Having worked in various levels of the retail industry, I can tell you that one day not so far in the future, that Amex might be near-useless except for airfare and high-markup items such as furniture and appliances.
It's not just that Amex is expensive and a PITA for the retailer, they're also grossly uncompetitive and irresponsible. You just can't win against Amex when you're the retailer. Walk into my store, buy 2,000$ of techno-crap, I'll make a copy of your drivers' license. 30 days later you call Amex and make up a story, they refund the money and you keep the goods. I send Amex my copy of your ID, proof that you were physically in my store, along with a complete listing of what you bought including serial numbers. 75% of the time Amex will still reverse the charge and you essentially stole my goods. Retailer stops accepting Amex and lives happily ever after. Their thinking is that it is far more profitable for them to keep you as an interest-paying customer than to respect my business and the painful lengths I take to cover my ass.
Even better, I had a friend who worked in a gas station back in our college days. He had people doing chargebacks on gas, saying it wasn't their vehicle! I forget the numbers but it was something like 20 Amex to 1 Visa because Visa is obviously smart enough to know gasoline is non-refundable. You pump it, you drive off and you use it, it's gone! I mean seriously, If I had a stolen CC, the first thing I'd do is fill up my tank instead of ordering a pallet of laptops:P Amex is retarded and eventually they will run out of retailers to screw.
Fine, so it's a throwback to the warez BBS'es of the early 90's. Yes I understand that you're only trading with respectable file hounds, but I'd rather have ten thousand eyeballs on a torrent than two dozen. Here's my personal experience: for popular stuff, the public trackers are loaded with people and run super fast. For hard-to-find stuff, yes a private forum might give better leads, simply because its users "care" more and are willing to honor requests.
Leechers have always been and will forever be, yes there are cheapasses who hit and run, but a good chunk of that problem lies on the ISP's asymmetrical bandwidth allocation. Even me, I have 15 mbit down, 2 mbit up it's puke. If I had 10mbit both ways instead, uploading would be much less of a nag because it can take ten times longer to share a file than to just leech it. Most people have far worse connectivity, often 3m/256k for DSL. ISP's will need to open more upload juice to foster the P2P transition of the internet. Right now, high upload bandwidth is still considered a premium business privilege, a very costly one at that. Capitalism stifles evolution yet again!
I always questioned the validity of private trackers. They're all over the place and they're all minuscule blips in Mininova's shadow, and the other big free sites. Why the hell would someone want to restrict themselves to a small group of file sharers ? It's fine to create a user group with common interests, but the very spirit of P2P is to get as many people in on the fun. Post your torrents on the public trackers, and link to them in your private forums for your friends to enjoy, as well as anyone else on the net who might happen to like what you're doing.
Banning clients is like kicking good customers out of a store because they choose to drive a GM instead of your favorite Nissan:P It's not the vehicle (client) that matters, it's the money (bandwidth).
As a shop tech who assembles roughly a thousand PC's every month, I have to step in and say you have cobbled together the flakiest components ever seen. Allow me to explain:
Abit is in deep doggy-doo because they're under fire for extremely shoddy quality control and RMA service. I don't carry Abit anymore because 3 out of 4 boards would come back to us, and then Abit would sit on them for a few months before repairing or replacing them because they have no idea how to run a business (money and workforce issues).
ATI Graphics consistently have the worst drivers. I wish I could root for my own province, but they're really clueless when it comes to software. Even worse is their Radeon Xpress motherboard chipset, they're trying to play catchup with NVidia and they suck at it. NVidia made their chipset mistakes many years ago, now the NForce is at its 4th major generation and running strong. ATI's chipset is young and sluggish/unstable with frequent compatibility issues, and the whole Crossfire thing is a joke. They are pushing the wrong way, not only are they no longer capable of innovating, they're also incapable of mimicking their competitor's innovations. I'm very worried about their future.
Toshiba DVD-RW.. meh. They make fancy looking notebooks, and they make fancy looking DVD-RW drives. In terms of actual performance they're very average. If you want a great all around burner, get a Pioneer. If you want the absolute best, go Plextor (and pay the premium for elite quality gear). Anything else is a waste of time and money. Sony is garbage, LG is still not quite there yet, BenQ is laughable.. NEC is not bad if you get it cheaply, but these days the differences are in the single digits, big deal. Your time and grief spent troubleshooting a flimsy unit is worth far more.
Now that I've bashed everything, here are my personal recommendations.. I'm not particularly tied to any brand name, I'm just drawing from experience. Motherboards should be Asus or MSI, graphics go Matrox or NVidia low-end. Optical drive should be Pioneer or Plextor and nothing else.
