1. you deal with an outsourced project where the time shift makes things difficult 2. you aren't willing to make sacrifices to accomodate those odd hours 3. you think slashdot has a magic solution
I think the best thing for you is to find a job with less responsibilities, because clearly you're incapable of dealing with the ones you're currently entrusted to. If you have a "Now!" problem that requires fast solutions, maybe you could stay up late and deal with the problem yourself.. meet your overseas peers halfway and get it done. Your job isn't defined by the hours you work or the money you earn, it's what you do that matters.
I was looking forward to reading something about Google's hiring practices, followed by stimulating discussion, but there's a huge freaking FLASH AD covering the whole article and it doesn't even have an [X] button to close it. Who the hell approves these ad programs anyway ?
It's BAD. Think about it.. if they're less interested in games, it's because they're too busy having kids at age 16 and throwing lightswitch raves at the methadone clinic.
The best argument FOR video games, is that every hour a kid spends playing video games, is an hour they aren't spending getting into big trouble. Today's kids are stupider than ever, I'd rather see a teenager hooked on WoW than making baby Cletuses with the trailer trash bimbo next door.
Someone's just going to break whatever retarded version check and made it run on XP, or even just write a quick loader that "emulates" trivial Vista system calls. For everyone else, we've already beat the damned game on Xbox when it came out in 2004:P If they had said Halo Three then it would be a different story, but luring us to Vista with Halo 2 is like trying to sell a BMW because it has a shiny new FM radio:P
Last time I looked, most media card readers supported regular MS, but not the Duo. Maybe things have changed in the 3 weeks since I quit my retail job:P
One thing is certain, UMD will never be a rewritable format for PC's. Hell, they never even released a MD-Audio drive, instead they decided to "invent" Net-MD just so you couldn't get direct access to the media. Sony has been practicing DRM-style bull forever.
I'd like to add my own twist: in my personal case, antisocial behavior is a REACTION to stupidity. I just don't give a !@#$ because 99.44% of humans aren't worth my time. I don't need nor want to befriend every single person on this planet, I'm quite content with a small group of respected peers.. there's only so much room on a colony ship to Mars anyway:P
Chum, you want to create a.NET app. You're chopped liver, like all the other.NET developers on the globe. There's no point in securing VC for such a trivial task when kids all over the world are doing it on their spare time running the server in their bedroom. Build it first, and then try to sell it. You're just looking for someone to pay you a salary for starting your 'own' business, and the dot.com world doesn't work that way anymore.
I'd think they could choose to cut the price to reflect the money they save in shipping, printing manuals and disks, etc
Son, discs cost pennies, manuals a few dollars, and shipping.. well, you toss a few tens of thousands of boxes on a truck. The real cost comes from the classic distribution pyramid, where each level takes a cut, often bigger than the creator's actual profit. It's hardly any different from the music business, except the numbers are bigger. Theoretically, a game that is sold for 49.99$ at JoeRandomGameShop, might make its creator 15$ per copy. If they take full control of the distribution model and go to direct sales over the internet, or even mail-order, they could potentially sell the same product for 24.99$ and make as much "profit", while creating new jobs within the company for in-house fulfillment. The 25$ saved comes from cutting out the middle men, and there are LOTS of them who do little more than store-and-forward boxes.
I looked at the PSP. My buddy got one the day it came out, and I was tempted, but then my brain kicked in and reminded me this is Sony. It reminded me this friggin sexy machine uses TWO proprietary Sony formats for storage, both of which my $5000 uber-PC can't even touch. The concept of movies on UMD struck me as idiotic from the very beginning. They cost the same as a full DVD, but at a tiny fraction of the resolution and image quality, plus I can't even play them on my home entertainment system. Why couldn't they have used standard 3-inch mini-DVD discs (1.46gb) ? Instead Sony went along with it's good old fashioned lock-in and invented a new format that does NOTHING more than the standards. This is like Minidisc, only worse.
