Short answer: Antec makes multiple supplies. The model that the other poster mentioned is in a PC I have and it's damned quiet and built like a tank. I've had other Antec supplies that do not advertise themselves as being quiet -- and they are not!
Would this nearly as much of an issue without the likes of Napster and P2P contributing to the proliferation of illegal music distribution (whatever you want to call it, I'm talking about the illegal stuff)?
I think so. I believe that Napster and other P2P networks were simply an excuse. There is little evidence to suggest that Napster et al. were costing the record companies a lot in sales. In fact, there were some pretty reputable studies and polls done that showed that exposure to new music on Napster caused people to buy more CDs. It's one thing to download a song or two by an artist to see if you like their stuff, but it is quite another to risk $15 or more on a CD that you've never heard.
Want to know what the largest network is that distributes copyrighted music? FM radio. Back in high school when I wanted one song by a band and could not afford and/or justify buying their whole album, I'd just record it off the air on cassette. My friends did the same thing. We also made cassettes of LPs (yeah, I know that I'm old).
I think that the RIAA just saw this as an opportunity to push crippled CDs on to the public.
No it does not. Here are Apple's own specs since you seem unable to navigate the web on your own.
Second, a USB floppy drive runs $30 and the Compaq POS here has no FireWire
A firewire card runs $20 -- and most people have no use for it. Oh, I see, if an iMac is missing something like a floppy, then that should be viewed as an 'inexpensive upgrade opportunity', but if the Compaq is missing something that costs less (and that most people neither need nor want), it's a POS.
Since you decided to get petty about ports, I will point out that the classic iMac does not have a parallel port, audio line in, serial port, or video connector (making monitor upgrades essentially impossible). Every one of those is a lot more valuable than Firewire for most people. Even more important than the iMac's lack of ports is the lack of expansion slots. The person who purchases the Compaq can add a SCSI card, Firewire card, USB 2.0 card, 802.11a card, RAID controller, TV tuner card, video capture card, etc. The iMac user has no such expansion opportunities.
no CDRW
Neither does the $789 "classic" iMac. So now the Compaq PC is a "POS" because it lacks something that the iMac also lacks? I will also point out that the CD-ROM drive in the Compaq is a 48x unit while the one in the G3 iMac is a 24x unit.
a lower-end version of the OS
For which there is far more software than for the Mac OS. Tell me what limitations Windows XP Home has that will impair the average home user.
no bundled software other than IE and Outlook Express.
Preinstalled software on the Compaq includes:
Microsoft Money 2002 Microsoft Works 6.0 office suite Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia Deluxe Intuit Quicken Financial Center/ Quicken 2002 RealNetworks RealOne Player Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 Norton Antivirus 2002 Coloreal Color Management software
Next time, do some research so that you don't make an ass of yourself.
ALSO, you could quote real prices--how much are these stupid rebates? Most are $199 for the computer, so looking at that I'd guess $50 for the monitor, which puts us back up at...a little over the cost of the G3 iMac today.
Are you too stupid to successfully get a rebate? What a "mornon" (to use your word)! Since you are apparently too challenged to use CompUSA's web site, the computer has a $50 rebate (not $199, as you suggested) and the monitor has an instant rebate -- so that even you could get it. So much for that pathetic argument.
It has more than one button on the mouse. Whoopie--you can buy a mouse with 100 buttons for your Mac, if it turns your crank.
So what? The machine costs $800 and doesn't come with one.
Other big selling point? This teacher, who has little money and time, can buy and install DVD players, video cards and assorted crap. I know that's what most teachers I know do-- they are constantly upgrading their low-end hardware.
If you would take your head out of Steve Jobs' ass for a moment, you would realize that it's a lot cheaper to upgrade a PC than to buy a whole new machine.
This is why I hate debating with many Mac users.
I initially said that the $1200 price of a modern iMac was too high for many teachers to pay. Then a Mac fanboy posted that there was an educator deal that offered the "classic" iMac (G3) for $789. When I compared that to what was available from Compaq (at CompUSA), you flamed me and claimed that the iMac has a CD-RW drive -- when the ones that have that are the new iMacs that start with the $1200 price tag to which I initially referred. So when comparing on price, we should assume $789, but when comparing specs, we should use the $1200 iMac?
I took the time to research what I wrote, looking up specs on the iMac and the Compaq before posting. You shot back with your flame (calling me a "mornon") in which you made incorrect assertions, illogical arguments, and for which you apparently did zero fact checking.
There is no scheme yet devised that will significantly hamper true music pirates. And by that term, I mean people who create and redistribute bootleg CDs for profit. Any of those folks will just take an audio CD player and capture the music via the SPDIF output.
