Yep I'm with you. I still don't understand how homeowners can knowingly give a percentage cut of their sale to some random idiot with a tie, especially in today's grossly inflated market.
These glorified used-car salesmen make ridiculous amounts of cash just to walk a dozen people around your home and put out a few photo ads in cartel-owned publications. Yes, it's a pain in the ass, but when you consider (in my area) the average townhouse goes for $175k, with modest bungalows in the 250 to 350 range, that represents anywhere from 10k to 20k commission. I'm not giving some fast-talker half a year's net income just for taking a few pictures and a couple days' work. I'd much rather spend that money on renovations/upgrades on the next house, which just might add to the total value of the property.
Where is that money coming from ? Resources aren't created out of thin air.
Someone who makes, for example, 10 million dollars per year, is taking that 10 million from other people. Now I'm not saying it's inhumane to be successful, but the "creation" of wealth is a concept borne out of ignorance. It's only created because you can't see far enough down the chain, to the entry point. Movie stars, with their ridiculous contracts, make their money from moviegoers... it just goes through several middlemen and gets split up into many different pots, but the money has to come from somewhere. Someone gets credited, and someone gets debited.
Money doesn't have any value in itself, it's the movement of money that's valuable. If you're broke, you can't move money, but even if you're rich, if you don't find ways to put that money to work, you're not benefiting from the supposed wealth - it becomes a meaningless number on a piece of paper that does nothing.
Yep the wife and I love the Wii because it gets the blood flowing, plus there's something oddly exciting about three people flailing their arms like idiots to make their little bunny run faster:) Then the round ends and everyone struggles to catch their breath while laughing.... fun times
USB is useful, but it is not performant. I'll take an eSATA over USB, especially if RAID is involved.
The WD Raptor drives are falling behind, for several reasons. One is that "regular" drives are catching up to the Raptor's performance. The other is that often times, the limiting factor for performance is the motherboard's chipset. This has led to the true speed freaks (*blushes*) opting for PCIe SAS controllers with dedicated RAID processors. SAS drives can often be cheaper than Raptors, and yet offer better performance under seek-heavy loads which are common with today's horribly-coded games.
Yeah you hit the nail in the head. Michael Robertson did one good thing years ago, that was to found MP3.com. Then he proceeded to destroy it. That was enough to make me hate him, but of course he had to continue ruining everything he touched.
The divide within India is greater, but the gap between India's poor and other countries is smaller than it used to be. That's why everyone is "richer". Those few super-rich folk are still hogging resources, but you're not seeing its ill effects as much, because the poverty is being pushed elsewhere.
The problem with the great majority of "obesity" indicators is they don't take into account varying body types.
For me, most doctors/dietitians would consider my dead dry bones overweight, because I'm average height but extremely broad and solid. It's just how I'm built, big heavy bones. Even when I was so thin, I needed a tight belt to keep pants on, I was around 180lbs, but my comfort zone is around 230. Every dietitian on the planet would say I'm overweight, some have even recommended physician-assisted weight loss, which is patently ridiculous.
My way to gauge fitness is quite simple: do I feel good, and do I look healthy ? Numbers can't answer that... they approximate, but as soon as you fall outside the middle of the bell curve they fail. Anyone who adheres to indexes like BMI or total body fat, I accord them zero credibility whatsoever. They're just numbers created to serve a purpose, usually that purpose is to create demand for a product.
As much as I love assembler, it's an offer vs demand thing. Very few people are actually proficient at assembler coding, but a crapload of morons can write a thousand lines of useless Java code a week, and they're willing to work for peanuts. Assembler guys want big bucks, mostly because their rarity gives them that power, along with the obscurity of the art.
Let's face it: there are some low-level things you just can't do in any language, and asm coders know it! If it's only a speed issue, it's usually cheaper to throw more hardware at the problem and let the cheap idiotic factory coders chew on it.
I don't know how bad it is elsewhere, but I've heard a lot of bad things about DreamHost, particularly in the area of reliability and performance. Apparently they oversell way too much, and then fail to deliver what most people would consider reasonable service for the price.
Don't even get me started on their ludicrous claims of disk space and bandwidth... Hell, I could offer a million people "up to" 5 terabytes a month. Good luck maxing that pipe while the CPU gets bogged down with everyone's broken PHP scripts and daily Diggs over some asshat's "top 10 link whores" list.
Just because Dell, HP and Toshiba bundle Windows, doesn't mean everyone bundles Windows with their PCs. You can go to a local, independent PC shop right now and walk out with a Linux-compatible PC, all you have to do is ask. Some can even customize laptops for you.