Finally hard drives. I like Maxtor myself, they're not for everyone, they require a little extra care (cooling mostly). Seagate is nice with their 5 year warranty but they're the slowest drives I've ever seen in that class. WD is just in the middle, not too fast, not too slow, I like them for desktops.
DIY servers can be a great thing if you know what you're doing. Being qualified to use a screwdriver does not mean you know how to build a good PC, just as owning a multimeter does not make you an electrician, and compiling the VB.NET samples does not make you a programmer. Learn the ins and outs of the business, which may involve lots of research and meta-research, browsing forums to find out the general opinion about a given product; OR you could be smart and hire someone else who does this professionally. Myself, I don't see why everyone "needs" a server-class machine with 12 gigs of ram and I don't know how much disk. It runs commodity PC sotware that is designed for 32 bit processors at this time. The hardware is very similar to conventional retail parts, it's the support that juggles those options.
I second this opinion. Remote debugging or "tuning" could be rather easily done from a serial terminal. There's no need for an HTTP protocol and the sloppy hassle of HTML forms; just a quick text console, not unlike those found in games such as Quake.
get myvar, set myvar xxyy, toggle myvar, listvars etc etc
Yeah, web interfaces are nice for end-users, but since you just want to debug your own one-off app and it's quite likely you will be the only person doing it, might as well be lazy - I mean efficient - and code the simplest interface possible, as long as it does what you need.
That's because they can claim a tax break on the expenses, yet not pay tax on the income until they break even. Hypothetically, if you invested 10 mil in the film, got 4 mil back in taxes.. then you make back your initial 10 mil.. you don't pay tax on that 10. You essentially launder 10 million dollars without any law-breaking.
They never said it was to drive your own kids away. If you feel the need to chase your own offspring away with this device, maybe you should have thought about that before having kids in the first place. The greatest problem with this generation is careless/mindless parents. S'funny, but when I was in my teens I didn't loiter in mall entrances yelling my stupid little head off, or wreaking random vandalism, stealing cars or evangelizing about getting high every goddamned moment of my worthless life.
Maybe that's because I had an education and an actual life to get started. Today's kids are so disaffected and confused, makes me wonder why they're even brought into the world. Kids having kids, that's the problem!
Statistical manufacturing defects aside, I'd say the #1 reason for a failed drive is a cheap system. That 200$ PC uses a 7$ power supply and no fans except the CPU. Not all 300watt power supplies are created equal.
These hard drives need juice and they need cooling. I have been a Maxtor nut forever because they run faster than any WD or Seagate, but they run hot. The average moron with their PC in a desk drawer will kill one of them in the first month. I've been running my raid-0 for two years now without a hitch. The trick ? I always stick a nice big 120mm fan right across the hard drives, blowing around them. And believe me, they don't sit idle all day. I've got 6-way Raid-0 for a reason; I thrash them harder than your average SQL server.
Now I'm citing Maxtor because they tend to run the hottest (performance driven), but this applies to all hard drives. If you let heat stagnate, you will kill any electronic device, it is merely a matter of time. Take care of your gear and it will last a long time.
I'm betting it's the burner. From working in a PC shop, and seeing what stupid people buy every day, it's the cheap burners and media that are responsible for this crap. LG burners, blah.. BenQ burners, puke. Pioneer never let me down, nor Plextor (except for their crippleware firmwares). I buy only Ritek/Ridata media which I consider very good for the price, but if I could find a reliable source of TDK I'd probably stick with those. I'd rather pay 50% more and get something that works everywhere everytime.
I think what the parent-parent posted meant is that the industry thrives on spontaneous mistakes. No one in their right mind would pay 2.50 for a crappy compressed version of a song on a phone, unless they were either stupid or so rich they don't care (or hte money made them stupid). Otherwise you'd have to be a little tipsy, or showing off your fancy 500$ phone to some dumb fashion slut who wants your wallet, not your seed.
The reason this is "wrong" is that many of us dislike the telecoms for abusing their customers. They lock us in and screw with us, and they buy the laws to make it enforceable. Yes, it is irresponsible for someone to pay 2.50$ for a downloadable song, but what's truly irresponsible is giving money to these detached corporations. Just like doing drugs is "wrong".. I don't give a flying @#&$ what you do with your brain cells, the problem isn't about people getting stoned, it's about money falling into the hands of criminals.
While it's not illegal to be a ruthless telecom, it certainly is immoral.