The music industry wants to convince the world that anyone who records a CD to their hard disc is a "pirate." They want consumers to believe that making a backup copy in case of damage is piracy. They want people to believe that creating a "mix CD" of your favorite songs is piracy. They want the public to believe that the guy who copies a CD so he can have one in his car and one at home is a pirate. In short, they are waging a campaign to equate simple copying with piracy.
In their ideal world, if you wanted a copy of a CD for the car and one for the home, you would have to purchase two of them. If you wanted a "mix CD" with numerous hits, you would choose from their canned compilations. If you damaged the CD while moving it from player to player, you would have to purchase a new one (since you would not have a backup). This is not about piracy. It's about making you pay multiple times for the same music.
You are quoting prices on an grotesquely underpowered, outdated machine on which OS-X crawls. It doesn't have any way to write to removable media, so how is the teacher supposed to back up her data? "Sorry class, but I lost all of your grades in my spreadsheet because my hard drive died. I had no backup because for $800, my iMac didn't even come with a floppy drive, much less a CD-R/W."
Now compare that price to a modern, low-end machine from, say, Compaq:
Presario 6300US Minitower 128MB RAM Windows XP Home Edition Intel Celeron Processor 1.4GHz 48X CD-Rom Drive 40GB Hard Drive Floppy drive (3..5") Keyboard Mouse (with more than one button and a wheel)
And that price is just what the general public can get by walking into CompUSA today. A little shopping or an educators' discount would have turned up an even better price. For $250 less than the outdated "classic" iMac, the teacher gets a much faster machine (a 1.7ghz Celeron will spank a 600mhz G3 according to any respected, independent benchmark such as Spec), a larger monitor, a floppy drive, and more bundled software. In addition, she gets a machine that is much more expandable should she ever wish to put in a better video card, CD-R/W drive, DVD drive, etc.
So please stop with the Apple fanboy routine. The iMac line is grossly overpriced -- especially for most teachers' modest incomes.
...Bentley is offering all K-12 teachers free 19" 5-spoke split-rim titanium bolted alloy wheels with and Pirelli P-Zero tires with the purchase of any Bentley Arnage T!
There are counties in the U.S. where the starting salary for teachers qualifies them to live in government subsidized housing. Few such teachers can afford to blow $1,200 or more on an iMac.
Here's a wild idea: Apple could price their computers such that an entry level iMac costs what an entry level Intel-architecture PC does. They could stop trying to be the Bang & Olufson of computers and build machines that teachers and students could readily afford. Not only would that get teachers and students on board, but also make the machines more appealing to the public at large. Instead, Apple seems to be doing just the opposite by integrating expensive LCDs into their entry level iMacs and not selling an entry level machine sans monitor so that consumers can go to Best Buy and purchase a cheap 15"-17" monitor.
but none of them has anything that allows them to send people to space to service these satellites
Two problems:
1. Only in the extremely rare exception of something like the Hubble Space Telescope is it cost-effective to service a satellite in orbit. It is much less costly to simply replace 99% of the satellites than it is to service them -- even for the U.S. which already has the Space Shuttle.
2. The Space Shuttle is only capable of servicing LEO (low-Earth orbiting) satellites (typically less than 2000 km in altitude) and not GEO (geosynchronous) satellites which reside 36,000 km (22,500 miles) above the Earth's equator. That means that communications satellites can't be serviced by the Space Shuttle.
By the way, I just finished up a two-year-plus contract at a firm that manufactures satellites, so I'm not talking out of any orifice other than the appropriate one.
Basing your immediate solution on something that is known to work is the best alternative.
Conventional rockets are known to work and boost payload and astronauts at a lower cost than our space shuttle. That's the point: We attempted to replace conventional rockets and learned that the replacement was inferior -- so why did Japan base their solution on the Shuttle? If Japan wanted to copy something, then they should have copied our conventional rockets.
The space shuttle has been a terrible disappointment in that its capacity is far lower than had been initially planned while its cost per pound of payload is far higher than had been predicted. Part of that is due to the fact that, regardless of its payload, it must be manned. Building a craft to support humans in space with adequate safety margins and backup equipment is incredibly expensive both in weight and cost. If we had to rely on the space shuttle to launch communications satellites into orbit, we would still be running trans-Atlantic cables for our communications needs.
A third party warranty has no value because it creates no financial disincentive to the manufacturer from producing shoddy products.
The point was that the manufacturer could offer any warranty that they wanted by simply adjusting the price accordingly. It's all a numbers game. You want a longer warranty? Expect a higher selling price. Maxtor could easily offer a five year warranty if customers were willing to pay more for the same drive.
If you would prefer, I'll rebrand the drives as "Happy Data Systems" drives and sell them to you for $300 for a 40GB drive. No third party warranty or anything. If your Happy Data Systems drive fails within five years due to a manufacturing defect, I will repair or replace it (my option).
I'm paying it because I know that the manufacturer that offers a longer warranty has a greater incentive to produce reliable products.
Then why aren't Kia and Hyundai the most reliable cars on the market? They have some of the longest warranties.
