I know that, you know that, and yet there are still some people that call for two subwoofers in a system.
BTW, the home theater guides that say "put the subwoofer anywhere!" are the crappy ones. Low frequency sound is largely non-directional, but your room is still going to have nodes and antinodes. Putting the subwoofer in the wrong place can cause a node (or antinode) to be located right where your listening position is, which would suck royally.
Yes, moving your subwoofer around the room can make a big difference. But it's not going to make a difference as to your being able to sense the direction of the low frequency sound (which is the point of all the additional channels and speakers in the first place).
The 9.2 comment was mostly a joke anyway... Most people are still hoping to even get a 5.1 setup, much less anything higher (heck, my Denon 3803 can do 7.1, but I have no intention of setting up the additional two channels).
If a normal neighborhood had 2 stationary panels on each home's roof pointed south that backfed to the utility power and they did the storage, it could be a reality right now.
That might work in some areas of the country... it certainly won't work worth a damn in any area of the country that experiences hail or severe winds (like, oh say, virtually the entire southeastern US). Hail utterly destroys solar panels, and it'll happen often enough that it'll ruin your cost return on them. High winds tend to cause tree branches (or entire trees... yes, it happened to my house under a year ago) to fall on houses, which may cause damage to the solar panels as well.
Not to mention that most people with a clue have already shaded their southern facing roof with trees, in order to reduce daylight exposure during summer and thus reduce energy usage.
And it completely ignores the issue that solar and wind power are considerably more expensive, on a KWh basis, than the alternatives. Including nuclear. Roughly twice the cost last time I checked. Yeah, I know... if pollution costs were included then the cost of production for fossil fuels would be considerably higher. Wouldn't significantly change the cost of production for natural gas though, which is a very large percentage of the power grid in the US now. And regardless, you have to compete in the real world, not some world where you get to make up the rules... about the best you can do is petition for new laws to be more strict on coal and oil fired power plants which would have the net effect of raising the production costs. Good luck.
Sure. When you can exactly replicate a real life concert audio experience (be that concert in an orchestral hall or a death metal moshpit) then we'll be done.
Realistically there's very little gained beyond 5.1, and most of the x.1 formats are seriously misrepresenting the numbering system (several of the 6.1 formats are actually 5.1 formats with a matrixed rear channel -- the first number is supposed to indicate the number of discrete channels).
Oh, and thus far nobody has come out with a standard with more than one subwoofer channel... although I wouldn't be surprised to see a 7.2 or 9.2 format in the near future, indicating front and rear low frequency outputs.
I still consider most charity calls less objectionable, and the number of police/fireman fund calls I've gotten is considerably smaller than the other charities. There's one non-profit that calls me, like clockwork, every 8 weeks. I'd really be annoyed if they stopped calling me in fact.
The Red Cross is one of those charities that is really hard to object to after all... and while they may literally want my blood (O+, and negative on the virus that would prevent usage by infants/children), but I'm not concerned about paid solicitors in this case:)
It would be illegal to make paid solicitors illegal, but this law is very nearly doing that. If the charity calls become an issue, I suspect the law will be amended to ensure that only valid charity calls are allowed (such as >50% going to the charity). As it stands, any donation you make to a paid solicitor isn't tax deductable since an insufficient amount is actually going to the non-profit.
BTW, feel free to report the various slimy "charity" calls you get to your Attourney General, and the charity in question... most of them are not real (esp. the police/fireman funds) and are in fact scams. And even if they are real, calling the charity and indicating that you didn't appreciate the call may send them a wake up call to move away from such fund raising methods.
There's some rather critical specs missing -- like the resolution of the display.
Also, this thing is going to be rather large, just based on the physical requirements -- a widescreen display and buttons on the front/top, a speaker, a disk loading mechanism, a USB port, an IRDA port, some other port, a memory stick port, a headphone jack, and some place for the battery. There better also be a DC input jack and audio/video output jacks (although all 3 of these could be done via the unknown extention port). There's absolutely no reason for 7.1 sound if you can't output the sound to an external receiver. And if you can do that, you'd better be able to output the video too -- since I sure wouldn't play on a tiny little screen when my TV is right in front of me.
The specs do sound intriguing, but some of them also seem off kilter, like the 7.1 sound.
I'm definitely sticking to the "wait and see" camp.
Yes, but telemarketing costs the phone company and everyone money because of the strain it puts on the infrastructure of the phone system.
Well, by that logic then the phone company should be happy if everyone cancels their service... after all, then there won't be anyone putting strain on the infrastructure!
Stupid.
