Warantees cost a lot of money even if your products never fail. The manufacturers all say that the majority of their returns are perfectly good drives, the user just didn't have the skills to diagnose the real problem, or take the time to run the bootable scanner utility they all provide.
That, combined with the number of drives returned due to subtle abuse, like running too hot or bouncing it around too much while spinning, means that the return rate of defective drives is much lower than the actual return rate.
The only time this little game works is with stocks where you can totally saturate the volume of some tiny stock for the a few days, then use the rapid price increase to scam people into thinking that there is something worthy about a worthless stock, so that they buy in as you sell out. This is, of course, illegal. Some people were able to manipulate prices without much cash back during the dot-com days, they relied completely on other suckers's money to do the inflating of the prices
That's what all those stock scam spams you get are attempting to do, they are almost always on stocks that trade less than $5, off major markets, and an average daily volume of a couple thousand shares. You would have to have some serious cash to pull it off on a major market stock, and traders would notice and suspect a hostile takeover bid if someone suddendly started buying up large chunks.... The SEC would also notice and keep an eye on you.
To bring it back round to the topic at hand, 1 billion bucks would allow you to buy pretty much every public Linux company, for cash.
Though way back when they never thought we would use over 1GB,
That's true. Could you imagine 1GB of data on a home computer back when the Commodore PET had 16k ram?
We will always find uses for the huge new technologies.
At work, for example, the new 320GB drives are going to be a boon. I can imagine backing up our whole archive onto two drives! A few years back the only option was a 1TB tape robot that cost over $100,000. Our RAID was about 30GB back then.
Man, it's not hard, these things are basically peltier junctions with a hot nuclear mass on one end.
One thing that I think is questionable though is that NASA seems to have used this sort of power supply a lot, but the government never informed the public that they were launching sizable masses of radioactive matter into space.
I believe that all electronic devices sold in the USA automatically carry a one-year manufacturer's warranty, no exceptions. (Is this law BTW?)
Wrong, and no.
They can disclaim most things, but merchantability for a certain purpose is one thing they usually cannot disclaim, no matter if they put it in capital legalese or not.
In a year or so if my hard drive goes up i'd rather get a newer, bigger one.
And this is the exact reason manufacturers are going with shorter warrantees on their low end drives. If you buy one of the low-end Maxtor 20GB drives in a year or so, in three more years, they won't have those in stock, and will be forced to send you a 100GB drive if you RMA it.
Maxtor has already said their high capactiy and high end drives will have a full three year warranty, and the same MTTF rating as SCSI drives. I think you will see price cuts, and intense price competition on the low end, you may not associate it with the shorter warantee, but they will come. Imagine buying a new, in production, not EOLed hard disk for $30... I think that's coming soon.
I think I am safe in saying that never before in history has there been such a gap between low and high end of in-production hard disks. In the next year, Maxtor will have drives from 20GB to 320GB. When 320 megabyte disks came into production, 20 meg drives were distant history, the smallest in production was something like 100 megs.
The nature of the hardware market is changing, I'd say that this is driving these warantee decisions, not some vague threat of magnetic flux unreliability.
What I'd like to see, and I suspect I'm not alone here, is similar software that can sort email into any number of categories, not just spam and non-spam.
You must run Windows. Try a modern OS sometime. This has been a standard feature for years.
I saw that... That's what I mean about getting rid of VM changes. Some kernel people I talked to on IRC still seemed to have "reservations" to put it lightly.
Well because it used to make extensive VM changes to the kernel, which was keeping it out for so long. The way I understand it, it was a direct port of the IRIX XFS mostly, and thus also had some IRIXisms that could cause problems on Linux. I read a recent post to lkml that indicated they had cleaned it of VM changes, but I really didn't expect a merge so soon.
This is pretty unexpected, at least for me. I know they had cleaned out the VM changes and things of that sort recently, but this is really something that I did not expect to see so soon.
But the software makers claim you never owned anything, you only licensed the use of their property.
Realtors(tm) have a book that they are not allowed to let out of their hands, ever. I don't think they ever "own" the book, it is only licensed for their use by being a Realtor(tm). No, I am not just being paranoid about the trademark thing either. You are either a Realtor(tm), and pay their fees or you are a real estate agent.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe is it in fact very hard (except through donations) to spend a billion dollar, while it is extremely easy to invest them.
You must be that South Park guy who got trapped in ice in the early 90s.
Warantees cost a lot of money even if your products never fail. The manufacturers all say that the majority of their returns are perfectly good drives, the user just didn't have the skills to diagnose the real problem, or take the time to run the bootable scanner utility they all provide.
That, combined with the number of drives returned due to subtle abuse, like running too hot or bouncing it around too much while spinning, means that the return rate of defective drives is much lower than the actual return rate.