If the UMD were only used for games, then I'd treat it like game boy carts and accept it, but for them to tout the thing as a multimedia gadget..... sorry but I've been mastering my own media for over a decade, this stuff is a hard sell.
Let's take a step back and see exactly what is religion. Religion is a group of people who share common beliefs and philosophies. Religion is an assortment of historical anecdotes and teachings that demonstrate guidelines for a certain way of life. The concept is no different than a nation's leader putting forth his ideals in the hopes of being followed and supported. The implementation however, is very touchy: these writings and doctrines are often many centuries old, perhaps millenia. These people have died a long time ago, our world has changed significantly since those times. Why do some people take these ancient words for law, more ridigly than the words and actions of living beings ? Were people smarter back in the dark ages ? I highly doubt it.
The Koran, the Bible, the Torah.. all these pieces of ancient literature were written by mortal men and women like you and I. Their mystic charm and lure comes from their easily regurgitated answers, and the sheer breadth of these tomes such that just about anyone can find a passage they relate to. That doesn't mean it should be taken as the absolute truth against which everyone should be judged and measured. Terence McKenna famously said "If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed." Religion is appealing because it is a form of mental entertainment, but not like movies or books, because religion is something you can participate in, something that offers an illusion of power to those who have none, as well as offering a broad shield for their misguided acts.
In the end, religion is a business, very unique and misunderstood by common folk. Think of it as a government that spans continents, currencies and languages. Each religion has a massive number of followers, many who will defend their organisation with their own lives without financial compensation, and while the head doesn't exert individual control over its members, the entire group self-regulates through peer pressure and mob tactics, as well as the innate human desire to "belong". I, for one, am dead scared of religion. If a simple cartoon is enough to warrant such hatred and destruction, we as a society are doomed.
While it is understood that eBay and Google are quite friendly to each other, and surely wouldn't want to piss each other off, I fail to see what is so wrong about Google starting their own payment system. Patent schmatent, Paypal is the biggest and longest-standing payment agent today, but that doesn't mean they can prevent new players from joining the game. If I were to open The First Bank of Billco, would I get sued by CapitalOne, MBNA et al ? Hell no.
There's a difference between plagiarism and just good ol' competition. Paypal's service is not a work of art or technical breakthrough.. their code may well be, but not their implementation and interface. If Google thinks they can do it better, then go for it!
Anti-US ramblings aside, I am fascinated by this very topic and have pondered upon the science behind destruction, especially with regards to tensile strength. Why do things smash when we hit them ? Why does wood split when you drive a screw/nail through it ? I think this research will not only give us very advanced insight for future building projects, but it might also trickle down to everyday uses like fasteners and glues, or maybe a better wood axe.
The best type of scientific breakthrough is the one that can benefit everyday people in great numbers.
I used to both love and hate this about the Silent Hill series of action/survival games, as well as Resident Evil. You didn't have a number for health/armor, you just had an EKG meter that went from a stable, bright green display (full HP) to jittery red to represent near-death. You had to gauge how badly hurt you were from the relative color/heart rate and choose which medicine to use to maximize healing without waste. Should I use a small ointment/herb or a full-blown medkit ?
Much different from the FPS genre where each item is worth N health, such as Quake 3/4 where you just camp out the armor shards and build yourself up to 200. It marks the difference between realism and arcade-like simplicity. In Quake you don't want to have to guess, it's more of a sport than a horror experience.
No, seriously something like a virtual machine might be the way to go. Yes it's horribly contorted, but see each indirection as a choke-point for leaks and glitches. Build in as many idiot-proof checks as you can, and do extensive bounds checking and whatnot. If you can make the outer layer of your app crash-proof, it will form a sort of "condom" for the innards.
You've obviously never held a job working with the public. In this knee-jerk world of hyper consumerism, admitting one's faults will make your customers run to the competitor, because they hide theirs. Or even worse, in corporate america, every welfare mother and grain-fed mamma's boy will be suing you for ruining their so-called life.
Honesty looks nice on paper, but it fails when everyone else on the globe is a straight-faced liar.
