Retail margins at Xbox launch were paper thin. The manager at my local EB was so pissed off by it that she was telling her customers not to buy the Xbox for their kids, and to get the PS2 instead. If I recall I think she was saying "Don't get the Xbox, because you'll just be back in here next year buying a PS2 when the Xbox is dead". Microsoft sent lots of marketing material and promo kit to the retailers, but the profit on the hardware was non existant.
The $10 per game that microsoft gets already takes the retailers margin into account. I'm guessing that they make a tidy sum on the accessories as well as the games. Still, 15 games and 3 extra controllers is still alot for someone to buy. They should have left the hard drive out and sold memory cards. Sony had the right idea there.
Did you even read the article? Only microsoft is loosing money. Everyone else has been making money all along. Only Microsoft and Sega have been shown to have ever sold a console at a loss.
That text is very narrow in scope. It talks only about censorware list decryption. That was the correct decision to be made in that case, and video decryption is a whole different story. With video, the content is different for every creation. With censorware, every product needs to be able to filter out the same list of sites, so the makers of censorware need a protected way of hiding their lists, otherwise someone could just walk off with their investment. With video, each product is unique and viewable by nature, and there is no clear reason to deny fair use rights.
This, like many things you post about, has nothing to do with censorware. I know that the issue is important to you, but there is no reason for you to lead a discussion off topic for your own manipulative reasons. If you really cared about all the censorware crap you are whining about all the time, you would go and do something, instead of bitching about how Michael "screwed" you. He owns the censorware.org domain, and you don't. Go get your own domain, and put all that effort into something useful instead of bitching all the time. Imagine the difference you could make if you weren't being a whiny baby all the time. The more you bitch about it the less persuasive your argument is. If it the censorware crap really mattered to you, then you would be out doing somthing with your time instead of going out of your way to run a smear campaign. You loose credibility every time you manually paste your obnoxious sig into a post.
Is switching from Office 97 to Office XP any easier then switching from Office 97 to Open Office? So much has changed with the interface between the two that they hardly resemble each other any more. Now you have $700 in licensing, and training time. (Which I would bet is much less then 20 hours. Maybe there'll be 20 hours at reduced productivity, but there won't be 20 hours of down time.)
Software IS ABSOLUTELY a significant part of a companies budget, but it is not the only significant part. Have you ever had anything to do with a company's budget? Many business applications have a higher yearly cost then the annual salary for an employee with an MBA. In a company with 25-50 employees, that's far from insignificant. Business software that needs to be updated with changes to tax law is the worst, because you HAVE TO BUY the package every year. If you have so many employees that an aditional salary seems insignificant, you're not saved. They just raise the price for you because you have more clients. If someone tells you that the licensing costs aren't a significant part of the TCO, then they are lying to you (and likely trying to sell you something).
I just had a great idea for a new company.
-- Made up but probably pretty acurate statistic --
90% of the the people who use MS Word use ony a small subset of the features.
Re:I Cancelled My Earthlink Account
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
With banks and credit card companies, press '0' five times seperated by about a half a second. This is what they tell mail order companies to do when they're calling to verify identity when charging to an account. Since the customer may be on hold while the check is happening, they put you through to a person immediatly.
This is a general rule for all job application situations. It's none of their business what you used to make. The only thing they need to know is what you're willing to do the work for *now*. You should be making the decisions about how much yout time costs, not some egotistical HR manager.
Also, apply at a temp agency... They won't turn you down.
It doesn't matter. All they had to do is sell it once to some unscrupulous company in the minutes when the box was unchecked, and the dammage is done. There's no web form that can undo it. The effectively have licence to the data in your account during that brief period. Ingenious of them. Glad I don't have an account there.
Actually I'm slightly anal about my posts and reread them three or four times and give them a pass through ispell before hitting submit. Wastes loads of time, but I'm a shitty speller so I deal with it.