To expand on what you said for the uninitiated:
The only time this little game works is with stocks where you can totally saturate the volume of some tiny stock for the a few days, then use the rapid price increase to scam people into thinking that there is something worthy about a worthless stock, so that they buy in as you sell out. This is, of course, illegal. Some people were able to manipulate prices without much cash back during the dot-com days, they relied completely on other suckers's money to do the inflating of the prices
That's what all those stock scam spams you get are attempting to do, they are almost always on stocks that trade less than $5, off major markets, and an average daily volume of a couple thousand shares. You would have to have some serious cash to pull it off on a major market stock, and traders would notice and suspect a hostile takeover bid if someone suddendly started buying up large chunks.... The SEC would also notice and keep an eye on you.
To bring it back round to the topic at hand, 1 billion bucks would allow you to buy pretty much every public Linux company, for cash.
Yeah I think I munged together merchantability and fitness for a purpose.
Evercase from newegg.com are inexpensive and very nice quality. If you need a new case for a desktop/low-end-server I highly recommend one.
Though way back when they never thought we would use over 1GB,
That's true. Could you imagine 1GB of data on a home computer back when the Commodore PET had 16k ram?
We will always find uses for the huge new technologies.
At work, for example, the new 320GB drives are going to be a boon. I can imagine backing up our whole archive onto two drives! A few years back the only option was a 1TB tape robot that cost over $100,000. Our RAID was about 30GB back then.
Man, it's not hard, these things are basically peltier junctions with a hot nuclear mass on one end.
One thing that I think is questionable though is that NASA seems to have used this sort of power supply a lot, but the government never informed the public that they were launching sizable masses of radioactive matter into space.
I'm just waiting to hear that Hollywood is making Slashdot into a movie.
:)
It's just a matter of time until some producer reads at -1 and sees all the captivating fan fiction involving the Slashdot crew.
I believe that all electronic devices sold in the USA automatically carry a one-year manufacturer's warranty, no exceptions. (Is this law BTW?)
Wrong, and no.
They can disclaim most things, but merchantability for a certain purpose is one thing they usually cannot disclaim, no matter if they put it in capital legalese or not.
As always IRECTAL, uh I mean IANAL.
Some ISPs scan for open relays and shut you down if they find one. Of course such an ISP sucks, but it is another risk I have seen no one mention.
In a year or so if my hard drive goes up i'd rather get a newer, bigger one.
And this is the exact reason manufacturers are going with shorter warrantees on their low end drives. If you buy one of the low-end Maxtor 20GB drives in a year or so, in three more years, they won't have those in stock, and will be forced to send you a 100GB drive if you RMA it.
Maxtor has already said their high capactiy and high end drives will have a full three year warranty, and the same MTTF rating as SCSI drives. I think you will see price cuts, and intense price competition on the low end, you may not associate it with the shorter warantee, but they will come. Imagine buying a new, in production, not EOLed hard disk for $30... I think that's coming soon.
I think I am safe in saying that never before in history has there been such a gap between low and high end of in-production hard disks. In the next year, Maxtor will have drives from 20GB to 320GB. When 320 megabyte disks came into production, 20 meg drives were distant history, the smallest in production was something like 100 megs.
The nature of the hardware market is changing, I'd say that this is driving these warantee decisions, not some vague threat of magnetic flux unreliability.
frothing Linux zealot
Mmmmmm, frothy...
What I'd like to see, and I suspect I'm not alone here, is similar software that can sort email into any number of categories, not just spam and non-spam.
You must run Windows. Try a modern OS sometime. This has been a standard feature for years.
would us telling our less-knowledgeable friends and relations NOT TO BUY FROM SPAMMERS!
I can hear them now:
"I didn't buy from a spammer, it said 'THIS IS NOT SPAM!!!' and it had legit looking unsubscribe info."
You might do better to send out a spam, then murder all the buyers once you get their address. Intellectual cleansing.
He was running an open relay. He was too ignorant to know it.
Banner ads suck, but all my Google adwords get at least 2%, some as high as 10%.
Give people what they want, and you waste a lot less time and money.
Do not confuse a honeypot with a honeynet
This is neither of those.
Have multiple sources of income (a la Yahoo!)
This is how Slashdot stay afloat, they accept money in exchange for "Slashvertisements", as announced earlier this year.
Do you use the closed source nvidia drivers or the shitty nv driver?
I saw that... That's what I mean about getting rid of VM changes. Some kernel people I talked to on IRC still seemed to have "reservations" to put it lightly.
I'm think that you are thinking of XLV and not XFS.
Well because it used to make extensive VM changes to the kernel, which was keeping it out for so long. The way I understand it, it was a direct port of the IRIX XFS mostly, and thus also had some IRIXisms that could cause problems on Linux. I read a recent post to lkml that indicated they had cleaned it of VM changes, but I really didn't expect a merge so soon.
This is pretty unexpected, at least for me. I know they had cleaned out the VM changes and things of that sort recently, but this is really something that I did not expect to see so soon.
Why should I pay for entertainment, then be forced to watch advertisements?
Then find new entertainment. It's what we call a free market.
But the software makers claim you never owned anything, you only licensed the use of their property.
Realtors(tm) have a book that they are not allowed to let out of their hands, ever. I don't think they ever "own" the book, it is only licensed for their use by being a Realtor(tm). No, I am not just being paranoid about the trademark thing either. You are either a Realtor(tm), and pay their fees or you are a real estate agent.