Telemarketers are one of the more profitable segments for the phone company... they pay a shitload for trunk lines, they pay for service, and often pay for large chunks of long distance time. Yes, they use the infrastructure? So what? The telephone business, like many high infrastructure businesses, has huge up front costs and very little scaling. Think about how much money it costs to allow one person to make a phone call to any other person -- you have to run all that wire, put in all the switches, etc. Does it cost much more for them to call 10 other people? 100? 1000? Not really. Yes, you can wind up with needing more infrastructure eventually, but that all pales in comparison to how much it costs to even have the system in existence at all. Additional load is rarely an issue.
I would think that over the long run, they will see a higher percentage of sales per hour by eliminating people like me from the list.
Because that's not how they're paid.
Telemarketers aren't paid in sell through (there's a bonus, to be sure, and a rather large one, but it's not the majority of their pay by a long shot), they're paid primarily by number of solicitations. Reducing the number of potential numbers to be solicited reduces that eventual bill... and while it's true that less than 10% of all US numbers have signed up so far, the sign up rate in particular markets may be much, much higher -- which is what they're worried about. Telemarketers don't get told to call anyone in the US. They get a list of numbers to call or a demographic to call. They're very concerned about certain demographics being eliminated... especially since as the demographic shrinks (as more people sign up) it's likely to make the same person get called more frequently, making them want to sign up as well.
You're making the (incorrect) assumption that all states have a DNC list. As of this moment, there are only 36 states that either have or are going to have a DNC list. Of those, 6 have not yet gone into effect. (Data from here).
The various states have different rules regarding who can and cannot contact people on the DNC lists. In general this doesn't affect most telemarketers -- they're verbotten no matter what. Who it does affect are the somewhat more socially acceptable telemarketers, and the ones that are least likely to be trying to screw you for a profit -- pollsters, charities, etc. It makes their job more difficult and thus more expensive, which is rather silly since they're generally less objectionable than telemarketers trying to sell you crap.
On top of that there's jurisdictional issues when the telemarketer is from out of state. The odds of anyone collecting on a telemarketer in Alaska making illegal solicitations to someone in Alabama are considerably reduced when you have to deal with two different state laws than when you have to deal with a single Federal law.
Went to see it this past weekend since it was a friend's birthday weekend and my wife wanted to see it (Yes, she can appreciate a hot woman as well. Yes, I am a lucky bastard).
About the only redeeming feature of the movie was Angelina Jolie's nipples. And since they're in the first 15 minutes, you can feel free to save yourself and leave after that.
I really wasn't expecting much from the movie, but even then I was disappointed. The action scenes were mostly lackluster, no adrenaline, and no tension. There were a couple that weren't bad, but they didn't make up for the rest. The plot, which I expected to be weak and sad, was abysmal and painful. It doesn't hurt much simply because the entire movie is so forgetable.
Yes, I've seen far, far worse movies. But this is a rental at best. The reason the movie ticket sales are so bad is because the movie is so bad... it had nothing to do with the game. But why are we expecting companies/people to actually admit that they're to blame instead of pointing fingers?
I'm probably going to switch to Firebird/Thunderbird at home from Mozilla. I'm sick and tired of closing Mozilla Mail to discover that it's not REALLY closed. Instead it's still pulling messages off the POP mail server in the background. Which sucks when you want to use your ISP's webmail from work to check on email, only to discover that the mail has now been sucked down to your home PC and is inaccessible.
Stupid feature, and annoying as hell. I can't imagine any valid reason for doing it, or why it's not an option that's easily findable.
Does that player feel worse for having been eaten knowing it was a person being the bad guy, versus a bot/scripted game event? I doubt it. Do you feel guilty when playing Quake 3 and you frag the point leader in an elimination round?
There's a difference though, and it's the reason why people who play "evil" characters in MMORPGs quickly discover it's a bad idea.
In Quake, the entire point of the game is to kill the other players. Without that there's no game, and there's really relatively little downside to having been killed.
In a MMORPG RP'ing an evil person is usually seen as no different from being an asshole. Probably because there's not much difference in reality either, and in neither case do people want to deal with you. Yeah, great, you're a dark elf and you're supposed to be evil and look out for yourself and whatnot, but if you ditch the group because you were worried that you might die, screw you - I don't need to deal with that kind of crap. If I'm in a PvP area and you're killing people and keeping them from getting back to their corpses or whatever -- screw that too. It may be fun for you, but it sure as hell isn't for me, and as far as I'm concerned you're an asshole.
Which is the thing that people tend to forget when they play evil characters, or are griefers, or whatever -- there's a real person on the other end of that avatar, and they want to have fun too. Having your fun at the expense of others -- when there's other options that don't involve screwing someone else -- is deplorable, and you deserve to be treated as scum.
This was the concern about robots in auto factories as well -- that it would unemploy a vast percentage of the American automotive workforce as their jobs were replaced with robots.
Well... it didn't happen. Sure, robots are used almost exclusively for some automotive jobs now (like painting and very heavy welding), but the automotive industry discovered something.
