I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them
Same here.
OTOH, I don't really mind the cheaters so much anyway except in tournaments. Any other time, they'll still lose in the long term. Cheats are a crutch that rot the mind that uses them to the point that the person can't think for themselves.
I'm almost embarassed to say that I find it amusing to imagine the cheaters saying 'my precious' to themselves over and over even while I'm figuring out their thoughtless behaviour patterns and stomping the crap out of them after I figure them out.
If this keeps up, pretty soon the old Slashdot saying " I run Windows for my games" will be obsolete and you guys won't have an excuse to support Microsoft anymore.
"If you don't make a linux dedicated server, the game is doomed (no pun intended)". --me
For the last 4 years, I've posted statistics on gaming forums for game popularity with Win32 dedicated servers only vs those that also ran on Linux. ~90% of the most popular online games have Linux server capability and usage, it's not a coinidence. Those games without *nix servers almost always fade away fast.
Where the servers lead, the clients will follow IMHO, and it seems to be happening.
Finally, I can run LAN games here for the local community on Saturday's with every game that's popular here running on Linux Servers with the clients choice of whether they want to run under Win32 or Linux.
Re:The tale of Ray Diosack and Mike Rocenter
on
Canadian Privacy Act
·
· Score: 1
I am sure they all realize that.
The fact is that even with people like you , 90% of data they collect is correct.
I'll agree with that if you'll agree that Trolls make up 90% of their statistics without any actual knowledge of facts or any information to back up their statements.
Deal?
Re:I dont think I would hack my car
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
And that's why computer repair shops have the bad reputation that they do.... "those guys lost all my data!!",
Around here a lot we're told "upgrade the computer and save the data except for those damn girlie nudes my kids keep putting in there"
Um yeah sure, it's always the kids huh? I always make sure that ALL of the data files make it to the upgraded box. The customer can explain that to the SO, it's not my problem, blame the kids to s/he =)
Re:The tale of Ray Diosack and Mike Rocenter
on
Canadian Privacy Act
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had a friend who used to give the name Ray Diosack (pronounce it) to Radioshack when they asked for his name. He would then procede to give the cashier the street address for the store he was in. Nobody ever commented on this fact. Anyway, he would laugh to himself about the bulk mailers that must show up at the store every month from Radio Shack to Ray Diosack
They won't say a word and the mails won't show up at the store (RS won't spam their own store addresses, just personal ones).
When I was young, I was a RS employee. We were required to list names and addresses for 75% of the the transactions each day or face possible serious verbal torture sessions for not living up to our minimum wage responsibilities.
So, as every other RS store did, we'd always have to fill in some BS into the customer information if we were having a bad day extorting their personal information from them. Even if we knew a customer was feeding us BS, we'd keep a straight face knowing that person was saving us from making up crap on our own.
Emachines? Respectible? Good lord! You must be kidding. Put down the crack pipe!
We had our newest tech here brag about his emachine on his application. With so many calls about problems with them, we thought 'what the heck, we have an emachine expert now, hire the guy'
Now, every time someone calls and mentions 'emachine', we route the call to NewGuy. His hourly time spend on boxes is double any others here. I think he'll either a) disown emachines soon, or b) show up with an AR-15 and mow us all down.
Gotta go, I'm browsing web sites that are offering good prices for body armor.
Want to really throw them for a loop? Find a lady (or 600) without a safeway club card, and have her sign up under a man's name. Then, encourage her to only buy tampons and chocolate at Safeway using that card. Get as many people to do it as possible!
That's funny, but not as funny as the time I reviewed a hospital bill I had and found out not only did they charge me $3 per aspirin, but they also charged me for 4 tampons. (and yes, I'm not female)
True. It's always going to be some sort of combination of 'need it yesterday', 'soon', 'works pretty good', or 'handles fatal exceptions exceptionally well'.
Tell Family Video that someone who is the primary phone owner at your house is not you and they will gladly let you give them a 555-whatever phone number for your video rental account number and contact information.
They still get your address from your ID card, but at least your phone number won't be up for sale.
Me and my friends played a lot of Duke Nukem deathmatch back in about 1995. I always preferred Quake more, but Duke was the last good flat bitmap based game
Heh, it wasn't flat, it was 2.3 or 2.4D! remember?
