Heh heh. That was pretty funny. And your imagination that dell has (multiple!) actual experts working for them, you should go into writing sci-fi!
On the other hand, I don't believe that dell's windows cost per pc is $0 or even $30, which is the lowest discount anyone has been able to find so far, and since dell sells support as a separate line item, it should be possible to drop the windows cost without adding in a corresponding support cost (ignoring the crappiness of dell hardware for a second, it would be nice to be able to buy a dell without paying for windows or for software support... and since dell can ship a pc with a hardware-test partition on the drive, i don't see any reason they can't offer hardware support separately from software support).
I think they pretty much expect you to upgrade your motherboard ($50-$100) more often than you upgrade your video card ($500). That seems like a pretty safe bet to me. Why not just purchase a more modern motherboard and transplant everything if you really are ready for a big new video card purchase. If your CPU/memory is sufficiently out of date that you can't, your system probably couldn't make good use out of the video card upgrade anyway.
Well, I think it is pretty safe to say that the target audience for these cards is high end gamers willing to spend ~$2000/year on game playing hardware. Once you're in that target market, you surely do have either a 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 monitor, in which case you really do want something faster pretty badly. And with LCDs getting their response times lower and lower (enabling higher frame rates), these cards are (as usual) going to become useful for an ever growing percentage of the gaming population. All of this is essentially no different from how things have been for the last 3-4 years already.
Well, the key problem is that in marketing speak, x is cool, but xi is wierd and hard to pronounce. ex eye? zi? No matter how you pronounce it, it just sounds wimpy compared to x. So once you reach x, what can you do? You pretty much have to shift to a different naming/numbering scheme.
I'm sure he means that CDs are his data source, not necessarily his final data format.
He buys used cd's and cds direct from musicians to avoid the RIAA tax. In case you don't know, there are shops in most communities that resell used cds for a fraction of the original price. Often you can get them for only $2 or $3, and are usually allowed to preview to your hearts content to verify there are no scratches you can't live with. Likewise, many musicians sell their music direct to the fan either by their website of at concert venues on cd, again cutting out the RIAA and selling for much lower than the price of a new cd.
Then presumably like most normal people, he rips his cds to mp3 and puts them on the mp3 player of his choice.
I'm really unclear why you thought his post was trolling, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Maybe you weren't replying to the post you seemed to be?
You're definitely not alone. About half of the people who have actually read the books are on our side. About 48% think the books are pretty good. And then there is this rabid remainder who are obsessed with the books being some sort of divine hand me down like the bible, and scream and yell if people don't bow down and worship the author.
It's the loud yelling that makes people think the books must be something special.
Personally, my theory is just that he was one of the earlier authors to get published in the genre, and so now people who want to can try to claim that everything else in the field is derivative, and nothing else is as good. But from a more rational book reading stand point, it is pretty clear that several more recent authors have far exceeded LOTR.
Tolkien fans just really have to learn to put up with the fact that anyone with a love for fantasy thinks they can rewrite Tolkien's stories better, and that they are right.
Surely it can't be evil to support an evil oppressive regime if it makes you a lot of money? I believe IBM did pretty well by the holocaust, and no one called that evil, right?
Of course, in doing that, they probably ought to think about revising their 'do no evil' motto, to something along the lines of 'do evil whenever it is economically convenient'.
That's not entirely true, some of the cheap flash is only 10k writes, and you only have to stick one bit to make a poorly designed one dead. How much effort would it take you to write the same bit (or byte) 10k times?
Yeesh, that's fraught with potential complications. What if you lose your wife, or your wife is stolen? What if she leaves you? What if you have to cannibalize her for food?
I'd have to disagree: I don't think anyone really knows what is going on in all the various fields of computing, the field has gotten too big. Likewise, 10 year predictions about computing made 10 years ago were drastically off. If you can't predict 10 years, I call that pretty unpredictable. And control it? Not even china, the most authoritarian regime around can control what people are doing with computers in their country.
Here's a short argument: gas prices tripled in the last 5 years, but society didn't collapse. As prices rise higher and higher, people will push and invest more and more in oil alternatives. Already there are at least 4 major oil alternatives which could power our society within 5 years if we were sufficiently desperate: solar, wind, fission, fusion. We also aren't making a lot of one time investments at a rapid rate, which we could if we got desperate enough, such as replacing all of our lighting with LEDs, and replacing older energy gobbling computers.
The bottom line is that we're working on efficiency and cost improvements to all of these technologies and making a gradual transition over to using them. If the oil situation gets serious, we'll accelerate our conversion.
On the other hand, more work in less time equals greater productivity. When everyone gets more done, there is more to go around. If a road worker can lay road in half the time, and is expected to do twice as much, we all benefit by receiving more roads for a lower price. This frees up more money in our budgets to spend on vacations to tropical island beaches. In all seriousness, look at the fraction of the population which can reasonably afford a tropical island vacation at least once in their lifetimes, or even yearly. That fraction is growing rapidly, to the point where in fact the tropical island vacation destinations are getting a bit overcrowded!
In many cases, the same company that sells its software with no guarantees, offers guarantees at a higher price. Microsoft offers licenses with greater guarantees for example, they're just exorbitantly expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh. That was pretty funny. And your imagination that dell has (multiple!) actual experts working for them, you should go into writing sci-fi!
... and since dell can ship a pc with a hardware-test partition on the drive, i don't see any reason they can't offer hardware support separately from software support).