Robots are expensive.
First, the capital outlay is non-trivial. If you drop $500k on a robot, that's the same as employing a $50/hr worker for about 4 years (once you include benefits and whatnot). Then you have to have programming, maintainence, and other upkeep, which is probably about 10%/year... which works out to be $50k. Where's the savings again? Sure, you may get tighter tolerances and some other fringe benefits, but you also lose some fringe benefits -- like an actual human being able to tell when a part is defective prior to attaching it.
I doubt that most service industries are going to move to automation on that kind of scale anytime soon. Sure, there are companies test marketing automated ordering systems, but that's cheap crap. Robotics to do the cooking and delivery would not be cheap, and now you're talking about replacing someone earning $6/hour instead of $50/hour. The economics don't make sense. Maybe they will one day, but I think it's a lot further off than the article suggests.
Talk about an utter lack of advertising. My brother-in-law and I found out about this... the day after. They certainly didn't put out much notice on this event.
I have 2 dead PCs, a dead monitor, and a dead laserjet that I need to be rid of. As well as a variety of components (mice, SCSI drives, SCSI cards, modems, motherboards, CPUs, etc) that are in operable condition. I've been looking into recycling options for the computers, and I'm trying to find someplace that will accept the components as a donation.
I've found some places for the recycling, but nobody for the donation. Yes, I have a list and a website, but so far all of my emails have either bounced or gone unresponded (and yes, Freebytes was one that didn't bother responding). None of the recycle stuff is cutting edge, but I've got to imagine that a couple of external 56k modems, a Zip drive, several small (2-4G) SCSI drives w/ adaptors, video cards, and an Athlon 750 w/ MB would be useful to a non-profit organization.
Sure... and when you get graphics quality anywhere vaguely close to HL2 let me know. And no, 480 interlaced doesn't cut it. At all.
Which is something most console gamers forget -- the actual resolution of console games is horrible. You're basically running at 640x480 interlaced, which is a resolution that no PC would run at nowadays. Yes, there are a few games (mostly Xbox) that can do HDTV, sometimes even at 1280x720p, but they're few and far between because of low developer support and insufficient hardware power.
The "10 year old" bit is so offtopic for this thread it's funny.
The salt can depend on the system used, but AFAIK, it's usually the first 2 characters of the password
Traditionally the salt is a 2 byte random value. It is stored as the first 2 bytes of the hashed password, but has nothing to do with the password or username at all.
Before shadow passwords were standard this was no real help at all, since all you had to do was read/etc/passwd and suck up the salt out of those first 2 bytes. Now you need to get access to the shadow password file, which is at least an improvement on things.
Many Unix systems are now moving to MD5 encrypted passwords though, which as I understand it are more secure (how? I dunno... I'm not that up to date on it).
So Microsoft will protect VOLUME licensees. That helps Joe Blow how?
Oh please. Joe Blow, who bought one copy of Windows for his PC, was never in danger of prosecution in the first place. It's not worth the time and effort to prosecute individual end users -- a single count of violation, each requiring a separate court case (sorry, class action suits do not work in reverse) in different jurisdictions? Yeah, right. Your lawyer fees will far eclipse any money you could hope to recoup.
They upped their warranty to 12 months? Why is it only 12 months?
They have a warranty? That's a new one on me... most software companies disclaim all warranty, period. I certainly don't have a warranty on any of the free software I use... or most of my paid softwre.
Limiting it to 12 months because it's a fairly standard term and actuaries get antsy when you do longer time periods.
And while, yes, there is definitely some FUD in this, they're still stating facts -- if you use MS products now you're free from liability. That's not true for Linux. Other Unix vendors have haphazard protection on this issue.
And no, I'm not a MS weenie (code for Unix, run RH9 at home). But your post was full of inaccuracies.
No... they don't eliminate the overhead. They reduce it. But that's already happened... the entire financial system is now online. Without computers the world economy would crash, and crash hard.
There's still overhead for handling each transaction though, and while that's decreased, it's still existant. If it costs $.05/transaction (which, BTW, is a gross underestimate -- in most industries it's closer to $.50/transaction) to handle everything then it's not feasible to charge $.05 for something. You've made no profit. If you charge even $2 then the overhead starts getting lost in the noise... but below that it becomes a larger and larger percentage of the gross. And presuming that it costs you nothing to generate the item for sale (which is untrue, even for things like web pages -- the server takes power, disk space, bandwidth, etc), the less you charge the more of the profit it takes.
The overhead continues to decrease, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be for micropayments to take off. And I doubt it will be for another decade or so.
The banks will go for it just as soon as there's profit to be made. There's currently none there.
I've found albums on cduniverse.com for $10.75 that go for $18 at tower records and sam goody.
