Jesus. With an attitude like that, you should set up shop with him. "even though you have perfectly functional hardware on your motherboard you paid good money for, go drive 20 minutes to the computer store, 20 minutes to get what you need, and another 20 back, not to mention gas and the waste of your time to buy a component because I'm too damn stupid to know how to install the driver off that shiny CD right in front of me"
There was a network interface on the motherboard. He didn't know how to install the driver, so to deal with it, he told her it was "broken" and turned it off in the BIOS. The guy purports himself to be an "expert". If it takes someone more than 12 minutes to load a perfectly functional XP network driver off a CD that's right there in front of him, he's not an expert.
It's not a matter of dollars and cents, it's a matter of competence. He is incompetent. And while I was there, he slowly lost all of his "customers" after things that took him an hour to not solve I usually fixed in 5-10 minutes. And in most cases, since we were both at the office anyway and my choices were a) help out colleage/coworker, or b) post more on Slashdot, I usually didn't even bother charging for such simple work. Though I got lunch bought for me an awful lot...
It's not my regular gig, but I do some stuff for various people on the side, pretty much just the same small group of people the last 5 or 6 years. One time I'm out of town on business and one of these folks had an "issue" with a critical software package. She had no choice but to call in someone else to try and get them through the week as the package is critical to their small business. Well, I get back the next week and spend 4 hours cleaning up the crap this "certified expert" did to their systems. One database was so screwed up we had to restore from the week prior instad of spending days they didn't have to fix it.
On top of that, this "expert" recommended about $6000 in upgrades for them, including taking all 4 of their workstations fron Windows 98 to XP (Never mind the version of the software they use has data corruption issues under XP. No problem! Just upgrade that too!), replacing their "server" (a 98 box they use for simple file sharing. Really simple file sharing) with a 2000 Server, and all the various hardware to make everything run almost as fast with the new OSs as it does now. What they have hardware and software wise fits their needs just fine. Windows 98 on 700Mhz - 128 MB machines is plenty fast for what they do. And besides, they don't have $6000 to drop on upgrades.
That's just the most egregious example I can recall offhand, but don't you worry, there are already tons of computer "snake oil" salesmen out there. One guy at a company I used to work at was "helping" people with their machines in the office for cash. One of the receptionists asked me to have a quick look at her computer after he did some work on it. My God! He made her buy another network card (one that XP autodetected and had drivers for) because he was too dense to know how to install drivers off the motherboard CD. Apparently in his world, if XP can't find it and deal with it automatically, it's broken!
Mmm. At one point they did, but the very first A's were practically identical to the Deschutes design. They were far more concerned with squelching the horrible press at that point, so speed was of the essence. A redesign did come later, with the characteristics you mention. I can't recall if it was done before the Mendocino line or not.. In any case, you are correct, the vast majority of the Celerons were produced exactly as you way.
A report I saw which I can't find now to save my life stated that Intel actually lost money doing the Celeron 300a thing. Not a lot, but a loss is a loss...
Maybe I should have been a bit clearer by stating "Not always is their goal to make a profit *THIS MINUTE*, but rather longer term make more by locking up market share and inflating prices once you've got the market share"
The world is full of examples of companies eschewing short-term profits in favor of long-view profits from market share:
- Gilette made it famous "Give away the razor, make it up on the blades"
- Microsoft and a ton of other companies sell their "academic" versions of software to college kids for pennies on the dollar compared to the stuff in the computer shop down the road. If they didn't the little bastards would probably use something like that pinko OpenOffice and Linux.;). Instead they "hook" them using the stuff now so it's harder to change later.
-Let people pirate your graphics software easily so they get used to screwing around with it *Cough*Photoshop*Cough*. When it comes time to get a job doing graphics, and the company asks what software to buy you for your workstation, well, it's a one-horse race, isn't it?
-Microsoft execs including Steve Ballmer himself, have said repeatedly that if people in asia were to pirate software, Microsoft would prefer that it was their software that was being pirated.
Short term loss, long term gain because of.. market share.
Not always is their goal to make a profit, but rather market share...
The best example of this is the Celeron 300A debacle for Intel. Switch back to those days of yore for a moment...