The way I see it, Intel has been losing the race for years, it just took them this long to lose enough market share to actually get off their cellulite and do something about it, though it may be too little too late.
Yes, the Socket-A Athlons were cute little chips that gave impressive performance at low cost, but in exchange for extreme heat and noisy fans. They helped drive prices down; for the price of a Pentium-4 CPU, you could afford a whole AMD-based mid-tower system with a burner and all. The chips were a nightmare for techies with their extravagant heat dissipation and people had a habit of cracking the core. Nevertheless, it was cheap and reliable.
Now they have Athlon 64 and X2, and the tables have turned. Now it's AMD who's got the pricier chips, with Intel covering the lower end because they simply haven't made much progress in the last three years. AMD has had a 64 bit desktop processor on the market for over a year and a half now, for less money than the cheapest 32-bit Pentium-4 CPU. Hell, most people buying a high-end P4 today still don't have 64-bit support. Why does it matter ? We may not be using the 64-bit much at this point, but it still gives AMD valuable experience to further improve their designs, and a growing user base to help AMD control the market while Intel plays catch-up.
It really doesn't matter which industry you're in, when a competitor catches you with your pants down, you're going to lag behind until you come up with the next big thing, or else your company will grow exhausted and fade into obscurity.
Dial-Up, DSL, Cable or even screaming copper are all equally safe if you stick a nice quiet Linux router/firewall box right in front of it. I've been running mine for years and haven't had a single problem no matter what kind of line I had coming in. Just a plain old Pentium-1 with the bare essentials, a simple iptables script with a few tweaks for selective port forwarding and a basic traffic shaper. At first I was even running a cookie-cutter firewall on a floppy disk! Works like a charm.
I'm a pretty big AMD fan, mostly because I'm sick of setting up Intel's stupid huge clunky heatsinks that arch the motherboard like a hunchback. It just looks retarded and I'm sure it's not exactly healthy for the finely layered circuitry lurking beneath. It's also quite charming to have a screaming dual-core AMD with an absolutely inaudible fan, and an NVidia-designed chipset that's got almost everything right.
In contrast, every late Intel board I've loaded will just plain bluescreen during Windows Setup if you don't load the floppy for its SATA controller, whether you use it or not. And that stupid round fan with no sides that loves to chew the power cables. Puh-leeze!
And who can forget the nightmare of mating chipsets to CPUs ? Sometimes I wonder if the processing power is really in the motherboard, and the actual CPU is just a key to unlock various features.. it's such a mindfuck. My AMD board from 2004 took the new dual-core chip without fussing, and I can drop just about any old Socket-A chip on an aging board.. sure, it might not always run it full speed but at least it runs. Try sticking a Prescott chip on an ancient 478 board and see how far you get.
Long story short: Intel may be the household name, but they've reached a point where they make too many "mistakes", intentional or not. It's alienating customers and techies alike.
As a 75-hour-a-week shop tech, I'd like to add one thing: QUALITY power supplies.
I do a lot of subcontracting for small shops, and the #1 idiotic mistake they make is to use cheap power supplies, you know, the kind that costs $5.00 and boasts "420 watts" underneath the "Made in China" sticker. Sure enough, 3 months later I was replacing the same power supply for the same client. Had they paid $15.00 for a slightly better unit, it would have lasted several years (i'm dead serious). Or if you're that anal, go with an Antec, best in the biz.. you might blow $50-60 on it, but consider the cost of labour to replace all those cheap ones over a couple years and get back to me:P
Hard drives, well those die on a regular basis. I personally don't even keep hard drives past their warranty expiration. I just sell them privately and buy myself some new gear (and a fresh warranty). Try calculating your actual MTBF.. maybe your drives typically fail after 2 years of usage, excluding obvious manufacturing defects. Sell it after a year, make some script kiddie happy, and get new fresh drives. I'd rather do a preventive backup on my own time, than deal with a failed drive in a mad panic. This also avoids the nasty situation where a part fails, but you've been milking it for so long that it's no longer available on the market. Ever had a raid controller die on you ? Ever shit your pants because there was no replacement for it and you had to kiss your perfectly safe data goodbye ? Yeah, no thanks. Keep it recent, and if it's that important to you, keep a spare. The money you spend today will be saved in psychotherapy tomorrow.