Well I question that many people on/. are shopping at either of those stores very much in the first place... I always wonder how they're able to stay in business, with Best Buy, Circuit City, and Media Play severly undercutting them plus all of the online stores. Yeah, BB/CC/MP don't have the greatest selection, especially for stuff that's not new and hot, or is fringe. But the online places do.
Of course, all of these high priced chains are going through tough times now. Blockbuster Music is gone. Several other chains died before they did. And it may be nearing the end for Tower and Sam Goody's. We'll see.
Other than that, you're right with the pluses vs minuses. Of course, you left off one big plus of downloading -- you get the music right then and there. Instant gratification. Whim shopping. And you can do it with the full resources of the 'net available for determining what you'd like. Yeah, that last bit is true for ordering a CD online, but I'm less likely to buy a CD that's going to take 3-7 days to get to me on a whim. And I can't buy just a few tracks if that's all I want.
As I said, it was so horribly oversimplified it's silly.
It's probably not exactly 1000x the CPU utilization... it may be less, it may be more. Depends on the code size, the I/O involved, and a host of other factors. But yes, storage space is hardly the only issue involved.
And lets not even get into that minor quibble of how much billing 100000 times vs. once costs.
Each transaction has overhead.... that $1000.00 transaction requires me to store information about precisely one contact.
The 100000 $.01 transactions requires me to store up to 100000 times as many contacts (presuming that there's no repeat business). Even if all that is is an account id (and it's not), you've gone from, oh say, 50 bytes of storage (a 30 byte UID and a 20 byte transaction amount) to 5 MB of storage (50 * 100000). Yeah, yeah, yeah - storage is cheap. Keep saying that when your monthly accounting log is in the terabyte range instead of kilobyte. And this is so horribly oversimplified it's silly.
It's all about the overhead. It's what kills micropayments.
Er... right you are. That or you blatantly violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics (insert ob Simpsons quote). Maybe it was hooked into the HVAC system then... there certainly weren't any hoses running outside of the computer room.
One of the reasons a 3 cent transaction is doable is that there is not a business making the transaction unworkable by adding a fee. The voter is once again uncouncious, failing to force government to live up to its obligations.
Huh?
What on earth are you talking about?
It is not up to the government to provide an accounting system. The government (at least the US, European, and most Asian governments) does, indeed, provide a robust and useful currency system. Most even have currencies that are available in "useless" denominations, such as the penny, the pence, the cent (EU), and 1 Yen.
The issue is not the currency system. The issue is that micropayments have overhead that vastly outweigh the actual payment. This overhead is in accounting, and it's not going to magically go away. You must show where ever penny comes from for at least two reasons - 1) The government wants to know, so it can tax you. 2) The consumer wants to know, so that you are accountable and they can get a refund if they were overcharged.
There's other reasons to keep track of all the pennies too - like figuring out if you're going to make money or not, doing trending, etc. But really the biggest issue is #2 -- and if you're not accountable to me, your customer, then screw you -- I won't do business with you then.
All of the micropayment systems I've seen have tried to reduce the accounting overhead merely through reducing billing overhead -- consolidate users by financial institution and request a lump sum. It still doesn't resolve the issue that the bank, credit union, etc. will need to take $.05 from account 1, $.08 from account 8, etc. And this is what kills micropayments. And will continue to kill them for the forseeable future.
Unless, of course, you don't have a problem with businesses not being accountable to their customers.
I hope he doesn't... a window in a server room is highly insecure, and it also leads to fluctuating temperatures in the area of the window.
Of course, with a fan and some cheap ducting you can have a similar effect. You'd need a much more powerful fan to do it though.
A serious suggestion? Generators and portable AC units. I've seen them used by a former company when the AC was inadequate in the server room. They were about 1.3m tall and had large white hoses coming out of the top to make them about 2m tall overall. You had to feed them water on a pretty regular basis since they were not closed loop AC units, and you'd also need generators to give them power. It worked in a pinch though. No need to cut holes in the ceiling either -- they just vented into the room (suck air in from the bottom, output at the top).
That's fine. As long as they offer it to everyone, indiscriminately, at that price. Including internal customers.
Anything else is price discrimination, which I'd bet is illegal in Canada.
Offering it at absurd prices will merely kill it outright and drive customers to alternate providers and/or services. This is the entire idea behind deregulation, and if it's implemented properly it can work.
When it's implemented improperly, however, it becomes a nightmare and causes far more problems than existed previously -- for examples on badly done public utility deregulation see California's electric power dereg or Georgia's natural gas dereg. Either one is a case study in how not to do it, and between the two they've frozen dereg pushes on power or natural gas across the US.
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I know that, you know that, and yet there are still some people that call for two subwoofers in a system.