Intel introduced the Celeron line to help blunt AMD's advance into the low end post-Pentium I market. One problem: The Celeron 233 and 266 with NO L2 cache suck so much ass nobody wanted them, but they couldn't just change over the production line to a new Celeron design at the drop of a hat. What to do, Andy? Easy. That production line in Malaysia that's pumping out the Deschutes 450 PIIs to the rescue! So Intel took a whack of those chips, gave them a lower L2 cache, dropped their "rated" bus speed to 66MHz and branded them Celeron 300As. Which is why pretty much every Malaysian Celeron 300A runs just fine at 450 MHz with the stock Intel cooler, no adjustment required. Intel actually lost money doing it, but they didn't lose the low end market. But the damage the current batch of crap they call a Celeron is doing to their reputation down there seems to indicate they will lose it soon...
This is intended as a *REPLACEMENT* for your home broadband, not as a portable solution. The "portable" modem is about as big as your cable modem is. The pricing is about the same as Shaw or Telus. The portability of it is just an afterthought, and a nice touch if you want to move your computer around from one room to the next. As for why you would want this, there are still lots of places in the GVRD where you can only get Telus OR Shaw or possibly neither, and if it turns out your Telus connection drops out several times a day (like ours at the office does), this is a viable alternative without Shaw telling you there's no cable to your building, but for $1000 they'd be happy to pull it there for you. Not like that's ever happened with me or anything...
Oh, I'd say there are lots of people who wouldn't dare mess with their cars, but will click things at random and screw everything up on their boxes because "they were trying to fix it themselves". I have lots of experience cleaning up their messes.
Tell me how I can pay for it. Really. This is what it's all about. How do we pay for it? We can't. Not because we don't want to, but because the corporations who currently hold the IP won't provide a method for us to do so. Listen to this carefully. We *want* to give them money, and they won't take it. And it's "COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT", not theft. If I take your car, I have stolen it. That's theft. If I scan your car in a nondestructive manner and make a perfect replica of it, and leave the original out in front of your house untouched, it's not theft.
Nice strawman. In most cases we don't even know who the authors are because Atari and other companies had a policy of deliberately not releasing that information. That's why Activision came to be, disgruntled Atari employees who wanted recognition for the games they made. But, setting that aside for the moment, almost all of these games were "works for hire", and as a result the authors got paid to sit there and write the game and that is all. If there were megabucks made off the game, all that stayed with the company, with maybe a little bonus for the guys/gals as incentive or a raise. No "points", no royalties or residuals from revenue. Furthermore, as legal entites pretty much none of the companies who produced these games exist anymore. Atari alone has been bought a number of times, either alone or when its parent was acquired by someone else again. You think if the current company masters put out a "classics" ROM pack and sell it (not that they would) any of the original authors will see a dime? Why in hell would they pay anything to someone who had an association with things 6 companies ago? Whatever you're smoking, pass it around!
And while you can't do NES games on the Palm V, Kalemsoft has an NES emulator for PalmOS 5 based devices. They also have a Game Gear/Sega Master System emulator as well. And with Tungsten E's being available for under $150 some places, that's a good reason to upgrade from the V. Color, tons more speed, more memory, and you can play MP3s on it as well.
True, hadn't read that close. I saw someone else posted London and thought we were talking worldwide.... Besides, don't a lot of USians think of Canada as the 51st state?;)
I wouldn't be surprised if Vancouver's in there, or at least in the top 5. About 4 blocks from my house is the huge EA Canadian headquarters (950 employees) where they do all the sports games, and then downtown we have Radical Entertainment, Relic, Threewave, Rockstar Vancouver, Barking Dog, etc...
Your examples only hold water if I as the wronged party was Larry Ellison/Bill Gates/Someone Else with Way Too Much Cash and Many Lawyers vs. my neighbor who works as a stocker for Home Depot.
The problem is that the RIAA holds a HUGE advantage walking onto the legal battlefield here, and that's where the extortion angle comes in. They would think nothing of throwing a quarter million at one of these lawsuits to make a point, whereas the defendant absorbing a bill of a quarter million to clear their name would turn them into a financial stain on the wall. So almost everyone rolls over rather than run the risk.
