a few others sporadically when the Celerons were wildly more popular than Intel had thought and they were short on parts. The performance differential was indeed there, but it was slight in most cases, and it sure as hell wasn't a $550 difference. The reason of course was the cache. The PII-into-Celerons has 3/4 of it deactivated at the plany by burning it out with a laser, so any cache-intensive op suffered. But a lot of the only people who cared at the time were gamers, and a lot of the games back then relied more on raw clock and the video card than the CPU cache.
Since then, they've exploited any opporutnity where high-end parts have high yeilds (see Northwood.)
This is largely true, but look at the insane price difference between the regular P4s and P4EEs (nicknamed Expensive Edition). And on the other side of the coin, in a few cases Intel has been downright reckless with their heat margins and stability. I remember when they had to pull their 1.13 GHz PIIIs shortly after introducing them on the market due to "thermal issues" and didn't return them until well after the P4s and Athlons were up past 1.5 - 2 GHz.
As has been mentioned, if one gets too greedy then they leave the door wide open for someone else (AMD) to come in and eat their lunch.
That is only a reality when they have a competitor who could produce, both in quality and quantity. I love AMD to death, and have for years, but they really didn't have anything that could stand up to Intel's best until the K7/Athlons got to market. Everything previously they did was cheaper, but also a lot behind Intel. The AMD "Super 7" platform was an excellent example of that, trying to keep up with the PII parts on what was essentially the old Pentium architecture. They had the MHz, but not the comparative clock for clock performance, and even the most deluded AMD fanboy could see it plainly. And Cyrix wasn't even on the same page. Hell, they were barely on the same planet.
Shareholders ALSO tend to get pissed when companies kill off the golden goose.
You'd be hard pressed to back that up with empirical evidence from business in the last couple of decades, at least here in North America. Most shareholders are not in a given company for the long term, and couldn't give a rat's ass how the company's health will be in 5 years, as long as they can do profit taking on the stock over the next 2. If the company shows a huge profit by selling off a division or two (like their R&D, or a reliable but unexciting source of income), those fair-weather stockholders rejoice and then cash out after the bump. The ones who don't tend to be the ones who weren't paying as close attention, and they get screwed.
For a perfect example of that behavior, Check out HP under Carly Fiorina. All in the name of trying to drive the stock back up in the middle of the dot-com implosion with good numbers, she essentially threw away everything that HP previously used to long-term advantage. Anything that wasn't making money at THAT moment, went. They laid off thousands of career HP engineers, ditched entire divisions - especially R&D, saw the dot com crash as a bizarre opportunity to reduce competition in the marketplace by buying a rival (Compaq) in a move that many now say was a calculated move to scramble the company up so much that nobody could tell how badly she was screwing it up until years after the fact. She had no long term plans, her short term plans amounted to "hit her numbers so she got her bonuses at year's end", and for 4 years it worked. Then the smoke cleared at last from both the Compaq acquisition and integration, and many of the other bold moves, and the board threw her out on her ass in February of this year. But the damage is already done. HP is a pale shadow of its former self and will take years to recover. If it ever does. And for the first 3 years of that carnage, the shareholders were content.
And on a side note, I'd like to hear about the last salary increase you turned down...
Do you really wish to? A few times I and others at a couple of companies have all taken pay cuts so that the doors stayed open and we at least had paychecks coming in and the company afloat instead of being out on the street with no income stream at all. A lot of that was during the dot com meltdown as well, so jobs were largely as scarce as hens' teeth. Then there's the company I am at now which was started by myself and a few friends from other companies where we'd all worked together. Things are all right now, but there were definitely times when we all went a month or a month and a half with no paycheck to get it all off the ground. Deciding to live on Mr. Noodles for a couple of weeks so that we could afford to take a client out for a working lunch so they'd have no idea how threadbare we actually were at the time, etc.
Yeah... no.
Intel has and always will gouge people if they can get away with it. Explanations of "but it goes to cover ops and R&D" don't cut it with me any more. Maybe back in the heady days of the 386s and 486s I bought that, but there was one thing Intel pulled that made it abundantly clear that they're just raking it in hand over fist as much as the market will bear, not recouping dev costs.