Somehow I don't think people will _need_ to upgrade to the latest Windows in order to function. Your mother will still have Firefox on XP, your inbred neighbor's kids will still use MSN Messenger to trade spyware, your office will still run 20-year old Cobol apps through a broken terminal emulator that doesn't run on anything but NT 4.
When Windows 95 came out, many people waited a bit before jumping on. Really it didn't offer significant performance or usability above Win 3.11, and most people didn't know how to dual-boot (or didn't want to). Hell, I mostly used Win95 as a multitasking kernel so I could code in one dosbox and Telix in another:D 32-bit my ass
How thy hell is this going to work in the consumer world ? Is there going to be a standard hardware base or will each "ambient game" require its own set of props ? The theory is mildly entertaining if one ignores the practicality issues.
"ambFarCry requires at least two ambPalmTrees to run. Go back to the store, punkass!"
We already have force-feedback controllers that either suck, or are poorly utilized by developers/designers. Now we're going to have a buttload of props that all suck, and take designers' attention away from the actual gameplay even more than the current orgy of ultra-excessive graphics and gee-whiz sound.
I haven't touched Java with a 10-foot pole in over 5 years, but wouldn't this be something you do with the Reflection functions to get the list of defined classes and have yourself some Foreach fun.
Fine then. Screw litigation, let's lynch these crooks!
There is no "perfect" solution to human mischief. Some people are honest and well-meaning, many more are selfish, treacherous and war-like. As long as we will have these two polar factions, we will have litigation.
Having a kiddie techno-toy does not make one a nerd. I think it was easier being a kid nerd in the 80's because we didn't have the zoo-formerly-known-as-the-internet.. we didn't have pretty clicky things. You either knew how to use the CLI (and/or Basic) or you went out and played "kill yourself on a bike". Today's kids just hop on a game and waste their life away, learning to snipe the red team with sub-pixel accuracy, but mention the command line and they will either say "Dos is kewl, nigga!" or "Dos is for old farts". Either way, I feel the potent urge to smack them over the head with the keyboard. Kids don't learn shit anymore, they are taught to be lazy and even expect/accept being mentally inferior, delegating the important stuff to "experts".
$100 worth of memory is just the beginning. When suing, you can try to argue the lost income of dealing with this problem.. factor in troubleshooting time, any money paid for tech support, the time you spent on the phone arguing with the dipshits.. time is money.
Warranties are nice for the casual user, but they're an intangible asset for a company. When you buy something with a 3 year warranty, you can count on having it work for 3 years and not have to budget for it because it will be repaired/replaced free of charge. If that warranty becomes void, so does the paper value of your product.
Your 100$ device has cost you far more in lost time and potential income, you'd be a fool to not try and stick it to them, if only to send a message to these crooks.
Why is it that we hear another story about Vista every day now, and yet the software is still in a very speculative state ? Do I really care what bullcrap the insider-of-the-week imagined when he repeatedly smacked his forehead against the desk this morning ?
Vista will be whatever Vista is when it is released. There have been more features dropped than added and all this media spin is sounding like the Weekly World News and their alien transgendered babies.
"We're going to do this, we'll revolutionize that".. why don't they just shut the hell up and build it already. It's just a freaking GUI, not rocket science here.
Chum, I'm in Canada. We have federally-funded healthcare. Yes, it is overtaxed because of all these jerkoffs and welfare retards hogging the emergency rooms for inane reasons, simply because it's free. It takes anywhere from 4 to 8 hours to see a freaking doctor unless you have severe trauma. At least I don't have to worry too much about my health, just knowing there's a system in place to take care of me is quite comforting, and I am sure this has a pacifying effect on society in general.
They pay for the medical consultation and any surgery, but not for any prescription drugs once you leave the hospital. This creates a scenario where an ill person may have to commit a substantial portion of their income to life-sustaining drugs. Again, those who are too lazy or stupid to work, have their prescriptions paid by the government. Yep, our "friendly" system has it all backwards but oh well.
The fact that this is a shit world is superficial. It is not by lack of natural resources or human labor, nor is it caused by greater forces such as geography or natural disasters. Our world is shit because of greed. Why must people take from others to be happy ? This is untrue.
Why do we pay enormous prices for gas ? Because the oil companies are soon to be running out of their precious product, and are unwilling to adapt to the ecological shift they directly provoked. Why is there inflation ? Because some people want to see bigger numbers, even though the true value does not increase. One person charges more, so the buyer wants a higher salary to maintain his/her living standards. The employer needs to recoup the added expense, thus prices increase. We're still poor, we just redefine the threshold every year. Why do we steal from one another ? Why do we kill ? Why do we consume ? Because we want what we don't have, more specifically we want what others have. If humankind could break away from this infinite loop, we just might open the door for broad-scale progress. Until then, we're just hamsters on a big wheel..