The drives that the manufacturers make now are no different than the drives that they made when the warranties were 3 years long. It's a damned tough engineering task to make hard drives with higher failure rates in years two and three without causing much higher infant mortality that's covered in a one-year warranty.
If Maxtor drives started failing far sooner and more often than other brands, would you buy a Maxtor next time you wanted a drive? Of course not. Customer dissatisfaction is a much stronger financial disincentive against producing shoddy merchandise than are increased warranty costs.
I responded to a posting that started off by saying I was "incorrect" (and by implication that I don't understand business) and that continued on to say that anyone who disagrees with the poster's assessment of the situation is so blind that they need "to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)" Yes, when someone is rude to me, I usually reciprocate.
Anyway, I wanted to comment that since the hard drive manufacturers are cutting costs, wouldn't they also lay off a few employees, specially from departments like QA that are not as necessary with their new policy and all.
Probably not. As I pointed out previously, IBM shot themselves in the foot by releasing unreliable drives. I can't imagine others following in IBM's footsteps. If a shorter warranty preceeds layoffs, I would expect layoffs of technicians and people in the shipping departments -- since warranty service relies on these people most heavily.
Seems the higher up the ladder you go the further you get from the real business.
Business is not that complex. Drive manufacturers probably realized that price was a bigger factor in purchase decisions than warranty length. Since computers typically come with a one year warranty, it's hardly surprising that drive warranties would be shortened to match.
I simply don't buy the notion that Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor have all decided to commit corporate suicide by downgrading the reliability of their drives. I don't go for the whole notion that every company has some hidden, evil agenda and that every policy change is part of that (well, for Microsoft, maybe). I think that the drive manufacturers realized that, without changing the drives at all, they could cut costs. That might be to give themselves some more profit margin, to reduce the selling price, or some combination of both. Look at Dell: If you buy a computer from them, you can choose the length of the warranty and simply pay more for a longer one. The quality of the product is the same whether you buy a three year warranty, two year, or one.
That statement is incorrect. Anybody that puts together a solid business model would have warrenty costs built into the product's original cost.
No, the statement is not "incorrect." Warranty costs that have not yet occurred can only be guessed. Shipping costs, failure rates, and personnel costs can all affect warranty costs and can all vary from what was predicted. I was obviously referring to the pre-warranty profits.
It may be true that they are only making $1 one each drive at this moment, but now they will make $2 on each drive because they will have to build in less warrenty cost into the product's price.
Or they might be able to remain price-competitive on the shelves of Best Buy. Or they might go from operating in the red to operating in the black. Frankly speaking, you don't know what the motivating factors were.
Also consider this. They have reduced the warrenty period from 3 years to 1 year... don't you think that they are also going to increase their profit to $2.50 - $3.00 per drive by using less stringent testing methods and using a smaller sample size when testing their units since now they can be MUCH less reliable?? The other possiblity is that they use lesser parts in their drives since they now know they only need to make the drives last for one year instead of three... the drives only have to last one third of the time they originally had to last!!!
Look at what happened to IBM when their drives were perceived as being less reliable than the competition: Customers practically boycotted their product and IBM subsequently sold its drive business to Hitachi. So, no, I don't think that there is some conspiracy to make drives less reliable. Nor do I believe that the reduced warranty is a response to higher failure rates. It is more likely a recognition that a low price sells more drives than a long warranty.
Now, they will make it so the drives only last 2 years (1 year less than their previous warrenty required and one more year than the current one requires). Any one that can't see the basic business behind this decision needs to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)
You have obviously never run a business if you think that the key to success is reducing the reliability of your product. And with that kind of mentality, there is little chance that you ever will run a business.
I wish I was the V.P. that got credit for this lesser warrenty idea.... I'd be in Maui right now!
There are not a lot of openings a major corporations for Vice Presidents who cannot spell "warranty." So, if I were you, I wouldn't be picking out swim trunks yet.
It just occurred to me that people actually believe warranty costs are driven solely by failure rate and replacement drive costs. I guess I have to spell out other reasons that warranty costs could go up for a manufacturer:
1. Employee pay increases. Everyone from the technicians who test the drives to the janitors to the shipping clerks get paid. Sometimes job market conditions force employers to raise pay to attract and retain employees.
2. Employee benefit costs. If a company finds itself with unexpected increases in health insurance premiums, for example, their costs on warranty service rise.
3. Government regulations. OSHA and EPA rules and regulations (for example) might directly affect warranty costs.
4. Facilities costs. If the cost goes up for electricity, heat, water, building leases, fuel, etc., that affects warranty costs.
5. Shipping costs. When shipping costs increase, that directly affects warranty service costs.
Those are but a few of the things that can increase warranty costs even if failures stay constant.