You did go to a manual labor type of school, you just haven't noticed yet. You didn't learn about how things work, you learned about how to use things. When new stuff comes along, the knowledge that you gained is more likely to be obsolete then if you had learned the types of material they teach at a traditional college. Unfortunately, most people don't understand that, and lots of people will skip college, or go and then complain that they're not being taught practical skills.
As a sysadmin you go to work every day, and perform a set of tasks that have been laid out for you. You don't make the types of decisions that create new technology, or help you become raise worthy. You fit into the same category as an auto mechanic, you just don't get you're hands dirty, and you know what to type at the command prompt.
I'm not saying that it's a bad career to have, but you really don't have anywhere else to go because you didn't go to college. If you had gone to college, you could still have been a sysadmin and you would have other options when you got tired of it. You also would have an easier time getting a job after getting laid off, and your knowledge wouldn't get stale as quickly requiring you to participate in expensive certification programs.
Again, ultimately the decision is your own, and what you did may have been the correct choice for you, but I don't want to recommend what you did to someone who still has the choice to make. It is foolish to limit yourself unnessicarily.
There are a million reasons you should go to college even if you think you shouldn't, but other posters have described most of them already. One I haven't seen so far is this: At your age, you're not going to get any respect in the workplace. I'm not saying you don't deserve it, it's just a fact of life. People don't take you seriously if you are (or seem to be) under 20-25 years old. Go to college, have some fun, and spare yourself four thankless years slaving away when you could have been learning and having a good time. As a bonus, at the end you'll have a degree that will increase your options if you ever decide to change careers.
You're way more likely to get laid in college too.
If you went to college, maybe you would have learned how to spell, and how to speak english. Don't compare a shitty technical school with college. there's a difference between learning the mechanics of a trade and understanding your field of work. Instead of going to college, you tried to take a short cut. You have no idea what you missed out on, and you have a dead end career where you may get a job again, but you'll have no chance for advancement. Good job. I hope you enjoy doing manual labor and not thinking for yourself, because that's what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
(BTW, no offence or anything, I just wanted to put some perspective on your story so the poor sap who asked the question in the first place would think twice before taking your advice.)
There a very high correlation between heat and electrical insulation. If it is good enough for electrical insulation, it is good enough for heat insulation.
I am not a physicist, but off the top of my head I can think of two materials that are both excelent heat conductors, and excelent electrical insulators: glass, and diamond. There is hardly a correlation between electral and heat insulation.
Loosing $150 per console requires the sale of somewhere between 15 and 20 games at full price to break even. It'll be a long time before a significant number of Xbox owners have that many games, and I'll bet most of them never will.
Software, drivers in particular, can only be so tolerant. You're relying on this device to boot correctly, so you can only be tolerant of certain types of errors. There are also only so many checks you can do to see if a disc is valid media. If a disc is specifically designed to pass all the possible tests to determine if it's, say, a bootable CD, but then turns out to *not* be a bootable CD, then there's really no automatic way to have prevented the error before knowing of the existance of this new type of disc.
There isn't really any damage, but it isn't a user escapable senerio. There is no way to manualy eject the disc, and the disc almost works enough to retry unendingly. When you reboot, the drive is too busy trying to figure out what to do with this "almost but not quite a CD" to boot. If there were a physical manual eject button, then there would be no problem.
Too cheap? How about not dumb enough to waste $20 on a piece of hardware that was obsolete 10 years ago. If you want to take files with you to somewhere with no net connection, burn a CD. They're more durable, and it's faster then writing to a floppy anyway. Now if only PC vendors would stop including them so we could be rid of the things.
My favorite feature is the 'DID' feature. I have a message that plays when I get called that asks marketers to hang up and tells everybody else to press '*'. It annoys the few people who actually want to call me, but it has stopped all but one of the telemarketers that used to call me all the time.
Actually the "Memory effect" (Which isn't really the memory effect at all) isn't really a problem with the NiCads in the gigaset, since it has an excelent charger that was designed correctly. They are lower capacity then the NiMh batteries though.
Not only are the siemens gigaset phones well featured, but they also take 3 standard NiCad rechargeable AA batteries. I haven't had them wear out yet, but at least I know it'll be cheap and easy to replace them when they go.