I think it's a good thing that the big names are neglecting Linux, it gives small guys like me a chance to grow by focusing on the customer's wants and needs. If a client asks me for Linux, I don't scare them away while squeezing my Bill Gates plushie. Of course, if they want Windows, I'll sell them Windows for a good price. I don't get any crapware kickbacks, nor do I get free Windows discs. As long as I get to sell my sexy machines and earn a living doing it, I don't care about Microsoft politics.
The Amiga came about after Tramiel had jumped ship. It was actually being developed by Amiga Corporation. Tramiel wanted the Amiga technology, but not their staff/company, he was going to lay them off after plundering their nest egg, so Amiga steered clear of Commodore at first. In fact, Amiga was under contract with Atari, but when the Amiga team found out that Tramiel was trying to buy Atari, they hated/feared him and his tactics so much that they struck a deal with Commodore to bail them out of the Atari contract.
Back then, there was no alternative. Today, the common sysadmin can cobble together a combination of striped disks and aggressive memory caching that either matches or beats SSD performance for a small fraction of the cost. The gap between disks and SSD is not large enough to justify the added cost, except in very exotic scenarios.
Should we abandon SSD research ? No, I don't think so, but I do think they need to stop advertising every little bunny-hop until they have something truly revolutionary in their hands. Wake me when they can saturate a 300mb SATA port with a single SSD, or they can run 10x more IO/s than the fastest 15k disk.
For those of you too young to care, Nolan Bushnell was indeed the founder of Atari, back in the 70's. He was crazy and irresponsible back then, and at age 65 his demeanor has only worsened.
His list of achievements includes selling Atari to his arch-rival (and equally unfit) Jack Tramiel of Commodore, after the gaming crash left the company in dire straits. Then he followed it up by ruining his restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, by leveraging its assets and stock value to fund some of his ridiculous projects that inevitably bombed, taking down the restaurant chain with them.
He's spent the last few years trying to sell touch-screen kiosk "solutions" to the wrong crowd. It's good that he tries to push new technology, but he seems to have a complete disregard for sustainability. He got lucky with his Catalyst capital funding group, but that's really just another name for "corporate loan shark".
I don't value a single word that comes out of this man's mouth. TPM chips have been around for a few years now, and they have yet to be used to secure cheap, stinky games. Worst case, if/when they do secure the desktop, some teenager with a soldering iron will be advertising the cure for $50 a pop, just like console modchips today.
1. Insert ANY Linux boot disc 2. Replace Vista with Linux 3. wait for the weak-ass installer to finish 4. ??? 5. SYSTEM LEVEL ACCESS!!!!!!!
Any imbecile can rootkit an OS if they have boot access to the damned thing. Now I'm going to go break into my own car by reaching through the open window and pushing the unlock button! OMG l33t!
I like the idea of the SSD, but I think they need to concentrate on lowering costs down to earth before flaunting their capacity achievements. Hell, any monkey can build a 500-TB mega-RAID stripe with a large enough budget.
When this SSD is cheap enough that I can buy 3-4 of them and stripe that into a bus-raping powerhouse, for less than a mortgage payment, then we'll talk.
Same here for the rotting disks, though I've been (slowly) archiving them to optical media. There's something charming about a DVD-R filled with 3000 floppy images:)
A whois record is proof that the registrar tagged your domain with that particular info. It is not proof of ownership, and they can change the info at whim. There's no bound value.
I'd be fine with Whois offering an email address for domain-related issues, but even better would be to do away with it entirely. Just send your gripes to abuse@ or postmaster@. Whois info has been more often used for bad than good.
It's in the UK. I say let them have their silly bans. That pales in comparison to their #1 problem which is the monarchy. No sane, sustainable, appreciable democracy can survive while a handful of inbred jingoes have veto power over everything and everyone.
*cough* Gee, I didn't mean for this to turn into another Bush-bash... tee-hee!
It's a fundamental concept of VMs, they're pretty much sandboxed. From a security perspective, assuming there are no exploitable faults in the hypervisor, it's hardly any different from having it run as a separate, physical machine. The host and VM only communicate through a simulated ethernet interface controlled by the hypervisor itself. If anything, the host could mess with the VM's address space through debugging hooks, but the reverse is impossible.
Actually, you have too much faith in the common human.
I'm convinced more than one weak-willed Bud-guzzler has stared at the Red Cross thinking "Hey, they're the guys who make baby powder! Wow, what a small world!"