One of the main reasons why dual-layer discs are pricier to manufacture is because you have double the failure rate. Actually gluing the two substrates together is a piece of cake, but if either one of those layers has a defect you have to throw out the pair to keep the production lines in sync.
Another strong reason is sheer soulless capitalism. It is a "privilege" to have dual-layer media, therefore the common american entrepreneur will charge a hefty premium for that privilege. It is no different than comparing low-end vs high-end hifi equipment, the cost of parts represents a minuscule portion of the price hike. If you want the bigger/better stuff, someone will make you pay dearly for it.
I just want to be clear on this: are pharmaceutical megacorps good or bad ? The way I see it, they are effectively imposing a ransom on health. Why are drugs so expensive ? Because they are in demand. It's basically like saying "If you don't pay, you're gonna die. So exactly how much money have you got ?" And they jack up the price accordingly.
Health care and medicinal research should either be government-communized so everyone can have access to proper treatment and medicine, or shot to hell so as to skim off the weak and purify the breed through natural selection.
Now I still hate humans and wish most of them would die a horrible death for my primal amusement, but I think I'd rather see fully subsidized health care for all, and toss these glorified drug dealers back into the ranks of the working poor.
The less rich people there are, the less poor people there are. Now I'm not saying to swing into full-on communism, but maybe as a modern society we could find an efficient mix of various ideologies in order to benefit humankind as a whole. Capitalism at the expense of lives only breeds more hatred.
Why don't we drop the nationalism altogether. I am not a North American, I am a PERSON goddamnit. It's because of this patriotism that we have racism at all. Why are Texans typically rednecks ? No they're not, that's just the stereotype that's been painted onto them. Well the problem is that eventually stereotypes become reality because not everyone has the IQ required to tell the difference between fact and fiction. There really are some people who think every person in Texas is drunk, owns a busted old pick-up truck, has a hot daughter and answers the door in the nude with a ballcap and shotgun.
I live in Canada. I am on the northern part of the american continent. That's all it is, it's a line on a map. It has nothing to do with who I am.
Does having more advertising shoved into our skulls really have a positive net effect on income ? Some commercials are actually entertaining (mostly funny ones), but for the most part it's more of the same poop. Some dumb ho walking around in new overpriced jeans (and little else), or some white-trash male model promoting chewing gum. It's goddamned chewing gum, if I feel like gum I'll look at the display rack at the convenience store.:P
I like advertising that teaches me new stuff.. informs me of products I was not aware of, and hopefully that I'm interested in. I don't need to see some dyke faking a (bad) orgasm in her shower thanks to X-garbage-shampoo. I don't need McDonalds to remind me they still sell BigMacs. I might actually like to hear about a new soft drink, and they could shut the hell up once half the world knows about Diet Ultra Coke Purple. Once I've tried it, I don't need more advertising, I'll just buy some at the store if I want it.
The day marketing stops treating humankind as puppets, is the day they will earn my respect.
Thank you for posting the facts. I'm sick of repeating this stuff to ignorants all over the net. Daylight savings time is a pain in the butt, but it exists for a reason, and for once that reason doesn't descend from some ruler's unchecked vanity. No matter what the bureaucrats tell you, we're still animals and thus we exist according to the rules of nature. The fact that we have these ugly buildings and cube-farm hate factories is just fluff. Sunlight is a ridiculously important energy source which is why most of us live by day and sleep at night. Adapting our synthetic time system to nature's clock is only logical.
While my factual information in these matters is absolutely nil, I would be very doubtful that such an attack, if successfully executed, would really cripple the economy that badly. Since I didn't just land off a spaceship, I remember a time when north americans had jobs in the high-tech sector and made lots of money with their skills. If India goes sky-high, all these hypocritical capitalists will simply have to re-hire the local geeks and pay them full salary plus benefits. Sure, it's going to cost 20x more, but the work will get done.
On the upside, maybe some of us will be happy to speak to our own kind when we call tech support. I swear there is nothing more aggravating than having someone read off a troubleshooting list to you with the kind of english that makes baby jesuses cry. Sorry folks but when your job is about speaking, you'd better be a damned good speaker. We don't have wheelchair mailmen because that would be wrong, why do we have non-english phone agents ?
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Having worked in various levels of the retail industry, I can tell you that one day not so far in the future, that Amex might be near-useless except for airfare and high-markup items such as furniture and appliances.