BTW, the home theater guides that say "put the subwoofer anywhere!" are the crappy ones. Low frequency sound is largely non-directional, but your room is still going to have nodes and antinodes. Putting the subwoofer in the wrong place can cause a node (or antinode) to be located right where your listening position is, which would suck royally.
Yes, moving your subwoofer around the room can make a big difference. But it's not going to make a difference as to your being able to sense the direction of the low frequency sound (which is the point of all the additional channels and speakers in the first place).
The 9.2 comment was mostly a joke anyway... Most people are still hoping to even get a 5.1 setup, much less anything higher (heck, my Denon 3803 can do 7.1, but I have no intention of setting up the additional two channels).
If a normal neighborhood had 2 stationary panels on each home's roof pointed south that backfed to the utility power and they did the storage, it could be a reality right now.
That might work in some areas of the country... it certainly won't work worth a damn in any area of the country that experiences hail or severe winds (like, oh say, virtually the entire southeastern US). Hail utterly destroys solar panels, and it'll happen often enough that it'll ruin your cost return on them. High winds tend to cause tree branches (or entire trees... yes, it happened to my house under a year ago) to fall on houses, which may cause damage to the solar panels as well.
Not to mention that most people with a clue have already shaded their southern facing roof with trees, in order to reduce daylight exposure during summer and thus reduce energy usage.
And it completely ignores the issue that solar and wind power are considerably more expensive, on a KWh basis, than the alternatives. Including nuclear. Roughly twice the cost last time I checked. Yeah, I know... if pollution costs were included then the cost of production for fossil fuels would be considerably higher. Wouldn't significantly change the cost of production for natural gas though, which is a very large percentage of the power grid in the US now. And regardless, you have to compete in the real world, not some world where you get to make up the rules... about the best you can do is petition for new laws to be more strict on coal and oil fired power plants which would have the net effect of raising the production costs. Good luck.
Sure. When you can exactly replicate a real life concert audio experience (be that concert in an orchestral hall or a death metal moshpit) then we'll be done.
Realistically there's very little gained beyond 5.1, and most of the x.1 formats are seriously misrepresenting the numbering system (several of the 6.1 formats are actually 5.1 formats with a matrixed rear channel -- the first number is supposed to indicate the number of discrete channels).
Oh, and thus far nobody has come out with a standard with more than one subwoofer channel... although I wouldn't be surprised to see a 7.2 or 9.2 format in the near future, indicating front and rear low frequency outputs.
I'll respond to you instead of the AC...
:)
I still consider most charity calls less objectionable, and the number of police/fireman fund calls I've gotten is considerably smaller than the other charities. There's one non-profit that calls me, like clockwork, every 8 weeks. I'd really be annoyed if they stopped calling me in fact.
The Red Cross is one of those charities that is really hard to object to after all... and while they may literally want my blood (O+, and negative on the virus that would prevent usage by infants/children), but I'm not concerned about paid solicitors in this case
It would be illegal to make paid solicitors illegal, but this law is very nearly doing that. If the charity calls become an issue, I suspect the law will be amended to ensure that only valid charity calls are allowed (such as >50% going to the charity). As it stands, any donation you make to a paid solicitor isn't tax deductable since an insufficient amount is actually going to the non-profit.
BTW, feel free to report the various slimy "charity" calls you get to your Attourney General, and the charity in question... most of them are not real (esp. the police/fireman funds) and are in fact scams. And even if they are real, calling the charity and indicating that you didn't appreciate the call may send them a wake up call to move away from such fund raising methods.
There's some rather critical specs missing -- like the resolution of the display.
Also, this thing is going to be rather large, just based on the physical requirements -- a widescreen display and buttons on the front/top, a speaker, a disk loading mechanism, a USB port, an IRDA port, some other port, a memory stick port, a headphone jack, and some place for the battery. There better also be a DC input jack and audio/video output jacks (although all 3 of these could be done via the unknown extention port). There's absolutely no reason for 7.1 sound if you can't output the sound to an external receiver. And if you can do that, you'd better be able to output the video too -- since I sure wouldn't play on a tiny little screen when my TV is right in front of me.
The specs do sound intriguing, but some of them also seem off kilter, like the 7.1 sound.
I'm definitely sticking to the "wait and see" camp.
Yes, but telemarketing costs the phone company and everyone money because of the strain it puts on the infrastructure of the phone system.
Well, by that logic then the phone company should be happy if everyone cancels their service... after all, then there won't be anyone putting strain on the infrastructure!
Stupid.
Telemarketers are one of the more profitable segments for the phone company... they pay a shitload for trunk lines, they pay for service, and often pay for large chunks of long distance time. Yes, they use the infrastructure? So what? The telephone business, like many high infrastructure businesses, has huge up front costs and very little scaling. Think about how much money it costs to allow one person to make a phone call to any other person -- you have to run all that wire, put in all the switches, etc. Does it cost much more for them to call 10 other people? 100? 1000? Not really. Yes, you can wind up with needing more infrastructure eventually, but that all pales in comparison to how much it costs to even have the system in existence at all. Additional load is rarely an issue.