(I guess that no one who witnessed the way-too-prolonged 'DukeNukem was 2.3 3d vs 2.4 3d' USENET wars will have no idea of how funny that really dispute was)
In some cases, if there is active quality control and testing after initial manufacture, you can use the ones off the line which are not quite up to the full uncrippled spec but work at the crippled level. At the extreme, you can just test all of your output, bin it by quality, and honestly sell different products from the same manufacturing process- this can happen in CPU manufacture
It's like that with hard drives and many other similar products.
Many may not know it, but (for example) buying a SOMEBRAND hard drive from low priced computer-electronics store most likely means that they've purchased a drive that is at the very low end of passing quality control at SOMEBRAND. The model numbers will be the same except for some obscure code letters/numbers most often only on the drive itself, not as often on the box (at least that I've noticed).
I do programming here, but the technicians offer both low end and high end of the same hard drives and are happy to explain why to customers if they ask.
We win either way. If they pay the higher price for the high end QC Passed hard drive, they probably won't have problems with it for a long time and we make a few extra dollars.
If they think we are full of crap and buy the cheaper drive, that's fine too, we'll be able to sell them another drive in the nearer future and they'll be more likely to trust and listen to our advice in the future.
Another bonus is that we don't have to play the 'buy an extended warrantee' game with people. We just double the standard warrantee on the better drives and skip the pressure sales.
In a free market price is set by the meeting place of the supply and demand curves. These are over the entire market. What creating a crippled version does is split the single market into two. One market with people willing to pay more for extra features, the other market for the rest.
Usually, the split is already there in a lot of situations. Here is an example.
I used to be in charge of ordering parts and accessories for Harley-Davidson & other motorcycles vendors. When I took over ordering (being their database & computer guru guy who rides bikes, it made sense to them).
I started to make things more efficient. The first thing I started investigating was why we purchased duplicate parts from different vendors that had similar costs for us. My thought was this 'We're tracking the same products twice, it's a waste of shipping costs, it's harder for me to track product sales trends, etc...'.
The owner explained it to me like this 'notice that we charge almost double the price for one of the duplicate products? We do that because many people will pay top dollar regardless of the fact that the products are identical. They are either filthy rich or believe that you always get what you pay for'.
He then had me spend a few weeks selling as well as ordering and told me to show both identical products to customers when they requested them. I was instructed to be completely honest with customers ie: don't claim one is better or has more features.
After that, I ran some calculations using the product & sales database and found that ~20% of the time, people were buying the more expensive product even though we never made any claims about product 'a' having different features than product 'b'.
Also, I could see by looking at the numbers that those ~20% of higher product sale profits made the other 80% look like a drop in the bucket.
I imagine that if we could have crippled one version of each product we would have picked up quite a few more percent of higher priced (profit) sales. We wouldn't be making a split of the market so much, we'd just be shifting some from one side of the existing split to the other.
Besides "liberal" tax and spend attitudes, most Califorians don't have the slightest idea of how to drive in ice and snow. This seems to be as much a part of Coloradans taking a dislike to Californians as anything. Thus, saying we are "from" the midwest seems to disarm some of the hostility we might otherwise encounter.
I moved from California to upper Michigan years back.
On the third day, I was pulled over by a police officer. My crime? Radar said I was going 3 miles an hour over the speed limit. The officer said 'We don't drive like that around here son'.
Needless to say, I got my licence plate changed to a Michigan one ASAP.
It could have been worse though. If I hadn't been driving an American car, I might have ended up getting beaten with a baton + the speeding ticket!
Why wouldn't these goals be better met by just sending out an email? If this is the only way you're diseminating this information, what if someone is on vacation, out sick, or traveling on business that day? Do they then get punished for not knowing the policies, procedures, or deadlines?
If the meeting is about TPS reports, I would have to say YES.
Yes, it really does depend on what is being discussed or decided. Often though, it's difficult in advance to make the call.
Here is a nightmare example of an email meeting over a billboard (large outdoor) design.
Being new to the subtlties of email meetings vs face-to-face ones I agreed with my partner graphics designer to have the design emailed around until it was approved. A simple problem to be solved right?
No. This design was bounced around for 3 months with touch-ups and/or complete redesigns every 1-2 weeks. Then, the billboard in question was leased by someone else which meant the whole design was useless since our next available billboard was of a different size and shape.
After another 3 months of designs, modifications, etc... went on we FINALLY had the design that the principals liked.
One week later, I get an email that said (paraphrased) "The billboard lease company wants too much to use their board so go ahead and forget about the whole project".