That thing was the Mendoceno Celeron 300A. I recall buying one for $135 CDN when the Pentium II 450 was being sold for $650 CDN or more. But they're different parts, what the hell are you babbling about, you say? No they were not. In fact, a lot of the Malaysian 300As were perfectly functional PII 450s that had a bunch of their cache burned out and their clock dropped to 66MHz instead of 100, as mine was, and as a result would run perfectly fine when clocked up to 450 MHz without even needing to change the heatsink and fan from the stock one.
So if Intel could afford to sell a chip that they had to do MORE work on (burning out the cache) for $500 less, what did that say for their profit margins on the PII 450?
Bottom line. Intel is not your friend. They're a business. If they think they can get a $300 profit on a part even after their R&D costs, they'll do it in a heartbeat. And moreover, their shareholders would be howling for their blood if they had the opportunity and didn't.
I never really saw Bester do anything particularly evil, he was just protecting his people
Mmmm. There was that one scene where they were Bester and some other telepath were transporting a couple of criminals back from B5 to Earth, I believe it was. After they hit hyperspace, Bester dumped them out the airlock instead of taking them back. When the other telepath asked him about it he told her not to worry about it as they were "just mundanes" i.e. not telepaths.
That struck me as being quite the epitome of evil, killing someone just because they weren't the same as you. I think there's a word for that..
Because the bad guys would NEVER use encryption or even just offhand references to something in their planning that they transmit over an open, public medium, right?
Let's see... when your dot-com stock tanked, you had nothing. When your house value tanks, you still have a house -- albeit with an upside down equity position -- but you don't lose the asset.
That depends on a lot. If you're in a position like the current batch of lemmings buying houses in Vancouver, for example, you're spending $350,000 - $400,000 on a house, (with only $50,000 down, or less!) and you have a 5% mortgage fixed for the next 5 years. A few years down the road, the bubble bursts, your house is suddenly worth $200,000 instead, and your mortgage refinancing is right around the corner. Oh, and interest rates aren't 5% anymore. Now they're 9% (or maybe worse. A buddy of mine carried at 14% mortgage for 2 years in Vancouver in the early 90's). You were barely able to afford your house when you were paying 5% interest, and now you have to refinance at something you cannot possibly afford. Also, the bank REALLY wants to talk to you about that extra $140,000 that's on the mortgage which is no longer reflected in your house's value.
And deity help you if in those intervening years your house rose in value and you decided to take out an equity loan on the increased value. Because that is suddenly no longer backed up by anything anymore either, and you can be sure they'll want to be taken care of as well.
Good times!
All that has to be done is include a unique ID on the card that contacts a central server to check how many subs have been purchased
Oh yes, because all of the Subways around where I work will immediately set aside a whole whack of cash to implement this new system. Maybe it'll even solve that nasty turnover problem they currently have where all of their staff seems to only last about 2 months, so they're forever retraining everyone on how to use the cash register.
Or, ya know. Not. They've got bigger fish to fry. Hell, half the time their staff couldn't reliably operate the sub-club coupon dispenser, and that was a purely mechanical device.
Somehow I don't think "central server" and persistent connection are going to be features of this new system. At least not if they want to keep their franchisees.
But isn't that why P2P is OK?
Sigh. You are either being deliberately obtuse, or talking to you is a waste of effort. But let it never be said that I won't take a moment to attempt to educate someone.
- When you take some THING that there is only a finite amount of, like a Rolex, or a car, or money (even in "bits" form in a bank computer), it is THEFT.
- When you make a copy of something like software, music, or video entertainment, in effect increasing the total population of thing X in the world, it is copyright infringment. You didn't deprive anyone of their copy of X, you just made another one.
That is the difference.
And since the money is probably in the form of bits on a computer, I really didn't steal anything - I just caused some bits to be flipped.
Bullshit. That is the textbook definition of theft. If I own a store and have enough "bits" in the bank to go and buy myself, say, 3 cars, but then you pull your little trick and after the dust settles I only have enough bits to buy 2 cars, and you have enough bits in your bank account to buy a car where before you didn't, you have committed theft. End of story.
If I steal a Rolex and then return it with a fake receipt, they are not out the Rolex. Therefore, I would not be stealing.
Sure you are. Where did the Rolex come from? SOMEONE's out a Rolex.