:P Amex is retarded and eventually they will run out of retailers to screw.
It's not just that Amex is expensive and a PITA for the retailer, they're also grossly uncompetitive and irresponsible. You just can't win against Amex when you're the retailer. Walk into my store, buy 2,000$ of techno-crap, I'll make a copy of your drivers' license. 30 days later you call Amex and make up a story, they refund the money and you keep the goods. I send Amex my copy of your ID, proof that you were physically in my store, along with a complete listing of what you bought including serial numbers. 75% of the time Amex will still reverse the charge and you essentially stole my goods. Retailer stops accepting Amex and lives happily ever after. Their thinking is that it is far more profitable for them to keep you as an interest-paying customer than to respect my business and the painful lengths I take to cover my ass.
Even better, I had a friend who worked in a gas station back in our college days. He had people doing chargebacks on gas, saying it wasn't their vehicle! I forget the numbers but it was something like 20 Amex to 1 Visa because Visa is obviously smart enough to know gasoline is non-refundable. You pump it, you drive off and you use it, it's gone! I mean seriously, If I had a stolen CC, the first thing I'd do is fill up my tank instead of ordering a pallet of laptops
Fine, so it's a throwback to the warez BBS'es of the early 90's. Yes I understand that you're only trading with respectable file hounds, but I'd rather have ten thousand eyeballs on a torrent than two dozen. Here's my personal experience: for popular stuff, the public trackers are loaded with people and run super fast. For hard-to-find stuff, yes a private forum might give better leads, simply because its users "care" more and are willing to honor requests.
Leechers have always been and will forever be, yes there are cheapasses who hit and run, but a good chunk of that problem lies on the ISP's asymmetrical bandwidth allocation. Even me, I have 15 mbit down, 2 mbit up it's puke. If I had 10mbit both ways instead, uploading would be much less of a nag because it can take ten times longer to share a file than to just leech it. Most people have far worse connectivity, often 3m/256k for DSL. ISP's will need to open more upload juice to foster the P2P transition of the internet. Right now, high upload bandwidth is still considered a premium business privilege, a very costly one at that. Capitalism stifles evolution yet again!
I always questioned the validity of private trackers. They're all over the place and they're all minuscule blips in Mininova's shadow, and the other big free sites. Why the hell would someone want to restrict themselves to a small group of file sharers ? It's fine to create a user group with common interests, but the very spirit of P2P is to get as many people in on the fun. Post your torrents on the public trackers, and link to them in your private forums for your friends to enjoy, as well as anyone else on the net who might happen to like what you're doing.
:P It's not the vehicle (client) that matters, it's the money (bandwidth).
Banning clients is like kicking good customers out of a store because they choose to drive a GM instead of your favorite Nissan
As a shop tech who assembles roughly a thousand PC's every month, I have to step in and say you have cobbled together the flakiest components ever seen. Allow me to explain:
Abit is in deep doggy-doo because they're under fire for extremely shoddy quality control and RMA service. I don't carry Abit anymore because 3 out of 4 boards would come back to us, and then Abit would sit on them for a few months before repairing or replacing them because they have no idea how to run a business (money and workforce issues).
ATI Graphics consistently have the worst drivers. I wish I could root for my own province, but they're really clueless when it comes to software. Even worse is their Radeon Xpress motherboard chipset, they're trying to play catchup with NVidia and they suck at it. NVidia made their chipset mistakes many years ago, now the NForce is at its 4th major generation and running strong. ATI's chipset is young and sluggish/unstable with frequent compatibility issues, and the whole Crossfire thing is a joke. They are pushing the wrong way, not only are they no longer capable of innovating, they're also incapable of mimicking their competitor's innovations. I'm very worried about their future.
Toshiba DVD-RW.. meh. They make fancy looking notebooks, and they make fancy looking DVD-RW drives. In terms of actual performance they're very average. If you want a great all around burner, get a Pioneer. If you want the absolute best, go Plextor (and pay the premium for elite quality gear). Anything else is a waste of time and money. Sony is garbage, LG is still not quite there yet, BenQ is laughable.. NEC is not bad if you get it cheaply, but these days the differences are in the single digits, big deal. Your time and grief spent troubleshooting a flimsy unit is worth far more.
Now that I've bashed everything, here are my personal recommendations.. I'm not particularly tied to any brand name, I'm just drawing from experience. Motherboards should be Asus or MSI, graphics go Matrox or NVidia low-end. Optical drive should be Pioneer or Plextor and nothing else.