They're saying "Pay this small fine of several thousand dollars, or when we take you to court we'll ensure that you and all of your immediate family are destitute for the next 3 generations"
They're banking (no pun intended) on the fact that most people see that it will cost at least as much as the proposed fine to hire a lawyer and fight, and by fighting there is no guarantee they will win, so they just pay the fine rather than take the risk.
Sounds at least a bit like extortion to me...
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
PDF is easier to use for converting paper documents to a downloadable book like format. A big advantage over HTML is it's portable, and I don't mean by platform, I mean everything you need is in one file. No separate HTML files, no separate graphics files, etc. I have a directory on a server for manuals, and I just download the PDF once and dump it there. No muss, no fuss.
Ever try taking a page with 3 diagrams or pictures on it and converting it to HTML quickly while retaining the formatting? Now do that for dozens of pages on hundreds of manuals.
It's like this: I can have a small to moderate manual converted to PDF in about an hour with a good scanner and an hour of a staff member's time. All told, maybe $20-$30 of the company's cash per manual. No biggie.
Or, I can pay someone to scan and OCR the manual, scan the images, place all the images in the proper places, and two days later have it all working and looking the way it should. All told, a couple hundred bucks per. Looking at that, most companies would say No, period.
And I wasn't aware that most people couldn't get Acrobat reader. Most people don't use Windows, OSX, Linux, PalmOS, or PocketPC?
Or, ya know, you could.... learn to spell and proofread. Seriously. I don't use a spell checker, ever, and I proofread everything I do. It's not that hard to do, and it's better for your mind. I can't tell you the number of times in recent years (and it's only been recent years, since the rise of editing programs with spell checkers) that a publication or a book I'm reading has misspellings in it where the word is spelled correctly, but it's the wrong spelling for the context (John picks the red card, witch is good for....). Now both the writer and the editor screw the pooch far more often because they're both trusting the computer to tell them if they got it right or not.
We as a society are letting computers, cell phones, PDAs, etc do all our memory tasks for us, and it's killing our minds. Most people can't multiply 25 x 22 in their heads, they just whip out a calculator and do it. I had a friend who lost a bag with his cell phone and keys in it off the side of a boat in Burrard Inlet. When he got back to shore he wanted to call his roommate to bring him the spare set of keys in the house, but couldn't call the roommate's cell, or anyone he knew. Why? He always used that damn speed dial feature on his phone and as a result COULDN'T REMEMBER anyone's number now that the cell phone was gone.
Seriously. Use the grey matter before it evaporates.
It would also prevent the little guy from going up against a large corporation. When a large corporation has 20 lawyers working on a case, they can claim exhorbant amounts of money wasted on the court case, and make the guy who has been wronged pay for the whole thing.
Why? Right now, big corporations can push their weight around on the flimsiest cases and bankrupt people. If this rule came into effect, the "little guy" could also run out and get a busload of Armani-suits without fear, especially if he/she had a good case. In fact, it'd probably stop 99% of all frivolous lawsuits. And the other 1% would get their asses taught a lesson they'd never forget
The "modern" light fixtures in our office were driving half our IT staff insane with headaches until we permanently "disabled" them. It's a new building, built in 2001...
Flourescents, compact or otherwise suck as a human-useful light source. They're the ultimate expression of the concept of making something cheap and barely able to do the task in question. Wonder why a lot of offices are starting to tear them out? The long term effects of looking at a computer monitor that is running at a different refresh rate than the flourescents causes eyestrain and headaches. Definitely not ideal. The only place flourescents are all right are some industrial / woodshop-ish applications, where you're not reading stuff off a monitor, or looking at fine detail all day. And flourescents still burn out a lot more often than LEDs do. One of my kitchen flourescent lights just blew a ballast, so I'll have to go get that replaced as well.... Besides, it's all relative. If cost efficiency was the defining goal behind everything, we'd all be eating no-name brand macaroni and Ramen for food, riding bikes to the office, and wearing sweats and t-shirts...
Well, if it was a 1920's farmhouse, two or three LEDs in a fake candle holder should about do it, right? Most rural farmhouses from that era weren't up with the 'lectrics yet...
Slashdot Mirror
Great! Got a corresponding cost of living index to go with that? Because numbers without context are useless....