Because of the case above, and with my experience now, I realize that the whole design & approval process could have been finished in one day. We should have created several designs in the morning and had a 2-3 hour meeting that afternoon. Those 2-3 hours would have been spent tweaking the chosen design at the meeting and approved immediately.
Instead, we ended up spended several hours a week responding to emails & making design changes only to find out the whole thing was a waste of effort.
The one thing I did like about what happened in that case is that for the short time before I quit that company, any time someone asked us why we were running behind on any particular project my answer would invariably be 'We're still trying to catch up from the 100 or so hours we spent on the billboard project'.
I should add to that comment this other problem with cheap network installations.
Usually, when I am fixing problems, I don't have to ask the business owners for passwords when dealing with routers or other devices that ask for them.
The majority of the time, the router & other passwords are the default ones, the business name, or the business software company's name. And, usually every box runs in administrator mode.
That is not the sort of thing that most Linux people I've seen would setting up networks would do.
The Slashdot hoards can say what they wish, but the setup of a basic Windows LAN with filesharing, network printing, backup and web access (the kind of arrangement one would find in a small ad firm, law office, etc) is less difficult than doing the same thing on Linux. There are just fewer steps.
So, I don't need some guru to come in and charge me $100 an hour to build me a Linux LAN when I can go to the classified ads and get some Windows jerk for $30 an hour to leave me with the same results.
Whoah, whoah, whoah there cowboy.
I deal with a lot of horrible situations trying to fix problems for businesses who do that. And, the networking is not the same result in most cases as it would have been if a Linux person had have done it, even if they were working with Windows boxes.
What I'm finding out is happening in ~%30 of the businesses I go to and fix problems for are these
a) Point-of-Sale or other software company sells their product(s) to the business.
b) A bunch of Windows computers are configured to be on the same workgroup by some cheap networking people. In a lot of cases PCanywhere is installed on the server(s)
c) Instead of sharing the only the data directories for the Point-of-Sale or other program, the ENTIRE C drive is shared on every computer & server on the network, without password checking & 'allow others to change files' is enabled. I do not agree that is something that most Linux network installers would do.
Not only that, in a large number of the small business situations I see, the router has been set to have the server box be in the DMZ zone. The firewall usually isn't configured right, so when something doesn't work correctly for the Point-of-Sale software company's PCanywhere access (or whatever isn't working), the business owner is told to shut the firewall off on the server after the installers and software company get done pointing fingers at each other.
I'll agree it's easier to quickly share resources on a windows network for the average business, but IMO it also encourages sloppy networking, security, and the reality that there will be serious problems with the network at some point.
Actually, that's fine with me because I end up charging $100/hour on-site to fix the problems that crop up after a few months. The total amount I bill ends up being pretty close to what I would have charged to set up their Windows server and set up networking with Linux clients in the first place.
If the fault is theirs, wouldn't anyone with a warranty be able to demand a replacement?
Sure, in the case of a hard drive for example dealing with the warrany is something I cannot do.
I had a drive that completely failed after 1 month of use. I wanted to warranty it but the manufacturer wanted the old drive back (so they could recondition it of course).
I could not remove my personal data from the failed drive so returning it was not an option. I had to destroy the drive and lost $100 in the process + the time (money) to get a new drive and recover my data from a backup tape.
In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?
It's much like the vacuum cleaner situation change over the years. I have one of those metal monsters from over 30 years ago that still works and know other people that also have vacuums with a lot of years on them.
But, these days, if people don't spend more and purchase industrial type vacuum cleaners they're not likely to get more than 2-4 years of daily use out of them.
The average prices for vacuum cleaners are much lower now than before even after calulating the difference between the value of the dollar then and now. But the price that is paid is having to purchase 2-3 vacuum cleaners per decade.
So when someone sets up shop in that unused attic/wing/crawlspace of yours and starts producing Methamphetamines or otherwise generates/disposes hazardous waste but out of your sight, I hope you enjoy the consequences.
Another good example is what will happen to the owner if a child wanders in and gets injured or dies because easy access was granted to the interior of the home.
The home owner will end up facing serious charges and most likely have to plea bargain to avoid facing a prison term.
Excuses like 'government can't tell me to lock my doors' won't have much effect on a judge or jury. Not to mention the Civil Suit that will follow the criminal conviction(s).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them
Same here.
OTOH, I don't really mind the cheaters so much anyway except in tournaments. Any other time, they'll still lose in the long term. Cheats are a crutch that rot the mind that uses them to the point that the person can't think for themselves.