I would think that over the long run, they will see a higher percentage of sales per hour by eliminating people like me from the list.
Because that's not how they're paid.
Telemarketers aren't paid in sell through (there's a bonus, to be sure, and a rather large one, but it's not the majority of their pay by a long shot), they're paid primarily by number of solicitations. Reducing the number of potential numbers to be solicited reduces that eventual bill... and while it's true that less than 10% of all US numbers have signed up so far, the sign up rate in particular markets may be much, much higher -- which is what they're worried about. Telemarketers don't get told to call anyone in the US. They get a list of numbers to call or a demographic to call. They're very concerned about certain demographics being eliminated... especially since as the demographic shrinks (as more people sign up) it's likely to make the same person get called more frequently, making them want to sign up as well.
Not that I'm crying over this, mind you.
You're making the (incorrect) assumption that all states have a DNC list. As of this moment, there are only 36 states that either have or are going to have a DNC list. Of those, 6 have not yet gone into effect. (Data from here).
The various states have different rules regarding who can and cannot contact people on the DNC lists. In general this doesn't affect most telemarketers -- they're verbotten no matter what. Who it does affect are the somewhat more socially acceptable telemarketers, and the ones that are least likely to be trying to screw you for a profit -- pollsters, charities, etc. It makes their job more difficult and thus more expensive, which is rather silly since they're generally less objectionable than telemarketers trying to sell you crap.
On top of that there's jurisdictional issues when the telemarketer is from out of state. The odds of anyone collecting on a telemarketer in Alaska making illegal solicitations to someone in Alabama are considerably reduced when you have to deal with two different state laws than when you have to deal with a single Federal law.
Went to see it this past weekend since it was a friend's birthday weekend and my wife wanted to see it (Yes, she can appreciate a hot woman as well. Yes, I am a lucky bastard).
About the only redeeming feature of the movie was Angelina Jolie's nipples. And since they're in the first 15 minutes, you can feel free to save yourself and leave after that.
I really wasn't expecting much from the movie, but even then I was disappointed. The action scenes were mostly lackluster, no adrenaline, and no tension. There were a couple that weren't bad, but they didn't make up for the rest. The plot, which I expected to be weak and sad, was abysmal and painful. It doesn't hurt much simply because the entire movie is so forgetable.
Yes, I've seen far, far worse movies. But this is a rental at best. The reason the movie ticket sales are so bad is because the movie is so bad... it had nothing to do with the game. But why are we expecting companies/people to actually admit that they're to blame instead of pointing fingers?
I'm probably going to switch to Firebird/Thunderbird at home from Mozilla. I'm sick and tired of closing Mozilla Mail to discover that it's not REALLY closed. Instead it's still pulling messages off the POP mail server in the background. Which sucks when you want to use your ISP's webmail from work to check on email, only to discover that the mail has now been sucked down to your home PC and is inaccessible.
Stupid feature, and annoying as hell. I can't imagine any valid reason for doing it, or why it's not an option that's easily findable.
Does that player feel worse for having been eaten knowing it was a person being the bad guy, versus a bot/scripted game event? I doubt it. Do you feel guilty when playing Quake 3 and you frag the point leader in an elimination round?
There's a difference though, and it's the reason why people who play "evil" characters in MMORPGs quickly discover it's a bad idea.
In Quake, the entire point of the game is to kill the other players. Without that there's no game, and there's really relatively little downside to having been killed.
In a MMORPG RP'ing an evil person is usually seen as no different from being an asshole. Probably because there's not much difference in reality either, and in neither case do people want to deal with you. Yeah, great, you're a dark elf and you're supposed to be evil and look out for yourself and whatnot, but if you ditch the group because you were worried that you might die, screw you - I don't need to deal with that kind of crap. If I'm in a PvP area and you're killing people and keeping them from getting back to their corpses or whatever -- screw that too. It may be fun for you, but it sure as hell isn't for me, and as far as I'm concerned you're an asshole.
Which is the thing that people tend to forget when they play evil characters, or are griefers, or whatever -- there's a real person on the other end of that avatar, and they want to have fun too. Having your fun at the expense of others -- when there's other options that don't involve screwing someone else -- is deplorable, and you deserve to be treated as scum.
This was the concern about robots in auto factories as well -- that it would unemploy a vast percentage of the American automotive workforce as their jobs were replaced with robots.
Well... it didn't happen. Sure, robots are used almost exclusively for some automotive jobs now (like painting and very heavy welding), but the automotive industry discovered something.
Robots are expensive.