Why are they going to such lengths to hide themselves online from Joe Random when any rival worth their salt can get their hands on blueprints and photos with relative ease ? If it can be walked past, driven by or flown over, it will be documented no matter what.
I apologize in advance for splashing more fuel onto the conspiracy bonfire, but the bigger the payoff, the more effort people are willing to invest in fraud. How hard can it be to buy out the auditor when we're playing with billions of dollars ? "Here's a quarter mil, see you in three months"
As long as humans will be human, there will be injustice. The trick is to find a balance between crime and control.. it usually costs more to prevent theft and fraud than the losses suffered from it, but there has to be SOME form of control to keep chaos at bay.
Yes dear, screws, cable ties, and I run mem/disk tests while I start on the next one.. it takes me about 10 minutes per system. The main difference is that I work far more than 22.14 days a month, make that 26.57 by your math (six days a week), and 11 hour days. That means I get 25.78 minutes per hour to blast you on slashdot:)
Yes, it has fallen to such ridicule. Everyone and their mother are buying 299$ PC's to surf the net, copy DVD's and flash their pirated satellite receivers, and we make a hefty profit on those crappy little machines even though we only new brand-new parts. It's a sad sad world.
Most likely, they will post the same profit as before, while reducing their costs and cooking the books to cover up the more efficient infrastructure. There's a lot of money to be made defrauding taxes, especially when you're a trillion dollar power corporation, a one-percent "oversight" means big bucks with which to buy out your favorite crazy old senator.
Really, why would a supremely dominant entity give something back to its captive customers ? Yes, we would all love to see the big guys kick back to the small guys, but that's just not how the game is played.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's get the facts straight:
1. you deal with an outsourced project where the time shift makes things difficult
2. you aren't willing to make sacrifices to accomodate those odd hours
3. you think slashdot has a magic solution
I think the best thing for you is to find a job with less responsibilities, because clearly you're incapable of dealing with the ones you're currently entrusted to. If you have a "Now!" problem that requires fast solutions, maybe you could stay up late and deal with the problem yourself.. meet your overseas peers halfway and get it done. Your job isn't defined by the hours you work or the money you earn, it's what you do that matters.
I was looking forward to reading something about Google's hiring practices, followed by stimulating discussion, but there's a huge freaking FLASH AD covering the whole article and it doesn't even have an [X] button to close it. Who the hell approves these ad programs anyway ?
Taco, oh Taco what have you done?!
It's BAD. Think about it.. if they're less interested in games, it's because they're too busy having kids at age 16 and throwing lightswitch raves at the methadone clinic.
The best argument FOR video games, is that every hour a kid spends playing video games, is an hour they aren't spending getting into big trouble. Today's kids are stupider than ever, I'd rather see a teenager hooked on WoW than making baby Cletuses with the trailer trash bimbo next door.
Someone's just going to break whatever retarded version check and made it run on XP, or even just write a quick loader that "emulates" trivial Vista system calls. For everyone else, we've already beat the damned game on Xbox when it came out in 2004 :P If they had said Halo Three then it would be a different story, but luring us to Vista with Halo 2 is like trying to sell a BMW because it has a shiny new FM radio :P
Last time I looked, most media card readers supported regular MS, but not the Duo. Maybe things have changed in the 3 weeks since I quit my retail job :P
One thing is certain, UMD will never be a rewritable format for PC's. Hell, they never even released a MD-Audio drive, instead they decided to "invent" Net-MD just so you couldn't get direct access to the media. Sony has been practicing DRM-style bull forever.
I'd like to add my own twist: in my personal case, antisocial behavior is a REACTION to stupidity. I just don't give a !@#$ because 99.44% of humans aren't worth my time. I don't need nor want to befriend every single person on this planet, I'm quite content with a small group of respected peers.. there's only so much room on a colony ship to Mars anyway :P
Feb 10th, US game developers start union.