Jesus. With an attitude like that, you should set up shop with him. "even though you have perfectly functional hardware on your motherboard you paid good money for, go drive 20 minutes to the computer store, 20 minutes to get what you need, and another 20 back, not to mention gas and the waste of your time to buy a component because I'm too damn stupid to know how to install the driver off that shiny CD right in front of me"
There was a network interface on the motherboard. He didn't know how to install the driver, so to deal with it, he told her it was "broken" and turned it off in the BIOS. The guy purports himself to be an "expert". If it takes someone more than 12 minutes to load a perfectly functional XP network driver off a CD that's right there in front of him, he's not an expert.
It's not a matter of dollars and cents, it's a matter of competence. He is incompetent. And while I was there, he slowly lost all of his "customers" after things that took him an hour to not solve I usually fixed in 5-10 minutes. And in most cases, since we were both at the office anyway and my choices were a) help out colleage/coworker, or b) post more on Slashdot, I usually didn't even bother charging for such simple work. Though I got lunch bought for me an awful lot...
Some day? How about already?
It's not my regular gig, but I do some stuff for various people on the side, pretty much just the same small group of people the last 5 or 6 years. One time I'm out of town on business and one of these folks had an "issue" with a critical software package. She had no choice but to call in someone else to try and get them through the week as the package is critical to their small business. Well, I get back the next week and spend 4 hours cleaning up the crap this "certified expert" did to their systems. One database was so screwed up we had to restore from the week prior instad of spending days they didn't have to fix it.
On top of that, this "expert" recommended about $6000 in upgrades for them, including taking all 4 of their workstations fron Windows 98 to XP (Never mind the version of the software they use has data corruption issues under XP. No problem! Just upgrade that too!), replacing their "server" (a 98 box they use for simple file sharing. Really simple file sharing) with a 2000 Server, and all the various hardware to make everything run almost as fast with the new OSs as it does now.
What they have hardware and software wise fits their needs just fine. Windows 98 on 700Mhz - 128 MB machines is plenty fast for what they do. And besides, they don't have $6000 to drop on upgrades.
That's just the most egregious example I can recall offhand, but don't you worry, there are already tons of computer "snake oil" salesmen out there. One guy at a company I used to work at was "helping" people with their machines in the office for cash. One of the receptionists asked me to have a quick look at her computer after he did some work on it. My God! He made her buy another network card (one that XP autodetected and had drivers for) because he was too dense to know how to install drivers off the motherboard CD. Apparently in his world, if XP can't find it and deal with it automatically, it's broken!
Mmm. At one point they did, but the very first A's were practically identical to the Deschutes design. They were far more concerned with squelching the horrible press at that point, so speed was of the essence. A redesign did come later, with the characteristics you mention. I can't recall if it was done before the Mendocino line or not.. In any case, you are correct, the vast majority of the Celerons were produced exactly as you way.
A report I saw which I can't find now to save my life stated that Intel actually lost money doing the Celeron 300a thing. Not a lot, but a loss is a loss...
Sorry, I gotta start a flame :)
;). Instead they "hook" them using the stuff now so it's harder to change later.
Maybe I should have been a bit clearer by stating
"Not always is their goal to make a profit *THIS MINUTE*, but rather longer term make more by locking up market share and inflating prices once you've got the market share"
The world is full of examples of companies eschewing short-term profits in favor of long-view profits from market share:
- Gilette made it famous "Give away the razor, make it up on the blades"
- Microsoft and a ton of other companies sell their "academic" versions of software to college kids for pennies on the dollar compared to the stuff in the computer shop down the road. If they didn't the little bastards would probably use something like that pinko OpenOffice and Linux.
-Let people pirate your graphics software easily so they get used to screwing around with it *Cough*Photoshop*Cough*. When it comes time to get a job doing graphics, and the company asks what software to buy you for your workstation, well, it's a one-horse race, isn't it?
-Microsoft execs including Steve Ballmer himself, have said repeatedly that if people in asia were to pirate software, Microsoft would prefer that it was their software that was being pirated.
Short term loss, long term gain because of.. market share.
Not always is their goal to make a profit, but rather market share...
The best example of this is the Celeron 300A debacle for Intel. Switch back to those days of yore for a moment...