I know the g in gcc stands for GNU. I just said GNU/gcc to show how rediculous it was for RMS not to put a GNU/ in front of his software, but he expects other, non GNU affiliated, authors to put a GNU/ in fromt of their work.
Re:You cannot deny GCC is the heart of free softwa
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 2
That sounds like a great reason to call gcc GNU/gcc. If you want to call a colection of software that is GNU based GNU/something, or you want to call an FSF owned program GNU/something, then that's fine, but individual projects should be allowd to name thenselves whatever they want. Otherwise we'd have GNU/Darwin, and GNU/mozilla, and GNU/freking everything.
GNU/Linux == OS Distribution with a linux/kernel and GNU software.
GNU/Linux != Linux kernel. The linux kernel is named whatever Linus says it's named.
Where do you get your information? Do you make it up? What makes you think that a white LED lamp that produces as much light as a fluorescent lamp would use 1/100th the power?
White LEDs are only about twice as efficient as modern fluorescent bulbs, and less efficient then high pressure sodium lighting. They're also way more expensive to purchase than fluorescent bulbs.
Today, the general public doesn't know how bad constant exposure to RF of all kinds of intensities might be.
In fact we know exactly how harmful exposure to RF can be at many intensities and frequencies. Isn't it interesting that while we can show that some levels of exposure are harmful, we can't show that the levels from cell phones are harmful even with an enourmous test group over 20 years? If you want to be paranoid, I suggest you stop using your computer. Between the motors and oscilators in the system unit, and all the radiation bombarding you from the monitor (what, you use an LCD, well there's radiation bombarding you from that too) you should be practicing lots of precaution. After all, we can't really prove that all that isn't bad for you either. You better stop using your regular telephone too. The speaker in the headset generates a varying low frequency RF field that could be dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Retail margins at Xbox launch were paper thin. The manager at my local EB was so pissed off by it that she was telling her customers not to buy the Xbox for their kids, and to get the PS2 instead. If I recall I think she was saying "Don't get the Xbox, because you'll just be back in here next year buying a PS2 when the Xbox is dead". Microsoft sent lots of marketing material and promo kit to the retailers, but the profit on the hardware was non existant.
The $10 per game that microsoft gets already takes the retailers margin into account. I'm guessing that they make a tidy sum on the accessories as well as the games. Still, 15 games and 3 extra controllers is still alot for someone to buy. They should have left the hard drive out and sold memory cards. Sony had the right idea there.
Did you even read the article? Only microsoft is loosing money. Everyone else has been making money all along. Only Microsoft and Sega have been shown to have ever sold a console at a loss.
That text is very narrow in scope. It talks only about censorware list decryption. That was the correct decision to be made in that case, and video decryption is a whole different story. With video, the content is different for every creation. With censorware, every product needs to be able to filter out the same list of sites, so the makers of censorware need a protected way of hiding their lists, otherwise someone could just walk off with their investment. With video, each product is unique and viewable by nature, and there is no clear reason to deny fair use rights.
This, like many things you post about, has nothing to do with censorware. I know that the issue is important to you, but there is no reason for you to lead a discussion off topic for your own manipulative reasons. If you really cared about all the censorware crap you are whining about all the time, you would go and do something, instead of bitching about how Michael "screwed" you. He owns the censorware.org domain, and you don't. Go get your own domain, and put all that effort into something useful instead of bitching all the time. Imagine the difference you could make if you weren't being a whiny baby all the time. The more you bitch about it the less persuasive your argument is. If it the censorware crap really mattered to you, then you would be out doing somthing with your time instead of going out of your way to run a smear campaign. You loose credibility every time you manually paste your obnoxious sig into a post.
Is switching from Office 97 to Office XP any easier then switching from Office 97 to Open Office? So much has changed with the interface between the two that they hardly resemble each other any more. Now you have $700 in licensing, and training time. (Which I would bet is much less then 20 hours. Maybe there'll be 20 hours at reduced productivity, but there won't be 20 hours of down time.)