The whole world of advertising is built on that very concept. People are dumb, and people are easily misled.
It's like seeing a gun marketed as "Cop killer*" and in 2pt font "*only applicable when said cop is on drugs, shooting wildly around him and shooting him would be in self-defense".
Problem is, the guns are there SPECIFICALLY to kill cops. Well at least that's what the right to bear arms was for. I'm not saying you should mow down every pig you see, but the whole point of arming plain citizens is to (theoretically) protect themselves from the threat of a totalitarian regime. Obviously that definition has little meaning anymore, the gov't is out of control and on a rampage, but the intent was there.
There's nothing in your constitution that states "Citizens have the right to download copyrighted content without retribution". That's why these issues are being decided in courts of law.
The fact that much of this indexing and filtering can be fully automated blurs the line a fair bit. Google could be doing the same thing as any torrent tracker, all it takes is basic web scraping and community moderation (explicit or implicit, the latter being Google's tendency). Google would stand to profit quite a chunk from such gray-area activities (hint: it already does).
So why is it that Google is not in court over file sharing ? They're as big a facilitator as any other index, if not more since it actually indexes the indexes. Google is like one monster torrent search that aggregates TPB, Mininova, IsoHunt and hundreds more.
Google is not in court, because the RIAA/MPAA doesn't have enough money to beat them. That's all.
Great idea. I just happen to have this network of high-bandwidth servers in need of financial support.
Besides, I would absolutely love to accelerate the implosion of copyright. The more abuse the RIAA throws around, the more people will take notice and discuss the issues. Hell, someone might actually grow a brain and get their good pal the Governator kicked out of office.
No, wait... I forgot one thing: the US/UN legal systems are corrupt and fucked up beyond repair.
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Yep I'm with you. I still don't understand how homeowners can knowingly give a percentage cut of their sale to some random idiot with a tie, especially in today's grossly inflated market.
These glorified used-car salesmen make ridiculous amounts of cash just to walk a dozen people around your home and put out a few photo ads in cartel-owned publications. Yes, it's a pain in the ass, but when you consider (in my area) the average townhouse goes for $175k, with modest bungalows in the 250 to 350 range, that represents anywhere from 10k to 20k commission. I'm not giving some fast-talker half a year's net income just for taking a few pictures and a couple days' work. I'd much rather spend that money on renovations/upgrades on the next house, which just might add to the total value of the property.
Where is that money coming from ? Resources aren't created out of thin air.
Someone who makes, for example, 10 million dollars per year, is taking that 10 million from other people. Now I'm not saying it's inhumane to be successful, but the "creation" of wealth is a concept borne out of ignorance. It's only created because you can't see far enough down the chain, to the entry point. Movie stars, with their ridiculous contracts, make their money from moviegoers... it just goes through several middlemen and gets split up into many different pots, but the money has to come from somewhere. Someone gets credited, and someone gets debited.
Money doesn't have any value in itself, it's the movement of money that's valuable. If you're broke, you can't move money, but even if you're rich, if you don't find ways to put that money to work, you're not benefiting from the supposed wealth - it becomes a meaningless number on a piece of paper that does nothing.
Yep the wife and I love the Wii because it gets the blood flowing, plus there's something oddly exciting about three people flailing their arms like idiots to make their little bunny run faster :) Then the round ends and everyone struggles to catch their breath while laughing.... fun times
I started rolling my eyes after you said USB.
USB is useful, but it is not performant. I'll take an eSATA over USB, especially if RAID is involved.
The WD Raptor drives are falling behind, for several reasons. One is that "regular" drives are catching up to the Raptor's performance. The other is that often times, the limiting factor for performance is the motherboard's chipset. This has led to the true speed freaks (*blushes*) opting for PCIe SAS controllers with dedicated RAID processors. SAS drives can often be cheaper than Raptors, and yet offer better performance under seek-heavy loads which are common with today's horribly-coded games.
Yeah you hit the nail in the head. Michael Robertson did one good thing years ago, that was to found MP3.com. Then he proceeded to destroy it. That was enough to make me hate him, but of course he had to continue ruining everything he touched.
Linspire ? joke.
SIPphone ? stillborn.
MP3tunes ? *crickets*
There's one thing music people hate: sellout, and this guy is the king of selling out. He's just a dollar sign with a big, arrogant mouth.
Wrong. You're not looking at the big picture.
The divide within India is greater, but the gap between India's poor and other countries is smaller than it used to be. That's why everyone is "richer". Those few super-rich folk are still hogging resources, but you're not seeing its ill effects as much, because the poverty is being pushed elsewhere.