I'm almost embarassed to say that I find it amusing to imagine the cheaters saying 'my precious' to themselves over and over even while I'm figuring out their thoughtless behaviour patterns and stomping the crap out of them after I figure them out.
If this keeps up, pretty soon the old Slashdot saying " I run Windows for my games" will be obsolete and you guys won't have an excuse to support Microsoft anymore.
"If you don't make a linux dedicated server, the game is doomed (no pun intended)". --me
For the last 4 years, I've posted statistics on gaming forums for game popularity with Win32 dedicated servers only vs those that also ran on Linux. ~90% of the most popular online games have Linux server capability and usage, it's not a coinidence. Those games without *nix servers almost always fade away fast.
Where the servers lead, the clients will follow IMHO, and it seems to be happening.
Finally, I can run LAN games here for the local community on Saturday's with every game that's popular here running on Linux Servers with the clients choice of whether they want to run under Win32 or Linux.
I am sure they all realize that.
The fact is that even with people like you , 90% of data they collect is correct.
I'll agree with that if you'll agree that Trolls make up 90% of their statistics without any actual knowledge of facts or any information to back up their statements.
Deal?
And that's why computer repair shops have the bad reputation that they do.... "those guys lost all my data!!",
Around here a lot we're told "upgrade the computer and save the data except for those damn girlie nudes my kids keep putting in there"
Um yeah sure, it's always the kids huh? I always make sure that ALL of the data files make it to the upgraded box. The customer can explain that to the SO, it's not my problem, blame the kids to s/he =)
I had a friend who used to give the name Ray Diosack (pronounce it) to Radioshack when they asked for his name. He would then procede to give the cashier the street address for the store he was in. Nobody ever commented on this fact. Anyway, he would laugh to himself about the bulk mailers that must show up at the store every month from Radio Shack to Ray Diosack
They won't say a word and the mails won't show up at the store (RS won't spam their own store addresses, just personal ones).
When I was young, I was a RS employee. We were required to list names and addresses for 75% of the the transactions each day or face possible serious verbal torture sessions for not living up to our minimum wage responsibilities.
So, as every other RS store did, we'd always have to fill in some BS into the customer information if we were having a bad day extorting their personal information from them. Even if we knew a customer was feeding us BS, we'd keep a straight face knowing that person was saving us from making up crap on our own.
swappable DVD+RW optical drive
Bleeding edge...WTF?
Emachines? Respectible? Good lord! You must be kidding. Put down the crack pipe!
We had our newest tech here brag about his emachine on his application. With so many calls about problems with them, we thought 'what the heck, we have an emachine expert now, hire the guy'
Now, every time someone calls and mentions 'emachine', we route the call to NewGuy. His hourly time spend on boxes is double any others here. I think he'll either a) disown emachines soon, or b) show up with an AR-15 and mow us all down.
Gotta go, I'm browsing web sites that are offering good prices for body armor.
Catchya later!
Want to really throw them for a loop? Find a lady (or 600) without a safeway club card, and have her sign up under a man's name. Then, encourage her to only buy tampons and chocolate at Safeway using that card. Get as many people to do it as possible!
That's funny, but not as funny as the time I reviewed a hospital bill I had and found out not only did they charge me $3 per aspirin, but they also charged me for 4 tampons. (and yes, I'm not female)
Aww comon, $1US per baud wasn't that bad!
is to _test_ your code.
...against the business requirements.
True. It's always going to be some sort of combination of 'need it yesterday', 'soon', 'works pretty good', or 'handles fatal exceptions exceptionally well'.
Tell Family Video that someone who is the primary phone owner at your house is not you and they will gladly let you give them a 555-whatever phone number for your video rental account number and contact information.
They still get your address from your ID card, but at least your phone number won't be up for sale.
I don't know if it ever came out. I was onto something else.. NetHack, IIRC
Even is still updated updated regularly. It's popular enough, even on our community lan.
December 2003 Nethack
er, um, I guess they would find it funny, whoops.
Hopefully anyway (if), Long Live Duke Nuke'em Whenever!
Me and my friends played a lot of Duke Nukem deathmatch back in about 1995. I always preferred Quake more, but Duke was the last good flat bitmap based game
Heh, it wasn't flat, it was 2.3 or 2.4D! remember?