Software IS ABSOLUTELY a significant part of a companies budget, but it is not the only significant part. Have you ever had anything to do with a company's budget? Many business applications have a higher yearly cost then the annual salary for an employee with an MBA. In a company with 25-50 employees, that's far from insignificant. Business software that needs to be updated with changes to tax law is the worst, because you HAVE TO BUY the package every year. If you have so many employees that an aditional salary seems insignificant, you're not saved. They just raise the price for you because you have more clients. If someone tells you that the licensing costs aren't a significant part of the TCO, then they are lying to you (and likely trying to sell you something).
I just had a great idea for a new company.
-- Made up but probably pretty acurate statistic --
90% of the the people who use MS Word use ony a small subset of the features.
With banks and credit card companies, press '0' five times seperated by about a half a second. This is what they tell mail order companies to do when they're calling to verify identity when charging to an account. Since the customer may be on hold while the check is happening, they put you through to a person immediatly.
This is a general rule for all job application situations. It's none of their business what you used to make. The only thing they need to know is what you're willing to do the work for *now*. You should be making the decisions about how much yout time costs, not some egotistical HR manager.
Also, apply at a temp agency... They won't turn you down.
It doesn't matter. All they had to do is sell it once to some unscrupulous company in the minutes when the box was unchecked, and the dammage is done. There's no web form that can undo it. The effectively have licence to the data in your account during that brief period. Ingenious of them. Glad I don't have an account there.
Actually I'm slightly anal about my posts and reread them three or four times and give them a pass through ispell before hitting submit. Wastes loads of time, but I'm a shitty speller so I deal with it.
You did go to a manual labor type of school, you just haven't noticed yet. You didn't learn about how things work, you learned about how to use things. When new stuff comes along, the knowledge that you gained is more likely to be obsolete then if you had learned the types of material they teach at a traditional college. Unfortunately, most people don't understand that, and lots of people will skip college, or go and then complain that they're not being taught practical skills.
As a sysadmin you go to work every day, and perform a set of tasks that have been laid out for you. You don't make the types of decisions that create new technology, or help you become raise worthy. You fit into the same category as an auto mechanic, you just don't get you're hands dirty, and you know what to type at the command prompt.
I'm not saying that it's a bad career to have, but you really don't have anywhere else to go because you didn't go to college. If you had gone to college, you could still have been a sysadmin and you would have other options when you got tired of it. You also would have an easier time getting a job after getting laid off, and your knowledge wouldn't get stale as quickly requiring you to participate in expensive certification programs.
Again, ultimately the decision is your own, and what you did may have been the correct choice for you, but I don't want to recommend what you did to someone who still has the choice to make. It is foolish to limit yourself unnessicarily.
There are a million reasons you should go to college even if you think you shouldn't, but other posters have described most of them already. One I haven't seen so far is this: At your age, you're not going to get any respect in the workplace. I'm not saying you don't deserve it, it's just a fact of life. People don't take you seriously if you are (or seem to be) under 20-25 years old. Go to college, have some fun, and spare yourself four thankless years slaving away when you could have been learning and having a good time. As a bonus, at the end you'll have a degree that will increase your options if you ever decide to change careers.
You're way more likely to get laid in college too.
If you went to college, maybe you would have learned how to spell, and how to speak english. Don't compare a shitty technical school with college. there's a difference between learning the mechanics of a trade and understanding your field of work. Instead of going to college, you tried to take a short cut. You have no idea what you missed out on, and you have a dead end career where you may get a job again, but you'll have no chance for advancement. Good job. I hope you enjoy doing manual labor and not thinking for yourself, because that's what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
(BTW, no offence or anything, I just wanted to put some perspective on your story so the poor sap who asked the question in the first place would think twice before taking your advice.)
There a very high correlation between heat and electrical insulation. If it is good enough for electrical insulation, it is good enough for heat insulation.
I am not a physicist, but off the top of my head I can think of two materials that are both excelent heat conductors, and excelent electrical insulators: glass, and diamond. There is hardly a correlation between electral and heat insulation.