Feb 11th, IIT debuts game developer courses.
Feb 12th, thousands of US game developers laid off.
We've already lost this game.
Chum, you want to create a .NET app. You're chopped liver, like all the other .NET developers on the globe. There's no point in securing VC for such a trivial task when kids all over the world are doing it on their spare time running the server in their bedroom. Build it first, and then try to sell it. You're just looking for someone to pay you a salary for starting your 'own' business, and the dot.com world doesn't work that way anymore.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Son, discs cost pennies, manuals a few dollars, and shipping.. well, you toss a few tens of thousands of boxes on a truck. The real cost comes from the classic distribution pyramid, where each level takes a cut, often bigger than the creator's actual profit. It's hardly any different from the music business, except the numbers are bigger. Theoretically, a game that is sold for 49.99$ at JoeRandomGameShop, might make its creator 15$ per copy. If they take full control of the distribution model and go to direct sales over the internet, or even mail-order, they could potentially sell the same product for 24.99$ and make as much "profit", while creating new jobs within the company for in-house fulfillment. The 25$ saved comes from cutting out the middle men, and there are LOTS of them who do little more than store-and-forward boxes.
I looked at the PSP. My buddy got one the day it came out, and I was tempted, but then my brain kicked in and reminded me this is Sony. It reminded me this friggin sexy machine uses TWO proprietary Sony formats for storage, both of which my $5000 uber-PC can't even touch. The concept of movies on UMD struck me as idiotic from the very beginning. They cost the same as a full DVD, but at a tiny fraction of the resolution and image quality, plus I can't even play them on my home entertainment system. Why couldn't they have used standard 3-inch mini-DVD discs (1.46gb) ? Instead Sony went along with it's good old fashioned lock-in and invented a new format that does NOTHING more than the standards. This is like Minidisc, only worse.
If the UMD were only used for games, then I'd treat it like game boy carts and accept it, but for them to tout the thing as a multimedia gadget..... sorry but I've been mastering my own media for over a decade, this stuff is a hard sell.
Let's take a step back and see exactly what is religion. Religion is a group of people who share common beliefs and philosophies. Religion is an assortment of historical anecdotes and teachings that demonstrate guidelines for a certain way of life. The concept is no different than a nation's leader putting forth his ideals in the hopes of being followed and supported. The implementation however, is very touchy: these writings and doctrines are often many centuries old, perhaps millenia. These people have died a long time ago, our world has changed significantly since those times. Why do some people take these ancient words for law, more ridigly than the words and actions of living beings ? Were people smarter back in the dark ages ? I highly doubt it.
The Koran, the Bible, the Torah.. all these pieces of ancient literature were written by mortal men and women like you and I. Their mystic charm and lure comes from their easily regurgitated answers, and the sheer breadth of these tomes such that just about anyone can find a passage they relate to. That doesn't mean it should be taken as the absolute truth against which everyone should be judged and measured. Terence McKenna famously said "If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed." Religion is appealing because it is a form of mental entertainment, but not like movies or books, because religion is something you can participate in, something that offers an illusion of power to those who have none, as well as offering a broad shield for their misguided acts.
In the end, religion is a business, very unique and misunderstood by common folk. Think of it as a government that spans continents, currencies and languages. Each religion has a massive number of followers, many who will defend their organisation with their own lives without financial compensation, and while the head doesn't exert individual control over its members, the entire group self-regulates through peer pressure and mob tactics, as well as the innate human desire to "belong". I, for one, am dead scared of religion. If a simple cartoon is enough to warrant such hatred and destruction, we as a society are doomed.
While it is understood that eBay and Google are quite friendly to each other, and surely wouldn't want to piss each other off, I fail to see what is so wrong about Google starting their own payment system. Patent schmatent, Paypal is the biggest and longest-standing payment agent today, but that doesn't mean they can prevent new players from joining the game. If I were to open The First Bank of Billco, would I get sued by CapitalOne, MBNA et al ? Hell no.