(I guess that no one who witnessed the way-too-prolonged 'DukeNukem was 2.3 3d vs 2.4 3d' USENET wars will have no idea of how funny that really dispute was)
In some cases, if there is active quality control and testing after initial manufacture, you can use the ones off the line which are not quite up to the full uncrippled spec but work at the crippled level. At the extreme, you can just test all of your output, bin it by quality, and honestly sell different products from the same manufacturing process- this can happen in CPU manufacture
It's like that with hard drives and many other similar products.
Many may not know it, but (for example) buying a SOMEBRAND hard drive from low priced computer-electronics store most likely means that they've purchased a drive that is at the very low end of passing quality control at SOMEBRAND. The model numbers will be the same except for some obscure code letters/numbers most often only on the drive itself, not as often on the box (at least that I've noticed).
I do programming here, but the technicians offer both low end and high end of the same hard drives and are happy to explain why to customers if they ask.
We win either way. If they pay the higher price for the high end QC Passed hard drive, they probably won't have problems with it for a long time and we make a few extra dollars.
If they think we are full of crap and buy the cheaper drive, that's fine too, we'll be able to sell them another drive in the nearer future and they'll be more likely to trust and listen to our advice in the future.
Another bonus is that we don't have to play the 'buy an extended warrantee' game with people. We just double the standard warrantee on the better drives and skip the pressure sales.
In a free market price is set by the meeting place of the supply and demand curves. These are over the entire market. What creating a crippled version does is split the single market into two. One market with people willing to pay more for extra features, the other market for the rest.
Usually, the split is already there in a lot of situations. Here is an example.
I used to be in charge of ordering parts and accessories for Harley-Davidson & other motorcycles vendors. When I took over ordering (being their database & computer guru guy who rides bikes, it made sense to them). I started to make things more efficient. The first thing I started investigating was why we purchased duplicate parts from different vendors that had similar costs for us. My thought was this 'We're tracking the same products twice, it's a waste of shipping costs, it's harder for me to track product sales trends, etc...'.
The owner explained it to me like this 'notice that we charge almost double the price for one of the duplicate products? We do that because many people will pay top dollar regardless of the fact that the products are identical. They are either filthy rich or believe that you always get what you pay for'.
He then had me spend a few weeks selling as well as ordering and told me to show both identical products to customers when they requested them. I was instructed to be completely honest with customers ie: don't claim one is better or has more features.
After that, I ran some calculations using the product & sales database and found that ~20% of the time, people were buying the more expensive product even though we never made any claims about product 'a' having different features than product 'b'.
Also, I could see by looking at the numbers that those ~20% of higher product sale profits made the other 80% look like a drop in the bucket.
I imagine that if we could have crippled one version of each product we would have picked up quite a few more percent of higher priced (profit) sales. We wouldn't be making a split of the market so much, we'd just be shifting some from one side of the existing split to the other.
Besides "liberal" tax and spend attitudes, most Califorians don't have the slightest idea of how to drive in ice and snow. This seems to be as much a part of Coloradans taking a dislike to Californians as anything. Thus, saying we are "from" the midwest seems to disarm some of the hostility we might otherwise encounter.
I moved from California to upper Michigan years back.
On the third day, I was pulled over by a police officer. My crime? Radar said I was going 3 miles an hour over the speed limit. The officer said 'We don't drive like that around here son'.
Needless to say, I got my licence plate changed to a Michigan one ASAP.
It could have been worse though. If I hadn't been driving an American car, I might have ended up getting beaten with a baton + the speeding ticket!
Why wouldn't these goals be better met by just sending out an email? If this is the only way you're diseminating this information, what if someone is on vacation, out sick, or traveling on business that day? Do they then get punished for not knowing the policies, procedures, or deadlines?
If the meeting is about TPS reports, I would have to say YES.
Yes, it really does depend on what is being discussed or decided. Often though, it's difficult in advance to make the call.
Here is a nightmare example of an email meeting over a billboard (large outdoor) design.
Being new to the subtlties of email meetings vs face-to-face ones I agreed with my partner graphics designer to have the design emailed around until it was approved. A simple problem to be solved right?
No. This design was bounced around for 3 months with touch-ups and/or complete redesigns every 1-2 weeks. Then, the billboard in question was leased by someone else which meant the whole design was useless since our next available billboard was of a different size and shape.
After another 3 months of designs, modifications, etc... went on we FINALLY had the design that the principals liked.
One week later, I get an email that said (paraphrased) "The billboard lease company wants too much to use their board so go ahead and forget about the whole project".
Because of the case above, and with my experience now, I realize that the whole design & approval process could have been finished in one day. We should have created several designs in the morning and had a 2-3 hour meeting that afternoon. Those 2-3 hours would have been spent tweaking the chosen design at the meeting and approved immediately.