As drives become cheaper and profit margins shrink, fixed warranty costs become disproportionate. It's no cheaper to ship an $89 drive than it is to ship a $300 drive of the same physical size -- and we've seen that kind of price drop. There was a time, not too long ago, when an inexpensive drive was $300. Drive manufacturers are now operating on razor-thin margins and downwards-spiralling prices. When you are making $1 profit on each drive, the shipping costs alone for a warranty replacement will eat up all of the profits for multiple drives.
A longer warranty does not imply a better or more reliable product. Just look at cars. Hyundai and Kia come with 10 year powertrain warranties while Lexus, the most reliable car according to studies/surveys, comes with a 6 year powertrain warranty. So how does Kia/Hyundai offer such a long warranty? They cut costs elsewhere.
I'm willing to sell Maxtor hard drives with five-year warranties if you're willing to pay me $300 for each 40GB hard drive. I'll just go down to CompUSA, buy the drives there, buy some spares, and sit the spares on a shelf. That won't make the drive you get any more reliable, but it will have a longer warranty.
While we did stop making it, we never stopped supporting it. I remember doing installs and testing of 5.0 (the last release) on BeBoxen.
The BeBox platform was not even mentioned in the BeOS Pro Edition 5.0 User's Guide the documentation, so I don't know what kind of internal testing was done, but if there was support for the BeBox, it was well-hidden.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it.
But Linux was ported to it by a people working in their spare time.
That was a last ditch effort to survive.
And it was transparent to BeOS customers and vendors alike.
We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
But still Be continued to lie to BeOS 5.0 purchasers. One need not have looked any further than the "Registered BeOS User Area" for proof that Be, Inc. had no interest in supporting BeOS customers. Months and months went by and there was never anything released via that worthless page. No drivers for new hardware. No updates or new software. Nothing. On the page, users found the lie "we will be adding additional features in the near future." The new networking layer, BONE, was never released. The OpenGL support was never released. Updates for new hardware never appeared.
Third-party Be developers were also left hung out to dry. like Wildcard Design and Thunder Munchkin Software close their doors, horribly in debt and sometimes in legal trouble, due to the conscious decision by Be, Inc. to abandon them. I thought that the following excerpt from a letter by Todd C. Brett, CEO of Thunder Munchkin Software, summed up the situation well:
Developer services have been reduced to highly expensive support for large corporations or consulting firms (with a noted preference for web appliances), leaving developer support for mainstream applications all but dried up. Simply trying to communicate with important staff to ensure quality service to our customers, let alone actually getting something done with Be, Inc., has become an unbelievably painful experience. The message made to small pioneering BeOS companies such as ours has been made crystal
clear: we are not needed anymore.
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
And others, like Netpliance, went with OSs like QNX. Was Be actually surprised that Microsoft pressured companies like Compaq to use WinCE? This is the same company that sabotaged Digital Research's DR-DOS by purposely making Windows beta installs fail with vague claims about (non-existent) compatability problems.
Of course, all of this is just a moot point. As I predicted in my e-mail to JLG, the Internet appliance market was a non-starter and, even had every vendor of those devices used BeIA, it would have made little difference. It's just a shame that Be could no go out of business on a high-note, supporting their loyal customers and developers to the end.
To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
While I loved BeOS as an OS, I hated Be, Inc. as a company. They abandoned every product and customer that they ever had. They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS. They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs. They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market. Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Be was a perfect example of what happens, and what should happen, to a company that abandons its customers and supporters.
Looking at the pictures of the Shuttle water-cooled system, I was reminded of Anna Nicole Smith. Both she and the computer used to be small and cute. Now both are big, unattractive, and on display for the world to see what has become of them. Sad...
Sadly it is a real pain not being able to race more than 2 at times.
I just picked up a 35mhz unit at a little kiosk in a mall. Works great. No problems at all. I specifically got that frequency because it is not FCC approved in the U.S. and, thus, less likely to be subject to interference from other RC vehicles.
I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
That's extremely unfair since no computer has a wife (or husband). We all know that computers can't get married to people -- possibly explaining why so many of the guys on Slashdot are single.
Geez, how can you survive, your minimum frame rate MUST drop bellow 100 f/s on that setup! Hell, it might even get bellow the 85Hz refresh rate of the monitor, or if you're really unlucky, bellow the 60 f/s which is the maximum the human eye can perceive!
Mine drops way below 30fps with the GeForce 3 Ti200 when there is a lot of action on the screen (e.g. 3 bots in a close-in firefight). I suggest you try a copy of UT2003 before you make rash assumptions about the frame rates. It's *WAY* more graphics intensive than was its predecessor.
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Short answer: Antec makes multiple supplies. The model that the other poster mentioned is in a PC I have and it's damned quiet and built like a tank. I've had other Antec supplies that do not advertise themselves as being quiet -- and they are not!
Despite our rocky start, you're okay by me.
I'm sorry I called you a mornon.