Intel introduced the Celeron line to help blunt AMD's advance into the low end post-Pentium I market. One problem: The Celeron 233 and 266 with NO L2 cache suck so much ass nobody wanted them, but they couldn't just change over the production line to a new Celeron design at the drop of a hat. What to do, Andy? Easy. That production line in Malaysia that's pumping out the Deschutes 450 PIIs to the rescue! So Intel took a whack of those chips, gave them a lower L2 cache, dropped their "rated" bus speed to 66MHz and branded them Celeron 300As. Which is why pretty much every Malaysian Celeron 300A runs just fine at 450 MHz with the stock Intel cooler, no adjustment required.
Intel actually lost money doing it, but they didn't lose the low end market. But the damage the current batch of crap they call a Celeron is doing to their reputation down there seems to indicate they will lose it soon...
This is intended as a *REPLACEMENT* for your home broadband, not as a portable solution. The "portable" modem is about as big as your cable modem is. The pricing is about the same as Shaw or Telus. The portability of it is just an afterthought, and a nice touch if you want to move your computer around from one room to the next.
As for why you would want this, there are still lots of places in the GVRD where you can only get Telus OR Shaw or possibly neither, and if it turns out your Telus connection drops out several times a day (like ours at the office does), this is a viable alternative without Shaw telling you there's no cable to your building, but for $1000 they'd be happy to pull it there for you. Not like that's ever happened with me or anything...
Oh, I'd say there are lots of people who wouldn't dare mess with their cars, but will click things at random and screw everything up on their boxes because "they were trying to fix it themselves". I have lots of experience cleaning up their messes.
Tell me how I can pay for it. Really. This is what it's all about. How do we pay for it? We can't. Not because we don't want to, but because the corporations who currently hold the IP won't provide a method for us to do so. Listen to this carefully. We *want* to give them money, and they won't take it.
And it's "COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT", not theft. If I take your car, I have stolen it. That's theft. If I scan your car in a nondestructive manner and make a perfect replica of it, and leave the original out in front of your house untouched, it's not theft.
Nice strawman. In most cases we don't even know who the authors are because Atari and other companies had a policy of deliberately not releasing that information. That's why Activision came to be, disgruntled Atari employees who wanted recognition for the games they made. But, setting that aside for the moment, almost all of these games were "works for hire", and as a result the authors got paid to sit there and write the game and that is all. If there were megabucks made off the game, all that stayed with the company, with maybe a little bonus for the guys/gals as incentive or a raise. No "points", no royalties or residuals from revenue. Furthermore, as legal entites pretty much none of the companies who produced these games exist anymore. Atari alone has been bought a number of times, either alone or when its parent was acquired by someone else again. You think if the current company masters put out a "classics" ROM pack and sell it (not that they would) any of the original authors will see a dime? Why in hell would they pay anything to someone who had an association with things 6 companies ago?
Whatever you're smoking, pass it around!
And while you can't do NES games on the Palm V, Kalemsoft has an NES emulator for PalmOS 5 based devices. They also have a Game Gear/Sega Master System emulator as well. And with Tungsten E's being available for under $150 some places, that's a good reason to upgrade from the V. Color, tons more speed, more memory, and you can play MP3s on it as well.
True, hadn't read that close. I saw someone else posted London and thought we were talking worldwide.... Besides, don't a lot of USians think of Canada as the 51st state? ;)
I wouldn't be surprised if Vancouver's in there, or at least in the top 5.
About 4 blocks from my house is the huge EA Canadian headquarters (950 employees) where they do all the sports games, and then downtown we have Radical Entertainment, Relic, Threewave, Rockstar Vancouver, Barking Dog, etc...
Your examples only hold water if I as the wronged party was Larry Ellison/Bill Gates/Someone Else with Way Too Much Cash and Many Lawyers vs. my neighbor who works as a stocker for Home Depot.
The problem is that the RIAA holds a HUGE advantage walking onto the legal battlefield here, and that's where the extortion angle comes in. They would think nothing of throwing a quarter million at one of these lawsuits to make a point, whereas the defendant absorbing a bill of a quarter million to clear their name would turn them into a financial stain on the wall. So almost everyone rolls over rather than run the risk.
Oh really? They're VERY careful, I see. They don't make mistakes.
They're "Offering a day in court"?
Please.