Finally hard drives. I like Maxtor myself, they're not for everyone, they require a little extra care (cooling mostly). Seagate is nice with their 5 year warranty but they're the slowest drives I've ever seen in that class. WD is just in the middle, not too fast, not too slow, I like them for desktops.
DIY servers can be a great thing if you know what you're doing. Being qualified to use a screwdriver does not mean you know how to build a good PC, just as owning a multimeter does not make you an electrician, and compiling the VB.NET samples does not make you a programmer. Learn the ins and outs of the business, which may involve lots of research and meta-research, browsing forums to find out the general opinion about a given product; OR you could be smart and hire someone else who does this professionally. Myself, I don't see why everyone "needs" a server-class machine with 12 gigs of ram and I don't know how much disk. It runs commodity PC sotware that is designed for 32 bit processors at this time. The hardware is very similar to conventional retail parts, it's the support that juggles those options.
I second this opinion. Remote debugging or "tuning" could be rather easily done from a serial terminal. There's no need for an HTTP protocol and the sloppy hassle of HTML forms; just a quick text console, not unlike those found in games such as Quake.
get myvar, set myvar xxyy, toggle myvar, listvars etc etc
Yeah, web interfaces are nice for end-users, but since you just want to debug your own one-off app and it's quite likely you will be the only person doing it, might as well be lazy - I mean efficient - and code the simplest interface possible, as long as it does what you need.
That's because they can claim a tax break on the expenses, yet not pay tax on the income until they break even. Hypothetically, if you invested 10 mil in the film, got 4 mil back in taxes.. then you make back your initial 10 mil.. you don't pay tax on that 10. You essentially launder 10 million dollars without any law-breaking.
They never said it was to drive your own kids away. If you feel the need to chase your own offspring away with this device, maybe you should have thought about that before having kids in the first place. The greatest problem with this generation is careless/mindless parents. S'funny, but when I was in my teens I didn't loiter in mall entrances yelling my stupid little head off, or wreaking random vandalism, stealing cars or evangelizing about getting high every goddamned moment of my worthless life.
Maybe that's because I had an education and an actual life to get started. Today's kids are so disaffected and confused, makes me wonder why they're even brought into the world. Kids having kids, that's the problem!
Statistical manufacturing defects aside, I'd say the #1 reason for a failed drive is a cheap system. That 200$ PC uses a 7$ power supply and no fans except the CPU. Not all 300watt power supplies are created equal.
These hard drives need juice and they need cooling. I have been a Maxtor nut forever because they run faster than any WD or Seagate, but they run hot. The average moron with their PC in a desk drawer will kill one of them in the first month. I've been running my raid-0 for two years now without a hitch. The trick ? I always stick a nice big 120mm fan right across the hard drives, blowing around them. And believe me, they don't sit idle all day. I've got 6-way Raid-0 for a reason; I thrash them harder than your average SQL server.
Now I'm citing Maxtor because they tend to run the hottest (performance driven), but this applies to all hard drives. If you let heat stagnate, you will kill any electronic device, it is merely a matter of time. Take care of your gear and it will last a long time.
I'm betting it's the burner. From working in a PC shop, and seeing what stupid people buy every day, it's the cheap burners and media that are responsible for this crap. LG burners, blah.. BenQ burners, puke. Pioneer never let me down, nor Plextor (except for their crippleware firmwares). I buy only Ritek/Ridata media which I consider very good for the price, but if I could find a reliable source of TDK I'd probably stick with those. I'd rather pay 50% more and get something that works everywhere everytime.
I think what the parent-parent posted meant is that the industry thrives on spontaneous mistakes. No one in their right mind would pay 2.50 for a crappy compressed version of a song on a phone, unless they were either stupid or so rich they don't care (or hte money made them stupid). Otherwise you'd have to be a little tipsy, or showing off your fancy 500$ phone to some dumb fashion slut who wants your wallet, not your seed.
The reason this is "wrong" is that many of us dislike the telecoms for abusing their customers. They lock us in and screw with us, and they buy the laws to make it enforceable. Yes, it is irresponsible for someone to pay 2.50$ for a downloadable song, but what's truly irresponsible is giving money to these detached corporations. Just like doing drugs is "wrong".. I don't give a flying @#&$ what you do with your brain cells, the problem isn't about people getting stoned, it's about money falling into the hands of criminals.
While it's not illegal to be a ruthless telecom, it certainly is immoral.