Apology accepted (assuming that you were expressing regrets at the term and not simply the spelling.
I do think if you try and win your arguements w/o so much bile, you'll get further.
You will find that I am a far more pleasant person when I am not called a moron in the subject of a message.
Would this nearly as much of an issue without the likes of Napster and P2P contributing to the proliferation of illegal music distribution (whatever you want to call it, I'm talking about the illegal stuff)?
I think so. I believe that Napster and other P2P networks were simply an excuse. There is little evidence to suggest that Napster et al. were costing the record companies a lot in sales. In fact, there were some pretty reputable studies and polls done that showed that exposure to new music on Napster caused people to buy more CDs. It's one thing to download a song or two by an artist to see if you like their stuff, but it is quite another to risk $15 or more on a CD that you've never heard.
Want to know what the largest network is that distributes copyrighted music? FM radio. Back in high school when I wanted one song by a band and could not afford and/or justify buying their whole album, I'd just record it off the air on cassette. My friends did the same thing. We also made cassettes of LPs (yeah, I know that I'm old).
I think that the RIAA just saw this as an opportunity to push crippled CDs on to the public.
First, the G3 iMac does come with a CDRW.
No it does not. Here are Apple's own specs since you seem unable to navigate the web on your own.
Second, a USB floppy drive runs $30 and the Compaq POS here has no FireWire
A firewire card runs $20 -- and most people have no use for it. Oh, I see, if an iMac is missing something like a floppy, then that should be viewed as an 'inexpensive upgrade opportunity', but if the Compaq is missing something that costs less (and that most people neither need nor want), it's a POS.
Since you decided to get petty about ports, I will point out that the classic iMac does not have a parallel port, audio line in, serial port, or video connector (making monitor upgrades essentially impossible). Every one of those is a lot more valuable than Firewire for most people. Even more important than the iMac's lack of ports is the lack of expansion slots. The person who purchases the Compaq can add a SCSI card, Firewire card, USB 2.0 card, 802.11a card, RAID controller, TV tuner card, video capture card, etc. The iMac user has no such expansion opportunities.
no CDRW
Neither does the $789 "classic" iMac. So now the Compaq PC is a "POS" because it lacks something that the iMac also lacks? I will also point out that the CD-ROM drive in the Compaq is a 48x unit while the one in the G3 iMac is a 24x unit.
a lower-end version of the OS
For which there is far more software than for the Mac OS. Tell me what limitations Windows XP Home has that will impair the average home user.
no bundled software other than IE and Outlook Express.
Preinstalled software on the Compaq includes:
Microsoft Money 2002
Microsoft Works 6.0 office suite
Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia Deluxe
Intuit Quicken Financial Center/ Quicken 2002
RealNetworks RealOne Player
Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0
Norton Antivirus 2002
Coloreal Color Management software
Next time, do some research so that you don't make an ass of yourself.
ALSO, you could quote real prices--how much are these stupid rebates? Most are $199 for the computer, so looking at that I'd guess $50 for the monitor, which puts us back up at...a little over the cost of the G3 iMac today.
Are you too stupid to successfully get a rebate? What a "mornon" (to use your word)! Since you are apparently too challenged to use CompUSA's web site, the computer has a $50 rebate (not $199, as you suggested) and the monitor has an instant rebate -- so that even you could get it. So much for that pathetic argument.
It has more than one button on the mouse. Whoopie--you can buy a mouse with 100 buttons for your Mac, if it turns your crank.
So what? The machine costs $800 and doesn't come with one.
Other big selling point? This teacher, who has little money and time, can buy and install DVD players, video cards and assorted crap. I know that's what most teachers I know do-- they are constantly upgrading their low-end hardware.
If you would take your head out of Steve Jobs' ass for a moment, you would realize that it's a lot cheaper to upgrade a PC than to buy a whole new machine.
This is why I hate debating with many Mac users.
I initially said that the $1200 price of a modern iMac was too high for many teachers to pay. Then a Mac fanboy posted that there was an educator deal that offered the "classic" iMac (G3) for $789. When I compared that to what was available from Compaq (at CompUSA), you flamed me and claimed that the iMac has a CD-RW drive -- when the ones that have that are the new iMacs that start with the $1200 price tag to which I initially referred. So when comparing on price, we should assume $789, but when comparing specs, we should use the $1200 iMac?
I took the time to research what I wrote, looking up specs on the iMac and the Compaq before posting. You shot back with your flame (calling me a "mornon") in which you made incorrect assertions, illogical arguments, and for which you apparently did zero fact checking.
There is no scheme yet devised that will significantly hamper true music pirates. And by that term, I mean people who create and redistribute bootleg CDs for profit. Any of those folks will just take an audio CD player and capture the music via the SPDIF output.