First, the capital outlay is non-trivial. If you drop $500k on a robot, that's the same as employing a $50/hr worker for about 4 years (once you include benefits and whatnot). Then you have to have programming, maintainence, and other upkeep, which is probably about 10%/year... which works out to be $50k. Where's the savings again? Sure, you may get tighter tolerances and some other fringe benefits, but you also lose some fringe benefits -- like an actual human being able to tell when a part is defective prior to attaching it.
I doubt that most service industries are going to move to automation on that kind of scale anytime soon. Sure, there are companies test marketing automated ordering systems, but that's cheap crap. Robotics to do the cooking and delivery would not be cheap, and now you're talking about replacing someone earning $6/hour instead of $50/hour. The economics don't make sense. Maybe they will one day, but I think it's a lot further off than the article suggests.
Yeah... sell a 4G SCSI drive on eBay. That'll get me an amazing $8. That just might cover the hassle of shipping it.
Oh, hey, that Zip drive is worth $10! Woot. I'm in the money now.
Or maybe I say screw the hassle, find a group to donate it all to, and take a tax write off. Sounds better to me.
Talk about an utter lack of advertising. My brother-in-law and I found out about this... the day after. They certainly didn't put out much notice on this event.
I have 2 dead PCs, a dead monitor, and a dead laserjet that I need to be rid of. As well as a variety of components (mice, SCSI drives, SCSI cards, modems, motherboards, CPUs, etc) that are in operable condition. I've been looking into recycling options for the computers, and I'm trying to find someplace that will accept the components as a donation.
I've found some places for the recycling, but nobody for the donation. Yes, I have a list and a website, but so far all of my emails have either bounced or gone unresponded (and yes, Freebytes was one that didn't bother responding). None of the recycle stuff is cutting edge, but I've got to imagine that a couple of external 56k modems, a Zip drive, several small (2-4G) SCSI drives w/ adaptors, video cards, and an Athlon 750 w/ MB would be useful to a non-profit organization.
Sure... and when you get graphics quality anywhere vaguely close to HL2 let me know. And no, 480 interlaced doesn't cut it. At all.
Which is something most console gamers forget -- the actual resolution of console games is horrible. You're basically running at 640x480 interlaced, which is a resolution that no PC would run at nowadays. Yes, there are a few games (mostly Xbox) that can do HDTV, sometimes even at 1280x720p, but they're few and far between because of low developer support and insufficient hardware power.
The "10 year old" bit is so offtopic for this thread it's funny.
The salt can depend on the system used, but AFAIK, it's usually the first 2 characters of the password
/etc/passwd and suck up the salt out of those first 2 bytes. Now you need to get access to the shadow password file, which is at least an improvement on things.
Traditionally the salt is a 2 byte random value. It is stored as the first 2 bytes of the hashed password, but has nothing to do with the password or username at all.
Before shadow passwords were standard this was no real help at all, since all you had to do was read
Many Unix systems are now moving to MD5 encrypted passwords though, which as I understand it are more secure (how? I dunno... I'm not that up to date on it).
So Microsoft will protect VOLUME licensees. That helps Joe Blow how?
Oh please. Joe Blow, who bought one copy of Windows for his PC, was never in danger of prosecution in the first place. It's not worth the time and effort to prosecute individual end users -- a single count of violation, each requiring a separate court case (sorry, class action suits do not work in reverse) in different jurisdictions? Yeah, right. Your lawyer fees will far eclipse any money you could hope to recoup.
They upped their warranty to 12 months? Why is it only 12 months?
They have a warranty? That's a new one on me... most software companies disclaim all warranty, period. I certainly don't have a warranty on any of the free software I use... or most of my paid softwre.
Limiting it to 12 months because it's a fairly standard term and actuaries get antsy when you do longer time periods.
And while, yes, there is definitely some FUD in this, they're still stating facts -- if you use MS products now you're free from liability. That's not true for Linux. Other Unix vendors have haphazard protection on this issue.
And no, I'm not a MS weenie (code for Unix, run RH9 at home). But your post was full of inaccuracies.
No... they don't eliminate the overhead. They reduce it. But that's already happened... the entire financial system is now online. Without computers the world economy would crash, and crash hard.
There's still overhead for handling each transaction though, and while that's decreased, it's still existant. If it costs $.05/transaction (which, BTW, is a gross underestimate -- in most industries it's closer to $.50/transaction) to handle everything then it's not feasible to charge $.05 for something. You've made no profit. If you charge even $2 then the overhead starts getting lost in the noise... but below that it becomes a larger and larger percentage of the gross. And presuming that it costs you nothing to generate the item for sale (which is untrue, even for things like web pages -- the server takes power, disk space, bandwidth, etc), the less you charge the more of the profit it takes.
The overhead continues to decrease, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be for micropayments to take off. And I doubt it will be for another decade or so.