They're saying "Pay this small fine of several thousand dollars, or when we take you to court we'll ensure that you and all of your immediate family are destitute for the next 3 generations"
They're banking (no pun intended) on the fact that most people see that it will cost at least as much as the proposed fine to hire a lawyer and fight, and by fighting there is no guarantee they will win, so they just pay the fine rather than take the risk.
Sounds at least a bit like extortion to me...
PDF is easier to use for converting paper documents to a downloadable book like format. A big advantage over HTML is it's portable, and I don't mean by platform, I mean everything you need is in one file. No separate HTML files, no separate graphics files, etc. I have a directory on a server for manuals, and I just download the PDF once and dump it there. No muss, no fuss.
Ever try taking a page with 3 diagrams or pictures on it and converting it to HTML quickly while retaining the formatting? Now do that for dozens of pages on hundreds of manuals.
It's like this: I can have a small to moderate manual converted to PDF in about an hour with a good scanner and an hour of a staff member's time. All told, maybe $20-$30 of the company's cash per manual. No biggie.
Or, I can pay someone to scan and OCR the manual, scan the images, place all the images in the proper places, and two days later have it all working and looking the way it should. All told, a couple hundred bucks per. Looking at that, most companies would say No, period.
And I wasn't aware that most people couldn't get Acrobat reader. Most people don't use Windows, OSX, Linux, PalmOS, or PocketPC?
Or, ya know, you could.... learn to spell and proofread. Seriously. I don't use a spell checker, ever, and I proofread everything I do. It's not that hard to do, and it's better for your mind. I can't tell you the number of times in recent years (and it's only been recent years, since the rise of editing programs with spell checkers) that a publication or a book I'm reading has misspellings in it where the word is spelled correctly, but it's the wrong spelling for the context (John picks the red card, witch is good for....). Now both the writer and the editor screw the pooch far more often because they're both trusting the computer to tell them if they got it right or not.
We as a society are letting computers, cell phones, PDAs, etc do all our memory tasks for us, and it's killing our minds. Most people can't multiply 25 x 22 in their heads, they just whip out a calculator and do it. I had a friend who lost a bag with his cell phone and keys in it off the side of a boat in Burrard Inlet. When he got back to shore he wanted to call his roommate to bring him the spare set of keys in the house, but couldn't call the roommate's cell, or anyone he knew. Why? He always used that damn speed dial feature on his phone and as a result COULDN'T REMEMBER anyone's number now that the cell phone was gone.
Seriously. Use the grey matter before it evaporates.
Why? Right now, big corporations can push their weight around on the flimsiest cases and bankrupt people. If this rule came into effect, the "little guy" could also run out and get a busload of Armani-suits without fear, especially if he/she had a good case. In fact, it'd probably stop 99% of all frivolous lawsuits. And the other 1% would get their asses taught a lesson they'd never forget
Mmm. True. What I meant though was more along the lines of constantly looking at fine detail, such as repairing a watch, etc..
OK. Tell that to my eyes, then..
The "modern" light fixtures in our office were driving half our IT staff insane with headaches until we permanently "disabled" them. It's a new building, built in 2001...
Flourescents, compact or otherwise suck as a human-useful light source. They're the ultimate expression of the concept of making something cheap and barely able to do the task in question. Wonder why a lot of offices are starting to tear them out? The long term effects of looking at a computer monitor that is running at a different refresh rate than the flourescents causes eyestrain and headaches. Definitely not ideal. The only place flourescents are all right are some industrial / woodshop-ish applications, where you're not reading stuff off a monitor, or looking at fine detail all day. And flourescents still burn out a lot more often than LEDs do. One of my kitchen flourescent lights just blew a ballast, so I'll have to go get that replaced as well....
Besides, it's all relative. If cost efficiency was the defining goal behind everything, we'd all be eating no-name brand macaroni and Ramen for food, riding bikes to the office, and wearing sweats and t-shirts...
Well, if it was a 1920's farmhouse, two or three LEDs in a fake candle holder should about do it, right? Most rural farmhouses from that era weren't up with the 'lectrics yet...
Actually, I have withstood the Slashdot Effect once in the past. I had no thousand dollar bandwidth bills to foot as a result either.
So, you are correct in stating that I never will run into the "problem" end of things, since I do plan ahead.