The music industry wants to convince the world that anyone who records a CD to their hard disc is a "pirate." They want consumers to believe that making a backup copy in case of damage is piracy. They want people to believe that creating a "mix CD" of your favorite songs is piracy. They want the public to believe that the guy who copies a CD so he can have one in his car and one at home is a pirate. In short, they are waging a campaign to equate simple copying with piracy.
In their ideal world, if you wanted a copy of a CD for the car and one for the home, you would have to purchase two of them. If you wanted a "mix CD" with numerous hits, you would choose from their canned compilations. If you damaged the CD while moving it from player to player, you would have to purchase a new one (since you would not have a backup). This is not about piracy. It's about making you pay multiple times for the same music.
You are quoting prices on an grotesquely underpowered, outdated machine on which OS-X crawls. It doesn't have any way to write to removable media, so how is the teacher supposed to back up her data? "Sorry class, but I lost all of your grades in my spreadsheet because my hard drive died. I had no backup because for $800, my iMac didn't even come with a floppy drive, much less a CD-R/W."
Now compare that price to a modern, low-end machine from, say, Compaq:
Presario 6300US Minitower
128MB RAM
Windows XP Home Edition
Intel Celeron Processor 1.4GHz
48X CD-Rom Drive
40GB Hard Drive
Floppy drive (3..5")
Keyboard
Mouse (with more than one button and a wheel)
CompUSA Price: $400 after rebate
Samsung SyncMaster 750s 17-inch monitor: $140 after rebate
Altec Lansing 220 2.0 Amplified Speaker System: $30
Grand total: $570
And that price is just what the general public can get by walking into CompUSA today. A little shopping or an educators' discount would have turned up an even better price. For $250 less than the outdated "classic" iMac, the teacher gets a much faster machine (a 1.7ghz Celeron will spank a 600mhz G3 according to any respected, independent benchmark such as Spec), a larger monitor, a floppy drive, and more bundled software. In addition, she gets a machine that is much more expandable should she ever wish to put in a better video card, CD-R/W drive, DVD drive, etc.
So please stop with the Apple fanboy routine. The iMac line is grossly overpriced -- especially for most teachers' modest incomes.
...Bentley is offering all K-12 teachers free 19" 5-spoke split-rim titanium bolted alloy wheels with and Pirelli P-Zero tires with the purchase of any Bentley Arnage T!
There are counties in the U.S. where the starting salary for teachers qualifies them to live in government subsidized housing. Few such teachers can afford to blow $1,200 or more on an iMac.
Here's a wild idea: Apple could price their computers such that an entry level iMac costs what an entry level Intel-architecture PC does. They could stop trying to be the Bang & Olufson of computers and build machines that teachers and students could readily afford. Not only would that get teachers and students on board, but also make the machines more appealing to the public at large. Instead, Apple seems to be doing just the opposite by integrating expensive LCDs into their entry level iMacs and not selling an entry level machine sans monitor so that consumers can go to Best Buy and purchase a cheap 15"-17" monitor.
but none of them has anything that allows them to send people to space to service these satellites
Two problems:
1. Only in the extremely rare exception of something like the Hubble Space Telescope is it cost-effective to service a satellite in orbit. It is much less costly to simply replace 99% of the satellites than it is to service them -- even for the U.S. which already has the Space Shuttle.
2. The Space Shuttle is only capable of servicing LEO (low-Earth orbiting) satellites (typically less than 2000 km in altitude) and not GEO (geosynchronous) satellites which reside 36,000 km (22,500 miles) above the Earth's equator. That means that communications satellites can't be serviced by the Space Shuttle.
By the way, I just finished up a two-year-plus contract at a firm that manufactures satellites, so I'm not talking out of any orifice other than the appropriate one.
Basing your immediate solution on something that is known to work is the best alternative.
Conventional rockets are known to work and boost payload and astronauts at a lower cost than our space shuttle. That's the point: We attempted to replace conventional rockets and learned that the replacement was inferior -- so why did Japan base their solution on the Shuttle? If Japan wanted to copy something, then they should have copied our conventional rockets.
The space shuttle has been a terrible disappointment in that its capacity is far lower than had been initially planned while its cost per pound of payload is far higher than had been predicted. Part of that is due to the fact that, regardless of its payload, it must be manned. Building a craft to support humans in space with adequate safety margins and backup equipment is incredibly expensive both in weight and cost. If we had to rely on the space shuttle to launch communications satellites into orbit, we would still be running trans-Atlantic cables for our communications needs.
I think he was making a joke...
oddly enough, it's also smaller than my penis.
And it's probably been handled by fewer Asian men.
A third party warranty has no value because it creates no financial disincentive to the manufacturer from producing shoddy products.
The point was that the manufacturer could offer any warranty that they wanted by simply adjusting the price accordingly. It's all a numbers game. You want a longer warranty? Expect a higher selling price. Maxtor could easily offer a five year warranty if customers were willing to pay more for the same drive.