Largely it's apples to oranges. Software piracy is not theft of a physical item, it's copyright infringement. The general lack of morals is the same, but at the end of the day if someone pirates XP, Microsoft doesn't have one less copy in their inventory that they can sell, whereas the jewelry store down the street will have one less Rolex.
I used to work at a software company that made contact management software. We had a mechanism built right into the main function of the software that specifically handled notes based on phone calls. The first iteration of that function we did in 1992.
True. At the same time, it also doesn't have any "fluff" divisions to drag it down, unlike Sony(film division) or Microsoft(err, Xbox division just posted another huge loss ;) ). Every time the "Nintendo is DOOOOOMED!!111" stories come around, people seem to forget that 1) they are still making profit, and have been for years, and 2) they also have been doing this for a LOT longer than all of their competitors. They've been pumping out games for almost 25 years. Sony's only been around for 10, and Microsoft less than 5 in this space.
As for what will support Nintendo if they fail to show a profit? Dunno. Maybe some of those profits they've been keeping in the bank from the last 25 years? That *is* why responsible corporations keep a portion of their profits as "retained earnings", after all. Microsoft has several billion in the bank for rainy days, I'd be shocked if Nintendo didn't have enough to carry them for a year or two as well.
Don't prohibit a free ecconomy
Oh yes, a free economy. Because that works out so very well doesn't it? In a free economy, corporations do whatever it takes in the short term to improve the bottom line, even at the expense of the long term. Just ask HP how cutting all their research a couple of years back is working out for those 10,000 people they freshly laid off. Better yet, for a succinct reasoning of why true free markets would be a disaster for everyone, check out the definition of the "tragedy of the commons".
Corporations will stop polution when you stop buying their shit.
Yeah. That'll happen soon in America. I watched that "30 days" show last week when they took a couple of NYC dwellers out to an off-the-grid community to see if they could live sustainably for a month. Just listening to them whine for the first 20 minutes of the show was ample evidence of why the only thing that's going to get any significant number of people in the US to do anything along the lines of "green living" is a $10 gallon of gas, complete with the commensurate rise in pricing of all other goods. But of course by then it'll be too damn late to set up an infrastructure easily.
Yes, down the street from my house, as a matter of fact, in Burnaby B.C.
The entire character seems to be pandering to the same crowd that 7-of-9 was in Voyager.
Yeah, because that's never been done on SG-1 before, right?
Claudia Black's character in SG-1 is a con artist, and uses the sex appeal to help work it. Nothing wrong with that as motivation for her to dress like that. As for worst episode of season 8, I'm going to have to go with the "holodeck malfunction"-esque plot of the one where Teal'c is trapped in that game. Or, from a "what the hell are you on?!" moment bad, Carter playing along with RepliCarter enough to give the replicators the ability to resist the Ancient weapon was terrible. That SHOULD have been, Teal'c and Carter step through the gate to to meet RepliCarter, Teal'c raises gun, BOOM! end of that threat.
It "felt" like Battlestar Galactica? WTF? Where was the shakycam? The holocaust of humanity and the desparate clawing of the few survivors to exist?
Claudia Black's characters are ever so slightly different...
Well, one was a straight-laced, take-no-crap ex-military warrior type (Aeryn Sun on Farscape), and the other is an irreverent, joking, good-life loving con woman (Vala on SG-1). Yeah. Exactly alike. Carbon copies! I mean, they both have black hair and all, how different can they be?
Personally, I LIKED the new SG-1 opener. Season 8 was getting quite stale. The new characters should bring it some life. And the interplay between Jackson and Vala was quite enjoyable.
Seeing as how it's from the Inquirer and all... IF it's real
You DO know that the Inquirer site in question is NOT the American rag that prints things on the Sasquatch's illegitimate chilrden with Elvis and all that, but rather a British IT/Tech news site?
The fake news mag is spelled Enquirer, not Inquirer. And technically it's known as the National Enquirer.
Just tired of explaining this to people when they ask about an article from the Inq.
where a pizza can get to your house faster than an ambulance
Ah, yes, but that's because our health care doesn't cost us anything. The reason the US ambulances are so fast is because they can smell your money, and they're trying to stay ahead of the pack of lawyers chasing them.