Loosing $150 per console requires the sale of somewhere between 15 and 20 games at full price to break even. It'll be a long time before a significant number of Xbox owners have that many games, and I'll bet most of them never will.
Software, drivers in particular, can only be so tolerant. You're relying on this device to boot correctly, so you can only be tolerant of certain types of errors. There are also only so many checks you can do to see if a disc is valid media. If a disc is specifically designed to pass all the possible tests to determine if it's, say, a bootable CD, but then turns out to *not* be a bootable CD, then there's really no automatic way to have prevented the error before knowing of the existance of this new type of disc.
There isn't really any damage, but it isn't a user escapable senerio. There is no way to manualy eject the disc, and the disc almost works enough to retry unendingly. When you reboot, the drive is too busy trying to figure out what to do with this "almost but not quite a CD" to boot. If there were a physical manual eject button, then there would be no problem.
Too cheap? How about not dumb enough to waste $20 on a piece of hardware that was obsolete 10 years ago. If you want to take files with you to somewhere with no net connection, burn a CD. They're more durable, and it's faster then writing to a floppy anyway. Now if only PC vendors would stop including them so we could be rid of the things.
My favorite feature is the 'DID' feature. I have a message that plays when I get called that asks marketers to hang up and tells everybody else to press '*'. It annoys the few people who actually want to call me, but it has stopped all but one of the telemarketers that used to call me all the time.
Actually the "Memory effect" (Which isn't really the memory effect at all) isn't really a problem with the NiCads in the gigaset, since it has an excelent charger that was designed correctly. They are lower capacity then the NiMh batteries though.
Not only are the siemens gigaset phones well featured, but they also take 3 standard NiCad rechargeable AA batteries. I haven't had them wear out yet, but at least I know it'll be cheap and easy to replace them when they go.
When did President Regan say that?
I know the g in gcc stands for GNU. I just said GNU/gcc to show how rediculous it was for RMS not to put a GNU/ in front of his software, but he expects other, non GNU affiliated, authors to put a GNU/ in fromt of their work.
That sounds like a great reason to call gcc GNU/gcc. If you want to call a colection of software that is GNU based GNU/something, or you want to call an FSF owned program GNU/something, then that's fine, but individual projects should be allowd to name thenselves whatever they want. Otherwise we'd have GNU/Darwin, and GNU/mozilla, and GNU/freking everything.
GNU/Linux == OS Distribution with a linux/kernel and GNU software.
GNU/Linux != Linux kernel. The linux kernel is named whatever Linus says it's named.
boxen
The word is boxes. (No, I don't care what it says in the jargon file) Websters has the following to say about boxen:
Made of boxwood; pertaining to, or resembling, the box
I.E. It's not the plural of anything.
I'm even going to waste karma posting this at +2, since the word bothers me so much. (Irrational, I know)
it gives off as much light as a much brighter incandescant bulb.
Really? How does it do that?
Where do you get your information? Do you make it up? What makes you think that a white LED lamp that produces as much light as a fluorescent lamp would use 1/100th the power?
White LEDs are only about twice as efficient as modern fluorescent bulbs, and less efficient then high pressure sodium lighting. They're also way more expensive to purchase than fluorescent bulbs.
One more thing...
Today, the general public doesn't know how bad constant exposure to RF of all kinds of intensities might be.
In fact we know exactly how harmful exposure to RF can be at many intensities and frequencies. Isn't it interesting that while we can show that some levels of exposure are harmful, we can't show that the levels from cell phones are harmful even with an enourmous test group over 20 years? If you want to be paranoid, I suggest you stop using your computer. Between the motors and oscilators in the system unit, and all the radiation bombarding you from the monitor (what, you use an LCD, well there's radiation bombarding you from that too) you should be practicing lots of precaution. After all, we can't really prove that all that isn't bad for you either. You better stop using your regular telephone too. The speaker in the headset generates a varying low frequency RF field that could be dangerous.