Somehow I don't think people will _need_ to upgrade to the latest Windows in order to function. Your mother will still have Firefox on XP, your inbred neighbor's kids will still use MSN Messenger to trade spyware, your office will still run 20-year old Cobol apps through a broken terminal emulator that doesn't run on anything but NT 4.
:D 32-bit my ass
When Windows 95 came out, many people waited a bit before jumping on. Really it didn't offer significant performance or usability above Win 3.11, and most people didn't know how to dual-boot (or didn't want to). Hell, I mostly used Win95 as a multitasking kernel so I could code in one dosbox and Telix in another
How thy hell is this going to work in the consumer world ? Is there going to be a standard hardware base or will each "ambient game" require its own set of props ? The theory is mildly entertaining if one ignores the practicality issues.
"ambFarCry requires at least two ambPalmTrees to run. Go back to the store, punkass!"
We already have force-feedback controllers that either suck, or are poorly utilized by developers/designers. Now we're going to have a buttload of props that all suck, and take designers' attention away from the actual gameplay even more than the current orgy of ultra-excessive graphics and gee-whiz sound.
I haven't touched Java with a 10-foot pole in over 5 years, but wouldn't this be something you do with the Reflection functions to get the list of defined classes and have yourself some Foreach fun.
Fine then. Screw litigation, let's lynch these crooks!
There is no "perfect" solution to human mischief. Some people are honest and well-meaning, many more are selfish, treacherous and war-like. As long as we will have these two polar factions, we will have litigation.
Having a kiddie techno-toy does not make one a nerd. I think it was easier being a kid nerd in the 80's because we didn't have the zoo-formerly-known-as-the-internet.. we didn't have pretty clicky things. You either knew how to use the CLI (and/or Basic) or you went out and played "kill yourself on a bike". Today's kids just hop on a game and waste their life away, learning to snipe the red team with sub-pixel accuracy, but mention the command line and they will either say "Dos is kewl, nigga!" or "Dos is for old farts". Either way, I feel the potent urge to smack them over the head with the keyboard. Kids don't learn shit anymore, they are taught to be lazy and even expect/accept being mentally inferior, delegating the important stuff to "experts".
$100 worth of memory is just the beginning. When suing, you can try to argue the lost income of dealing with this problem.. factor in troubleshooting time, any money paid for tech support, the time you spent on the phone arguing with the dipshits.. time is money.
Warranties are nice for the casual user, but they're an intangible asset for a company. When you buy something with a 3 year warranty, you can count on having it work for 3 years and not have to budget for it because it will be repaired/replaced free of charge. If that warranty becomes void, so does the paper value of your product.
Your 100$ device has cost you far more in lost time and potential income, you'd be a fool to not try and stick it to them, if only to send a message to these crooks.
Why is it that we hear another story about Vista every day now, and yet the software is still in a very speculative state ? Do I really care what bullcrap the insider-of-the-week imagined when he repeatedly smacked his forehead against the desk this morning ?
Vista will be whatever Vista is when it is released. There have been more features dropped than added and all this media spin is sounding like the Weekly World News and their alien transgendered babies.
"We're going to do this, we'll revolutionize that".. why don't they just shut the hell up and build it already. It's just a freaking GUI, not rocket science here.
Chum, I'm in Canada. We have federally-funded healthcare. Yes, it is overtaxed because of all these jerkoffs and welfare retards hogging the emergency rooms for inane reasons, simply because it's free. It takes anywhere from 4 to 8 hours to see a freaking doctor unless you have severe trauma. At least I don't have to worry too much about my health, just knowing there's a system in place to take care of me is quite comforting, and I am sure this has a pacifying effect on society in general.
They pay for the medical consultation and any surgery, but not for any prescription drugs once you leave the hospital. This creates a scenario where an ill person may have to commit a substantial portion of their income to life-sustaining drugs. Again, those who are too lazy or stupid to work, have their prescriptions paid by the government. Yep, our "friendly" system has it all backwards but oh well.
The fact that this is a shit world is superficial. It is not by lack of natural resources or human labor, nor is it caused by greater forces such as geography or natural disasters. Our world is shit because of greed. Why must people take from others to be happy ? This is untrue.
Why do we pay enormous prices for gas ? Because the oil companies are soon to be running out of their precious product, and are unwilling to adapt to the ecological shift they directly provoked. Why is there inflation ? Because some people want to see bigger numbers, even though the true value does not increase. One person charges more, so the buyer wants a higher salary to maintain his/her living standards. The employer needs to recoup the added expense, thus prices increase. We're still poor, we just redefine the threshold every year. Why do we steal from one another ? Why do we kill ? Why do we consume ? Because we want what we don't have, more specifically we want what others have. If humankind could break away from this infinite loop, we just might open the door for broad-scale progress. Until then, we're just hamsters on a big wheel..