Instead, we ended up spended several hours a week responding to emails & making design changes only to find out the whole thing was a waste of effort.
The one thing I did like about what happened in that case is that for the short time before I quit that company, any time someone asked us why we were running behind on any particular project my answer would invariably be 'We're still trying to catch up from the 100 or so hours we spent on the billboard project'.
As someone who has loved the browser since 0.1, they can call it DogCrap(TM) for all I care (and I'm sure most other users agree).
I think I should be called 'ClickHereForFreeBoobies' with a Win32 executable of the same name.
My guess is that it would be the top used browser in 2 months.
I should add to that comment this other problem with cheap network installations.
Usually, when I am fixing problems, I don't have to ask the business owners for passwords when dealing with routers or other devices that ask for them.
The majority of the time, the router & other passwords are the default ones, the business name, or the business software company's name. And, usually every box runs in administrator mode.
That is not the sort of thing that most Linux people I've seen would setting up networks would do.
The Slashdot hoards can say what they wish, but the setup of a basic Windows LAN with filesharing, network printing, backup and web access (the kind of arrangement one would find in a small ad firm, law office, etc) is less difficult than doing the same thing on Linux. There are just fewer steps.
So, I don't need some guru to come in and charge me $100 an hour to build me a Linux LAN when I can go to the classified ads and get some Windows jerk for $30 an hour to leave me with the same results.
Whoah, whoah, whoah there cowboy.
I deal with a lot of horrible situations trying to fix problems for businesses who do that. And, the networking is not the same result in most cases as it would have been if a Linux person had have done it, even if they were working with Windows boxes.
What I'm finding out is happening in ~%30 of the businesses I go to and fix problems for are these
a) Point-of-Sale or other software company sells their product(s) to the business.
b) A bunch of Windows computers are configured to be on the same workgroup by some cheap networking people. In a lot of cases PCanywhere is installed on the server(s)
c) Instead of sharing the only the data directories for the Point-of-Sale or other program, the ENTIRE C drive is shared on every computer & server on the network, without password checking & 'allow others to change files' is enabled. I do not agree that is something that most Linux network installers would do.
Not only that, in a large number of the small business situations I see, the router has been set to have the server box be in the DMZ zone. The firewall usually isn't configured right, so when something doesn't work correctly for the Point-of-Sale software company's PCanywhere access (or whatever isn't working), the business owner is told to shut the firewall off on the server after the installers and software company get done pointing fingers at each other.
I'll agree it's easier to quickly share resources on a windows network for the average business, but IMO it also encourages sloppy networking, security, and the reality that there will be serious problems with the network at some point.
Actually, that's fine with me because I end up charging $100/hour on-site to fix the problems that crop up after a few months. The total amount I bill ends up being pretty close to what I would have charged to set up their Windows server and set up networking with Linux clients in the first place.
If the fault is theirs, wouldn't anyone with a warranty be able to demand a replacement?
Sure, in the case of a hard drive for example dealing with the warrany is something I cannot do.
I had a drive that completely failed after 1 month of use. I wanted to warranty it but the manufacturer wanted the old drive back (so they could recondition it of course).
I could not remove my personal data from the failed drive so returning it was not an option. I had to destroy the drive and lost $100 in the process + the time (money) to get a new drive and recover my data from a backup tape.
In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?
It's much like the vacuum cleaner situation change over the years. I have one of those metal monsters from over 30 years ago that still works and know other people that also have vacuums with a lot of years on them.
But, these days, if people don't spend more and purchase industrial type vacuum cleaners they're not likely to get more than 2-4 years of daily use out of them.
The average prices for vacuum cleaners are much lower now than before even after calulating the difference between the value of the dollar then and now. But the price that is paid is having to purchase 2-3 vacuum cleaners per decade.
Like you said, are we saving that much money?
So when someone sets up shop in that unused attic/wing/crawlspace of yours and starts producing Methamphetamines or otherwise generates/disposes hazardous waste but out of your sight, I hope you enjoy the consequences.
Another good example is what will happen to the owner if a child wanders in and gets injured or dies because easy access was granted to the interior of the home.
The home owner will end up facing serious charges and most likely have to plea bargain to avoid facing a prison term.
Excuses like 'government can't tell me to lock my doors' won't have much effect on a judge or jury. Not to mention the Civil Suit that will follow the criminal conviction(s).