If you would prefer, I'll rebrand the drives as "Happy Data Systems" drives and sell them to you for $300 for a 40GB drive. No third party warranty or anything. If your Happy Data Systems drive fails within five years due to a manufacturing defect, I will repair or replace it (my option).
I'm paying it because I know that the manufacturer that offers a longer warranty has a greater incentive to produce reliable products.
Then why aren't Kia and Hyundai the most reliable cars on the market? They have some of the longest warranties.
The drives that the manufacturers make now are no different than the drives that they made when the warranties were 3 years long. It's a damned tough engineering task to make hard drives with higher failure rates in years two and three without causing much higher infant mortality that's covered in a one-year warranty.
If Maxtor drives started failing far sooner and more often than other brands, would you buy a Maxtor next time you wanted a drive? Of course not. Customer dissatisfaction is a much stronger financial disincentive against producing shoddy merchandise than are increased warranty costs.
You're very rude.
I responded to a posting that started off by saying I was "incorrect" (and by implication that I don't understand business) and that continued on to say that anyone who disagrees with the poster's assessment of the situation is so blind that they need "to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)" Yes, when someone is rude to me, I usually reciprocate.
Anyway, I wanted to comment that since the hard drive manufacturers are cutting costs, wouldn't they also lay off a few employees, specially from departments like QA that are not as necessary with their new policy and all.
Probably not. As I pointed out previously, IBM shot themselves in the foot by releasing unreliable drives. I can't imagine others following in IBM's footsteps. If a shorter warranty preceeds layoffs, I would expect layoffs of technicians and people in the shipping departments -- since warranty service relies on these people most heavily.
Seems the higher up the ladder you go the further you get from the real business.
Business is not that complex. Drive manufacturers probably realized that price was a bigger factor in purchase decisions than warranty length. Since computers typically come with a one year warranty, it's hardly surprising that drive warranties would be shortened to match.
I simply don't buy the notion that Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor have all decided to commit corporate suicide by downgrading the reliability of their drives. I don't go for the whole notion that every company has some hidden, evil agenda and that every policy change is part of that (well, for Microsoft, maybe). I think that the drive manufacturers realized that, without changing the drives at all, they could cut costs. That might be to give themselves some more profit margin, to reduce the selling price, or some combination of both. Look at Dell: If you buy a computer from them, you can choose the length of the warranty and simply pay more for a longer one. The quality of the product is the same whether you buy a three year warranty, two year, or one.
That statement is incorrect. Anybody that puts together a solid business model would have warrenty costs built into the product's original cost.
... don't you think that they are also going to increase their profit to $2.50 - $3.00 per drive by using less stringent testing methods and using a smaller sample size when testing their units since now they can be MUCH less reliable?? The other possiblity is that they use lesser parts in their drives since they now know they only need to make the drives last for one year instead of three ... the drives only have to last one third of the time they originally had to last!!!
.... I'd be in Maui right now!
No, the statement is not "incorrect." Warranty costs that have not yet occurred can only be guessed. Shipping costs, failure rates, and personnel costs can all affect warranty costs and can all vary from what was predicted. I was obviously referring to the pre-warranty profits.
It may be true that they are only making $1 one each drive at this moment, but now they will make $2 on each drive because they will have to build in less warrenty cost into the product's price.
Or they might be able to remain price-competitive on the shelves of Best Buy. Or they might go from operating in the red to operating in the black. Frankly speaking, you don't know what the motivating factors were.
Also consider this. They have reduced the warrenty period from 3 years to 1 year
Look at what happened to IBM when their drives were perceived as being less reliable than the competition: Customers practically boycotted their product and IBM subsequently sold its drive business to Hitachi. So, no, I don't think that there is some conspiracy to make drives less reliable. Nor do I believe that the reduced warranty is a response to higher failure rates. It is more likely a recognition that a low price sells more drives than a long warranty.
Now, they will make it so the drives only last 2 years (1 year less than their previous warrenty required and one more year than the current one requires). Any one that can't see the basic business behind this decision needs to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)
You have obviously never run a business if you think that the key to success is reducing the reliability of your product. And with that kind of mentality, there is little chance that you ever will run a business.
I wish I was the V.P. that got credit for this lesser warrenty idea
There are not a lot of openings a major corporations for Vice Presidents who cannot spell "warranty." So, if I were you, I wouldn't be picking out swim trunks yet.
It just occurred to me that people actually believe warranty costs are driven solely by failure rate and replacement drive costs. I guess I have to spell out other reasons that warranty costs could go up for a manufacturer:
1. Employee pay increases. Everyone from the technicians who test the drives to the janitors to the shipping clerks get paid. Sometimes job market conditions force employers to raise pay to attract and retain employees.
2. Employee benefit costs. If a company finds itself with unexpected increases in health insurance premiums, for example, their costs on warranty service rise.