One of the main reasons why dual-layer discs are pricier to manufacture is because you have double the failure rate. Actually gluing the two substrates together is a piece of cake, but if either one of those layers has a defect you have to throw out the pair to keep the production lines in sync.
Another strong reason is sheer soulless capitalism. It is a "privilege" to have dual-layer media, therefore the common american entrepreneur will charge a hefty premium for that privilege. It is no different than comparing low-end vs high-end hifi equipment, the cost of parts represents a minuscule portion of the price hike. If you want the bigger/better stuff, someone will make you pay dearly for it.
I just want to be clear on this: are pharmaceutical megacorps good or bad ? The way I see it, they are effectively imposing a ransom on health. Why are drugs so expensive ? Because they are in demand. It's basically like saying "If you don't pay, you're gonna die. So exactly how much money have you got ?" And they jack up the price accordingly.
Health care and medicinal research should either be government-communized so everyone can have access to proper treatment and medicine, or shot to hell so as to skim off the weak and purify the breed through natural selection.
Now I still hate humans and wish most of them would die a horrible death for my primal amusement, but I think I'd rather see fully subsidized health care for all, and toss these glorified drug dealers back into the ranks of the working poor.
The less rich people there are, the less poor people there are. Now I'm not saying to swing into full-on communism, but maybe as a modern society we could find an efficient mix of various ideologies in order to benefit humankind as a whole. Capitalism at the expense of lives only breeds more hatred.
Why don't we drop the nationalism altogether. I am not a North American, I am a PERSON goddamnit. It's because of this patriotism that we have racism at all. Why are Texans typically rednecks ? No they're not, that's just the stereotype that's been painted onto them. Well the problem is that eventually stereotypes become reality because not everyone has the IQ required to tell the difference between fact and fiction. There really are some people who think every person in Texas is drunk, owns a busted old pick-up truck, has a hot daughter and answers the door in the nude with a ballcap and shotgun.
I live in Canada. I am on the northern part of the american continent. That's all it is, it's a line on a map. It has nothing to do with who I am.
Does having more advertising shoved into our skulls really have a positive net effect on income ? Some commercials are actually entertaining (mostly funny ones), but for the most part it's more of the same poop. Some dumb ho walking around in new overpriced jeans (and little else), or some white-trash male model promoting chewing gum. It's goddamned chewing gum, if I feel like gum I'll look at the display rack at the convenience store. :P
I like advertising that teaches me new stuff.. informs me of products I was not aware of, and hopefully that I'm interested in. I don't need to see some dyke faking a (bad) orgasm in her shower thanks to X-garbage-shampoo. I don't need McDonalds to remind me they still sell BigMacs. I might actually like to hear about a new soft drink, and they could shut the hell up once half the world knows about Diet Ultra Coke Purple. Once I've tried it, I don't need more advertising, I'll just buy some at the store if I want it.
The day marketing stops treating humankind as puppets, is the day they will earn my respect.
Meh, I've played many older games in a VMwared Win98 environment when they wouldn't install/run on XP. For the rest I use DosBox, it's grand!
Anything beats powering up that noisy old 486.
Thank you for posting the facts. I'm sick of repeating this stuff to ignorants all over the net. Daylight savings time is a pain in the butt, but it exists for a reason, and for once that reason doesn't descend from some ruler's unchecked vanity. No matter what the bureaucrats tell you, we're still animals and thus we exist according to the rules of nature. The fact that we have these ugly buildings and cube-farm hate factories is just fluff. Sunlight is a ridiculously important energy source which is why most of us live by day and sleep at night. Adapting our synthetic time system to nature's clock is only logical.
While my factual information in these matters is absolutely nil, I would be very doubtful that such an attack, if successfully executed, would really cripple the economy that badly. Since I didn't just land off a spaceship, I remember a time when north americans had jobs in the high-tech sector and made lots of money with their skills. If India goes sky-high, all these hypocritical capitalists will simply have to re-hire the local geeks and pay them full salary plus benefits. Sure, it's going to cost 20x more, but the work will get done.
On the upside, maybe some of us will be happy to speak to our own kind when we call tech support. I swear there is nothing more aggravating than having someone read off a troubleshooting list to you with the kind of english that makes baby jesuses cry. Sorry folks but when your job is about speaking, you'd better be a damned good speaker. We don't have wheelchair mailmen because that would be wrong, why do we have non-english phone agents ?