There's a difference between plagiarism and just good ol' competition. Paypal's service is not a work of art or technical breakthrough.. their code may well be, but not their implementation and interface. If Google thinks they can do it better, then go for it!
Don't build a goddamned city below sea level!
Anti-US ramblings aside, I am fascinated by this very topic and have pondered upon the science behind destruction, especially with regards to tensile strength. Why do things smash when we hit them ? Why does wood split when you drive a screw/nail through it ? I think this research will not only give us very advanced insight for future building projects, but it might also trickle down to everyday uses like fasteners and glues, or maybe a better wood axe.
The best type of scientific breakthrough is the one that can benefit everyday people in great numbers.
I used to both love and hate this about the Silent Hill series of action/survival games, as well as Resident Evil. You didn't have a number for health/armor, you just had an EKG meter that went from a stable, bright green display (full HP) to jittery red to represent near-death. You had to gauge how badly hurt you were from the relative color/heart rate and choose which medicine to use to maximize healing without waste. Should I use a small ointment/herb or a full-blown medkit ?
Much different from the FPS genre where each item is worth N health, such as Quake 3/4 where you just camp out the armor shards and build yourself up to 200. It marks the difference between realism and arcade-like simplicity. In Quake you don't want to have to guess, it's more of a sport than a horror experience.
Easy answer: just learn to code, dammit! :P
No, seriously something like a virtual machine might be the way to go. Yes it's horribly contorted, but see each indirection as a choke-point for leaks and glitches. Build in as many idiot-proof checks as you can, and do extensive bounds checking and whatnot. If you can make the outer layer of your app crash-proof, it will form a sort of "condom" for the innards.
The next big dot.com boom: contact lenses that fool the medical exam!
:P
Haven't any of you seen Gattaca ?
You've obviously never held a job working with the public. In this knee-jerk world of hyper consumerism, admitting one's faults will make your customers run to the competitor, because they hide theirs. Or even worse, in corporate america, every welfare mother and grain-fed mamma's boy will be suing you for ruining their so-called life.
Honesty looks nice on paper, but it fails when everyone else on the globe is a straight-faced liar.
The way I see it, Intel has been losing the race for years, it just took them this long to lose enough market share to actually get off their cellulite and do something about it, though it may be too little too late.
Yes, the Socket-A Athlons were cute little chips that gave impressive performance at low cost, but in exchange for extreme heat and noisy fans. They helped drive prices down; for the price of a Pentium-4 CPU, you could afford a whole AMD-based mid-tower system with a burner and all. The chips were a nightmare for techies with their extravagant heat dissipation and people had a habit of cracking the core. Nevertheless, it was cheap and reliable.
Now they have Athlon 64 and X2, and the tables have turned. Now it's AMD who's got the pricier chips, with Intel covering the lower end because they simply haven't made much progress in the last three years. AMD has had a 64 bit desktop processor on the market for over a year and a half now, for less money than the cheapest 32-bit Pentium-4 CPU. Hell, most people buying a high-end P4 today still don't have 64-bit support. Why does it matter ? We may not be using the 64-bit much at this point, but it still gives AMD valuable experience to further improve their designs, and a growing user base to help AMD control the market while Intel plays catch-up.
It really doesn't matter which industry you're in, when a competitor catches you with your pants down, you're going to lag behind until you come up with the next big thing, or else your company will grow exhausted and fade into obscurity.
Dial-Up, DSL, Cable or even screaming copper are all equally safe if you stick a nice quiet Linux router/firewall box right in front of it. I've been running mine for years and haven't had a single problem no matter what kind of line I had coming in. Just a plain old Pentium-1 with the bare essentials, a simple iptables script with a few tweaks for selective port forwarding and a basic traffic shaper. At first I was even running a cookie-cutter firewall on a floppy disk! Works like a charm.
I'm a pretty big AMD fan, mostly because I'm sick of setting up Intel's stupid huge clunky heatsinks that arch the motherboard like a hunchback. It just looks retarded and I'm sure it's not exactly healthy for the finely layered circuitry lurking beneath. It's also quite charming to have a screaming dual-core AMD with an absolutely inaudible fan, and an NVidia-designed chipset that's got almost everything right.