The banks will go for it just as soon as there's profit to be made. There's currently none there.
I've found albums on cduniverse.com for $10.75 that go for $18 at tower records and sam goody.
/. are shopping at either of those stores very much in the first place... I always wonder how they're able to stay in business, with Best Buy, Circuit City, and Media Play severly undercutting them plus all of the online stores. Yeah, BB/CC/MP don't have the greatest selection, especially for stuff that's not new and hot, or is fringe. But the online places do.
Well I question that many people on
Of course, all of these high priced chains are going through tough times now. Blockbuster Music is gone. Several other chains died before they did. And it may be nearing the end for Tower and Sam Goody's. We'll see.
Other than that, you're right with the pluses vs minuses. Of course, you left off one big plus of downloading -- you get the music right then and there. Instant gratification. Whim shopping. And you can do it with the full resources of the 'net available for determining what you'd like. Yeah, that last bit is true for ordering a CD online, but I'm less likely to buy a CD that's going to take 3-7 days to get to me on a whim. And I can't buy just a few tracks if that's all I want.
As I said, it was so horribly oversimplified it's silly.
It's probably not exactly 1000x the CPU utilization... it may be less, it may be more. Depends on the code size, the I/O involved, and a host of other factors. But yes, storage space is hardly the only issue involved.
And lets not even get into that minor quibble of how much billing 100000 times vs. once costs.
You don't get it.
Each transaction has overhead.... that $1000.00 transaction requires me to store information about precisely one contact.
The 100000 $.01 transactions requires me to store up to 100000 times as many contacts (presuming that there's no repeat business). Even if all that is is an account id (and it's not), you've gone from, oh say, 50 bytes of storage (a 30 byte UID and a 20 byte transaction amount) to 5 MB of storage (50 * 100000). Yeah, yeah, yeah - storage is cheap. Keep saying that when your monthly accounting log is in the terabyte range instead of kilobyte. And this is so horribly oversimplified it's silly.
It's all about the overhead. It's what kills micropayments.
Er... right you are. That or you blatantly violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics (insert ob Simpsons quote). Maybe it was hooked into the HVAC system then... there certainly weren't any hoses running outside of the computer room.
One of the reasons a 3 cent transaction is doable is that there is not a business making the transaction unworkable by adding a fee. The voter is once again uncouncious, failing to force government to live up to its obligations.
Huh?
What on earth are you talking about?
It is not up to the government to provide an accounting system. The government (at least the US, European, and most Asian governments) does, indeed, provide a robust and useful currency system. Most even have currencies that are available in "useless" denominations, such as the penny, the pence, the cent (EU), and 1 Yen.
The issue is not the currency system. The issue is that micropayments have overhead that vastly outweigh the actual payment. This overhead is in accounting, and it's not going to magically go away. You must show where ever penny comes from for at least two reasons - 1) The government wants to know, so it can tax you. 2) The consumer wants to know, so that you are accountable and they can get a refund if they were overcharged.
There's other reasons to keep track of all the pennies too - like figuring out if you're going to make money or not, doing trending, etc. But really the biggest issue is #2 -- and if you're not accountable to me, your customer, then screw you -- I won't do business with you then.
All of the micropayment systems I've seen have tried to reduce the accounting overhead merely through reducing billing overhead -- consolidate users by financial institution and request a lump sum. It still doesn't resolve the issue that the bank, credit union, etc. will need to take $.05 from account 1, $.08 from account 8, etc. And this is what kills micropayments. And will continue to kill them for the forseeable future.
Unless, of course, you don't have a problem with businesses not being accountable to their customers.
I hope he doesn't... a window in a server room is highly insecure, and it also leads to fluctuating temperatures in the area of the window.
Of course, with a fan and some cheap ducting you can have a similar effect. You'd need a much more powerful fan to do it though.
A serious suggestion? Generators and portable AC units. I've seen them used by a former company when the AC was inadequate in the server room. They were about 1.3m tall and had large white hoses coming out of the top to make them about 2m tall overall. You had to feed them water on a pretty regular basis since they were not closed loop AC units, and you'd also need generators to give them power. It worked in a pinch though. No need to cut holes in the ceiling either -- they just vented into the room (suck air in from the bottom, output at the top).
That's fine. As long as they offer it to everyone, indiscriminately, at that price. Including internal customers.
Anything else is price discrimination, which I'd bet is illegal in Canada.
Offering it at absurd prices will merely kill it outright and drive customers to alternate providers and/or services. This is the entire idea behind deregulation, and if it's implemented properly it can work.
When it's implemented improperly, however, it becomes a nightmare and causes far more problems than existed previously -- for examples on badly done public utility deregulation see California's electric power dereg or Georgia's natural gas dereg. Either one is a case study in how not to do it, and between the two they've frozen dereg pushes on power or natural gas across the US.