The problem with the great majority of "obesity" indicators is they don't take into account varying body types.
For me, most doctors/dietitians would consider my dead dry bones overweight, because I'm average height but extremely broad and solid. It's just how I'm built, big heavy bones. Even when I was so thin, I needed a tight belt to keep pants on, I was around 180lbs, but my comfort zone is around 230. Every dietitian on the planet would say I'm overweight, some have even recommended physician-assisted weight loss, which is patently ridiculous.
My way to gauge fitness is quite simple: do I feel good, and do I look healthy ? Numbers can't answer that... they approximate, but as soon as you fall outside the middle of the bell curve they fail. Anyone who adheres to indexes like BMI or total body fat, I accord them zero credibility whatsoever. They're just numbers created to serve a purpose, usually that purpose is to create demand for a product.
As much as I love assembler, it's an offer vs demand thing. Very few people are actually proficient at assembler coding, but a crapload of morons can write a thousand lines of useless Java code a week, and they're willing to work for peanuts. Assembler guys want big bucks, mostly because their rarity gives them that power, along with the obscurity of the art.
Let's face it: there are some low-level things you just can't do in any language, and asm coders know it! If it's only a speed issue, it's usually cheaper to throw more hardware at the problem and let the cheap idiotic factory coders chew on it.
I don't know how bad it is elsewhere, but I've heard a lot of bad things about DreamHost, particularly in the area of reliability and performance. Apparently they oversell way too much, and then fail to deliver what most people would consider reasonable service for the price.
Don't even get me started on their ludicrous claims of disk space and bandwidth... Hell, I could offer a million people "up to" 5 terabytes a month. Good luck maxing that pipe while the CPU gets bogged down with everyone's broken PHP scripts and daily Diggs over some asshat's "top 10 link whores" list.
Just because Dell, HP and Toshiba bundle Windows, doesn't mean everyone bundles Windows with their PCs. You can go to a local, independent PC shop right now and walk out with a Linux-compatible PC, all you have to do is ask. Some can even customize laptops for you.
I think it's a good thing that the big names are neglecting Linux, it gives small guys like me a chance to grow by focusing on the customer's wants and needs. If a client asks me for Linux, I don't scare them away while squeezing my Bill Gates plushie. Of course, if they want Windows, I'll sell them Windows for a good price. I don't get any crapware kickbacks, nor do I get free Windows discs. As long as I get to sell my sexy machines and earn a living doing it, I don't care about Microsoft politics.
I'm just waiting for an American firm to sue VueStar, on the grounds that it holds a patent for "hilariously ridiculous legal abuse".
Actually, the only reason why there ISN'T a patent on legal abuse, is because there's way too much prior art.
You couldn't be more wrong, I'm sorry to say.
The Amiga came about after Tramiel had jumped ship. It was actually being developed by Amiga Corporation. Tramiel wanted the Amiga technology, but not their staff/company, he was going to lay them off after plundering their nest egg, so Amiga steered clear of Commodore at first. In fact, Amiga was under contract with Atari, but when the Amiga team found out that Tramiel was trying to buy Atari, they hated/feared him and his tactics so much that they struck a deal with Commodore to bail them out of the Atari contract.
False argument.
Back then, there was no alternative. Today, the common sysadmin can cobble together a combination of striped disks and aggressive memory caching that either matches or beats SSD performance for a small fraction of the cost. The gap between disks and SSD is not large enough to justify the added cost, except in very exotic scenarios.
Should we abandon SSD research ? No, I don't think so, but I do think they need to stop advertising every little bunny-hop until they have something truly revolutionary in their hands. Wake me when they can saturate a 300mb SATA port with a single SSD, or they can run 10x more IO/s than the fastest 15k disk.
That's assuming they don't abuse a legal loophole, fabricating and then enforcing a state of emergency so the election can be postponed.
With all the sneaky shit that's happened in the last 8 years, I wouldn't even blink.
For those of you too young to care, Nolan Bushnell was indeed the founder of Atari, back in the 70's. He was crazy and irresponsible back then, and at age 65 his demeanor has only worsened.
His list of achievements includes selling Atari to his arch-rival (and equally unfit) Jack Tramiel of Commodore, after the gaming crash left the company in dire straits. Then he followed it up by ruining his restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, by leveraging its assets and stock value to fund some of his ridiculous projects that inevitably bombed, taking down the restaurant chain with them.