In contrast, every late Intel board I've loaded will just plain bluescreen during Windows Setup if you don't load the floppy for its SATA controller, whether you use it or not. And that stupid round fan with no sides that loves to chew the power cables. Puh-leeze!
And who can forget the nightmare of mating chipsets to CPUs ? Sometimes I wonder if the processing power is really in the motherboard, and the actual CPU is just a key to unlock various features.. it's such a mindfuck. My AMD board from 2004 took the new dual-core chip without fussing, and I can drop just about any old Socket-A chip on an aging board.. sure, it might not always run it full speed but at least it runs. Try sticking a Prescott chip on an ancient 478 board and see how far you get.
Long story short: Intel may be the household name, but they've reached a point where they make too many "mistakes", intentional or not. It's alienating customers and techies alike.
As a 75-hour-a-week shop tech, I'd like to add one thing: QUALITY power supplies.
:P
I do a lot of subcontracting for small shops, and the #1 idiotic mistake they make is to use cheap power supplies, you know, the kind that costs $5.00 and boasts "420 watts" underneath the "Made in China" sticker. Sure enough, 3 months later I was replacing the same power supply for the same client. Had they paid $15.00 for a slightly better unit, it would have lasted several years (i'm dead serious). Or if you're that anal, go with an Antec, best in the biz.. you might blow $50-60 on it, but consider the cost of labour to replace all those cheap ones over a couple years and get back to me
Hard drives, well those die on a regular basis. I personally don't even keep hard drives past their warranty expiration. I just sell them privately and buy myself some new gear (and a fresh warranty). Try calculating your actual MTBF.. maybe your drives typically fail after 2 years of usage, excluding obvious manufacturing defects. Sell it after a year, make some script kiddie happy, and get new fresh drives. I'd rather do a preventive backup on my own time, than deal with a failed drive in a mad panic. This also avoids the nasty situation where a part fails, but you've been milking it for so long that it's no longer available on the market. Ever had a raid controller die on you ? Ever shit your pants because there was no replacement for it and you had to kiss your perfectly safe data goodbye ? Yeah, no thanks. Keep it recent, and if it's that important to you, keep a spare. The money you spend today will be saved in psychotherapy tomorrow.
Why are they going to such lengths to hide themselves online from Joe Random when any rival worth their salt can get their hands on blueprints and photos with relative ease ? If it can be walked past, driven by or flown over, it will be documented no matter what.
I apologize in advance for splashing more fuel onto the conspiracy bonfire, but the bigger the payoff, the more effort people are willing to invest in fraud. How hard can it be to buy out the auditor when we're playing with billions of dollars ? "Here's a quarter mil, see you in three months"
As long as humans will be human, there will be injustice. The trick is to find a balance between crime and control.. it usually costs more to prevent theft and fraud than the losses suffered from it, but there has to be SOME form of control to keep chaos at bay.
Yes dear, screws, cable ties, and I run mem/disk tests while I start on the next one.. it takes me about 10 minutes per system. The main difference is that I work far more than 22.14 days a month, make that 26.57 by your math (six days a week), and 11 hour days. That means I get 25.78 minutes per hour to blast you on slashdot :)
Yes, it has fallen to such ridicule. Everyone and their mother are buying 299$ PC's to surf the net, copy DVD's and flash their pirated satellite receivers, and we make a hefty profit on those crappy little machines even though we only new brand-new parts. It's a sad sad world.
Most likely, they will post the same profit as before, while reducing their costs and cooking the books to cover up the more efficient infrastructure. There's a lot of money to be made defrauding taxes, especially when you're a trillion dollar power corporation, a one-percent "oversight" means big bucks with which to buy out your favorite crazy old senator.
Really, why would a supremely dominant entity give something back to its captive customers ? Yes, we would all love to see the big guys kick back to the small guys, but that's just not how the game is played.