On the other hand, I don't believe that dell's windows cost per pc is $0 or even $30, which is the lowest discount anyone has been able to find so far, and since dell sells support as a separate line item, it should be possible to drop the windows cost without adding in a corresponding support cost (ignoring the crappiness of dell hardware for a second, it would be nice to be able to buy a dell without paying for windows or for software support
I think they pretty much expect you to upgrade your motherboard ($50-$100) more often than you upgrade your video card ($500). That seems like a pretty safe bet to me. Why not just purchase a more modern motherboard and transplant everything if you really are ready for a big new video card purchase. If your CPU/memory is sufficiently out of date that you can't, your system probably couldn't make good use out of the video card upgrade anyway.
You think the cards are going to be able to stay inside the case?
Well, I think it is pretty safe to say that the target audience for these cards is high end gamers willing to spend ~$2000/year on game playing hardware. Once you're in that target market, you surely do have either a 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 monitor, in which case you really do want something faster pretty badly. And with LCDs getting their response times lower and lower (enabling higher frame rates), these cards are (as usual) going to become useful for an ever growing percentage of the gaming population. All of this is essentially no different from how things have been for the last 3-4 years already.
Well, the key problem is that in marketing speak, x is cool, but xi is wierd and hard to pronounce. ex eye? zi? No matter how you pronounce it, it just sounds wimpy compared to x. So once you reach x, what can you do? You pretty much have to shift to a different naming/numbering scheme.
What I think you're seeing is the definitive proof that windows is worthless.
I'm sure he means that CDs are his data source, not necessarily his final data format.
He buys used cd's and cds direct from musicians to avoid the RIAA tax. In case you don't know, there are shops in most communities that resell used cds for a fraction of the original price. Often you can get them for only $2 or $3, and are usually allowed to preview to your hearts content to verify there are no scratches you can't live with. Likewise, many musicians sell their music direct to the fan either by their website of at concert venues on cd, again cutting out the RIAA and selling for much lower than the price of a new cd.
Then presumably like most normal people, he rips his cds to mp3 and puts them on the mp3 player of his choice.
I'm really unclear why you thought his post was trolling, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Maybe you weren't replying to the post you seemed to be?
Yep, and you know they were using cubicles even during the creation of their most successfull software products, like OS/2 and DB2.
You're definitely not alone. About half of the people who have actually read the books are on our side. About 48% think the books are pretty good. And then there is this rabid remainder who are obsessed with the books being some sort of divine hand me down like the bible, and scream and yell if people don't bow down and worship the author.
It's the loud yelling that makes people think the books must be something special.
Personally, my theory is just that he was one of the earlier authors to get published in the genre, and so now people who want to can try to claim that everything else in the field is derivative, and nothing else is as good. But from a more rational book reading stand point, it is pretty clear that several more recent authors have far exceeded LOTR.
Worse, that's assuming you ignore ST2:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367093/
Tolkien fans just really have to learn to put up with the fact that anyone with a love for fantasy thinks they can rewrite Tolkien's stories better, and that they are right.
Same thing with bungie though, bungie just paid some programmers and artists to make the game, and then slapped their name on it.
Surely it can't be evil to support an evil oppressive regime if it makes you a lot of money? I believe IBM did pretty well by the holocaust, and no one called that evil, right?
Of course, in doing that, they probably ought to think about revising their 'do no evil' motto, to something along the lines of 'do evil whenever it is economically convenient'.
That's not entirely true, some of the cheap flash is only 10k writes, and you only have to stick one bit to make a poorly designed one dead. How much effort would it take you to write the same bit (or byte) 10k times?
Yeesh, that's fraught with potential complications. What if you lose your wife, or your wife is stolen? What if she leaves you? What if you have to cannibalize her for food?
I'd have to disagree: I don't think anyone really knows what is going on in all the various fields of computing, the field has gotten too big. Likewise, 10 year predictions about computing made 10 years ago were drastically off. If you can't predict 10 years, I call that pretty unpredictable. And control it? Not even china, the most authoritarian regime around can control what people are doing with computers in their country.
Here's a short argument: gas prices tripled in the last 5 years, but society didn't collapse. As prices rise higher and higher, people will push and invest more and more in oil alternatives. Already there are at least 4 major oil alternatives which could power our society within 5 years if we were sufficiently desperate: solar, wind, fission, fusion. We also aren't making a lot of one time investments at a rapid rate, which we could if we got desperate enough, such as replacing all of our lighting with LEDs, and replacing older energy gobbling computers.
The bottom line is that we're working on efficiency and cost improvements to all of these technologies and making a gradual transition over to using them. If the oil situation gets serious, we'll accelerate our conversion.
On the other hand, more work in less time equals greater productivity. When everyone gets more done, there is more to go around. If a road worker can lay road in half the time, and is expected to do twice as much, we all benefit by receiving more roads for a lower price. This frees up more money in our budgets to spend on vacations to tropical island beaches. In all seriousness, look at the fraction of the population which can reasonably afford a tropical island vacation at least once in their lifetimes, or even yearly. That fraction is growing rapidly, to the point where in fact the tropical island vacation destinations are getting a bit overcrowded!
I think the engineer says something more along the lines of: "The glass is rigorously designed to accomodate twice normal loads."
You mean this flying car?
m l?tid=105&tid=126&tid=159
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/01/0148210.sht
What, are you poor or something?
Well, at least not in most children's bibles. The adult versions are of course much more blue, to keep the flock entertained.
The struggling games industry?
y Id=4172753
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
I'm sure they cry themselves to sleep on their mattresses made of money every night.
In many cases, the same company that sells its software with no guarantees, offers guarantees at a higher price. Microsoft offers licenses with greater guarantees for example, they're just exorbitantly expensive.
And then order all of their national ISPs to switch over? It's not like we have technical control over their DNS lookups.