3. Government regulations. OSHA and EPA rules and regulations (for example) might directly affect warranty costs.
4. Facilities costs. If the cost goes up for electricity, heat, water, building leases, fuel, etc., that affects warranty costs.
5. Shipping costs. When shipping costs increase, that directly affects warranty service costs.
Those are but a few of the things that can increase warranty costs even if failures stay constant.
As drives become cheaper and profit margins shrink, fixed warranty costs become disproportionate. It's no cheaper to ship an $89 drive than it is to ship a $300 drive of the same physical size -- and we've seen that kind of price drop. There was a time, not too long ago, when an inexpensive drive was $300. Drive manufacturers are now operating on razor-thin margins and downwards-spiralling prices. When you are making $1 profit on each drive, the shipping costs alone for a warranty replacement will eat up all of the profits for multiple drives.
A longer warranty does not imply a better or more reliable product. Just look at cars. Hyundai and Kia come with 10 year powertrain warranties while Lexus, the most reliable car according to studies/surveys, comes with a 6 year powertrain warranty. So how does Kia/Hyundai offer such a long warranty? They cut costs elsewhere.
I'm willing to sell Maxtor hard drives with five-year warranties if you're willing to pay me $300 for each 40GB hard drive. I'll just go down to CompUSA, buy the drives there, buy some spares, and sit the spares on a shelf. That won't make the drive you get any more reliable, but it will have a longer warranty.
Anna Nicole Smith is a beautiful person.
She is a fat sow that will marry anything for money. I would not be at all surprised to find out that she's engaged to Strom Thurmond.
The BeBox platform was not even mentioned in the BeOS Pro Edition 5.0 User's Guide the documentation, so I don't know what kind of internal testing was done, but if there was support for the BeBox, it was well-hidden.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it.
But Linux was ported to it by a people working in their spare time.
That was a last ditch effort to survive.
And it was transparent to BeOS customers and vendors alike.
We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
But still Be continued to lie to BeOS 5.0 purchasers. One need not have looked any further than the "Registered BeOS User Area" for proof that Be, Inc. had no interest in supporting BeOS customers. Months and months went by and there was never anything released via that worthless page. No drivers for new hardware. No updates or new software. Nothing. On the page, users found the lie "we will be adding additional features in the near future." The new networking layer, BONE, was never released. The OpenGL support was never released. Updates for new hardware never appeared.
Third-party Be developers were also left hung out to dry. like Wildcard Design and Thunder Munchkin Software close their doors, horribly in debt and sometimes in legal trouble, due to the conscious decision by Be, Inc. to abandon them. I thought that the following excerpt from a letter by Todd C. Brett, CEO of Thunder Munchkin Software, summed up the situation well:
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
And others, like Netpliance, went with OSs like QNX. Was Be actually surprised that Microsoft pressured companies like Compaq to use WinCE? This is the same company that sabotaged Digital Research's DR-DOS by purposely making Windows beta installs fail with vague claims about (non-existent) compatability problems.
Of course, all of this is just a moot point. As I predicted in my e-mail to JLG, the Internet appliance market was a non-starter and, even had every vendor of those devices used BeIA, it would have made little difference. It's just a shame that Be could no go out of business on a high-note, supporting their loyal customers and developers to the end.
When she posed for Playboy, she was -- especially compared to how she looks now.
To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
While I loved BeOS as an OS, I hated Be, Inc. as a company. They abandoned every product and customer that they ever had. They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS. They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs. They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market. Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Be was a perfect example of what happens, and what should happen, to a company that abandons its customers and supporters.
Looking at the pictures of the Shuttle water-cooled system, I was reminded of Anna Nicole Smith. Both she and the computer used to be small and cute. Now both are big, unattractive, and on display for the world to see what has become of them. Sad...
Sadly it is a real pain not being able to race more than 2 at times.
I just picked up a 35mhz unit at a little kiosk in a mall. Works great. No problems at all. I specifically got that frequency because it is not FCC approved in the U.S. and, thus, less likely to be subject to interference from other RC vehicles.
I can, for instance, look at a picture of my wife and identify her as my wife in a fraction of a second. The best image-recognition software in the world can't reliably do even that simple task.
That's extremely unfair since no computer has a wife (or husband). We all know that computers can't get married to people -- possibly explaining why so many of the guys on Slashdot are single.
Geez, how can you survive, your minimum frame rate MUST drop bellow 100 f/s on that setup! Hell, it might even get bellow the 85Hz refresh rate of the monitor, or if you're really unlucky, bellow the 60 f/s which is the maximum the human eye can perceive!
Mine drops way below 30fps with the GeForce 3 Ti200 when there is a lot of action on the screen (e.g. 3 bots in a close-in firefight). I suggest you try a copy of UT2003 before you make rash assumptions about the frame rates. It's *WAY* more graphics intensive than was its predecessor.