He's spent the last few years trying to sell touch-screen kiosk "solutions" to the wrong crowd. It's good that he tries to push new technology, but he seems to have a complete disregard for sustainability. He got lucky with his Catalyst capital funding group, but that's really just another name for "corporate loan shark".
I don't value a single word that comes out of this man's mouth. TPM chips have been around for a few years now, and they have yet to be used to secure cheap, stinky games. Worst case, if/when they do secure the desktop, some teenager with a soldering iron will be advertising the cure for $50 a pop, just like console modchips today.
I've got an even more potent hack:
1. Insert ANY Linux boot disc
2. Replace Vista with Linux
3. wait for the weak-ass installer to finish
4. ???
5. SYSTEM LEVEL ACCESS!!!!!!!
Any imbecile can rootkit an OS if they have boot access to the damned thing. Now I'm going to go break into my own car by reaching through the open window and pushing the unlock button! OMG l33t!
I like the idea of the SSD, but I think they need to concentrate on lowering costs down to earth before flaunting their capacity achievements. Hell, any monkey can build a 500-TB mega-RAID stripe with a large enough budget.
When this SSD is cheap enough that I can buy 3-4 of them and stripe that into a bus-raping powerhouse, for less than a mortgage payment, then we'll talk.
Same here for the rotting disks, though I've been (slowly) archiving them to optical media. There's something charming about a DVD-R filled with 3000 floppy images :)
A whois record is proof that the registrar tagged your domain with that particular info. It is not proof of ownership, and they can change the info at whim. There's no bound value.
I'd be fine with Whois offering an email address for domain-related issues, but even better would be to do away with it entirely. Just send your gripes to abuse@ or postmaster@. Whois info has been more often used for bad than good.
Dude, let's take this back one step.
It's in the UK. I say let them have their silly bans. That pales in comparison to their #1 problem which is the monarchy. No sane, sustainable, appreciable democracy can survive while a handful of inbred jingoes have veto power over everything and everyone.
*cough* Gee, I didn't mean for this to turn into another Bush-bash... tee-hee!
It's a fundamental concept of VMs, they're pretty much sandboxed. From a security perspective, assuming there are no exploitable faults in the hypervisor, it's hardly any different from having it run as a separate, physical machine. The host and VM only communicate through a simulated ethernet interface controlled by the hypervisor itself. If anything, the host could mess with the VM's address space through debugging hooks, but the reverse is impossible.
Actually, you have too much faith in the common human.
I'm convinced more than one weak-willed Bud-guzzler has stared at the Red Cross thinking "Hey, they're the guys who make baby powder! Wow, what a small world!"
The whole world of advertising is built on that very concept. People are dumb, and people are easily misled.
Easy. Make a list of the top 50 wealthiest governors and senators, put their names on a wheel of fortune, and spin it.
I bet 20 on the bald guy from Arkansas with bad teeth.
Whadya mean they all look the same ?
It's like seeing a gun marketed as "Cop killer*" and in 2pt font "*only applicable when said cop is on drugs, shooting wildly around him and shooting him would be in self-defense".
Problem is, the guns are there SPECIFICALLY to kill cops. Well at least that's what the right to bear arms was for. I'm not saying you should mow down every pig you see, but the whole point of arming plain citizens is to (theoretically) protect themselves from the threat of a totalitarian regime. Obviously that definition has little meaning anymore, the gov't is out of control and on a rampage, but the intent was there.
There's nothing in your constitution that states "Citizens have the right to download copyrighted content without retribution". That's why these issues are being decided in courts of law.
The fact that much of this indexing and filtering can be fully automated blurs the line a fair bit. Google could be doing the same thing as any torrent tracker, all it takes is basic web scraping and community moderation (explicit or implicit, the latter being Google's tendency). Google would stand to profit quite a chunk from such gray-area activities (hint: it already does).
So why is it that Google is not in court over file sharing ? They're as big a facilitator as any other index, if not more since it actually indexes the indexes. Google is like one monster torrent search that aggregates TPB, Mininova, IsoHunt and hundreds more.
Google is not in court, because the RIAA/MPAA doesn't have enough money to beat them. That's all.
Great idea. I just happen to have this network of high-bandwidth servers in need of financial support.
Besides, I would absolutely love to accelerate the implosion of copyright. The more abuse the RIAA throws around, the more people will take notice and discuss the issues. Hell, someone might actually grow a brain and get their good pal the Governator kicked out of office.
No, wait... I forgot one thing: the US/UN legal systems are corrupt and fucked up beyond repair.
(goes back to TPB)