A more likely scenario is that it's a symptom of our economy's drive to keep making things faster and cheaper. Products get rushed out the door without enough time for a truly thorough QA process. Little things that the design engineers may miss, or discard as "nah, that'll hold fine!", can very easily come back and bite you in the ass later.
I do think your statement is right in a sense. We see more recalls, and a public recall is often preferable to the cost and bad pr of a lawsuit. At the same time, I think there's a lot more really shoddy products out there than ever before. The statement "They don't make em like they used to" has a lot of truth in it.
Not all LEDs give off pure light (all of one wavelength). Especially with cheaper LEDs with not-quite-so-pure stuff used in the construction, it's possible to have other wavelengths coming out.
It's been a while since I sold anything on ebay, so some things could be different now, but the price you pay to have the auction posted is a percentage of the starting price. I never did a reserve auction, so I don't know if that is also factored into the auction fee. So, I suppose it is possible that you set a low starting price but high reserve to save on the auction fee.
Additionally, if the item in question has a lot of emotional value, the seller may still be questioning his desire to sell, and want the ability to gracefully back out.
And yes, there will always be speculators, testing the waters in many markets and pissing people off left and right.
You can avoid the neck pain problems if you lay flat on your back and set the unit such that the stand rests on your chest. I've had many hours of pain-free fun that way (bought a VB for $30 brand new after Nintendo abandoned it). Now if I could just do something about the horrible disorientation experienced upon standing up after playing Red Alarm for a couple hours...
Thinking BACK?! I still get serious over video games sometimes. Then again, I'm a collector as well (though at the low end of the spectrum). I love running a little super breakout (I have the arcade machine) tournament in my apartment. Well, used to anyway. One of the fuses on the power supply board went out...need to order a replacement. Thank god it was a generic part that blew.
It's getting harder and harder to find a lot of the older systems, and rare carts are even harder. Throw in that a lot of these systems have had years of punishment at the hands of many a child, and finding mint-condition equipment gets really difficult.
Yeah, most of us can relieve our nostalgia with emulators, or maybe picking up a beat-up-but-still-working 2600 and a handful of games at a flea market, but some people want more. Some people are collectors. And those people are willing to pay a premium for well maintained and functional equipment. You get this with a lot of things...it's really no different than any other sort of collector...comic book, beanie baby, whatever. Only reason anyone here cares in this case is the intersection of the Geek Set and the Gamer Set is fairly large.
Older chips are more of a known factor. They've had more time to determine the necessary power and radiation shielding levels. Plus, if you write your software right, there's not a whole lot of things you really need a high speed processor for. Not like they're going to be doing some Q3 deathmatches up there.
There is a big difference between latest-and-greatest and that which is suitable for the needs of a particular product. After all, what's the point of the latest drivers for the latest whiz-bang device when the device doesn't, and possibly never will, have said device?
If the embedded software used is stable enough and sufficiently featureful, there's really no need to install kernel 2.9.10001030-pre5004-AC234 or whatever.
I love it when people think that if they just ban/ignore/whatever else something that it will just go away.
Do you honestly think that whether or not Nazi memorabilia is for sale on Yahoo will affect in any way the number of Nazi sympathizers and imitators in Europe or anywhere else? Do you think that a budding neo-Nazi recruit in France is going to change his beliefs solely on the fact that he cannot order an authentic artifact or two?
Yes, the Nazis were responsible for many atrocities in the past. But PRETENDING THINGS DON'T EXIST DOESN'T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. In fact, all too often it increases the mystique as perceived by the minds of those who are already easily lead into such things.
Outlook isn't free. Doing a quick price check on CDW, it costs $97 for Outlook 2000. Of course, it also comes with pretty much any Office install (SBE, Professional, Premium) so the cost has most likely been paid already in any organization that standardizes on Office as the main productivity suite. Plus there's those goddamned CALs you gotta buy.
(time to go offtopic for a sec)
Speaking of licenses and crap, what is with all the different licensing schemes available for NT? Most annoying one has to be the Small Business Server edition of Backoffice. God forbid you ever realize down the road that you might need more than a single server in your environment. When that point comes, get ready to reinstall, cause there's no way to get it to join another NT domain, and it won't let you add other servers to its domain. There's also that 50-user absolute cap.
Probably not...I remember talking to the guy who made this a long time ago on IRC. He's a collector...there's a good chance he actually owns the vast majority of the carts whose roms reside inside Bankzilla. And unless something's changed (can't check the site, it's being hit hard), it was more of a personal project than something he intended to sell.
Main Entry: joystick
Pronunciation: -"stik
Function: noun
Etymology: perhaps from English slang joystick penis
Hell, if the dictionary thinks that's where it came from,it's alright by me.
Re:Who cares about practicality - look at the size
on
Firewall On A PCI card
·
· Score: 2
There's a couple reasons...first of all, anything that's gonna go in a rack needs to be 19" wide, and thick enough for some mounting brackets to be securely attatched. Then there's the ventilation aspect. The manufacturers can't count on Joe Schmoe to leave adequate spacing between devices and have the room properly air conditioned, so they compensate by having large airflow spaces within the device itself. Third, and possibly most important, a lot of stuff like this is really expensive...and stupid managers don't like to spend several grand on something that comes in a tiny box.
I used to work in a support center as well. The best schedule I ever had there was a 4 10-hour days on, 3 days off schedule. Sure by the end of that 4th day you feel like dogshit, but ohh the continual 3-day weekends. Heck, there was one time they shifted around what days I was working, and I ended up with a (one-time-only) 6-day weekend. Plus, my "weekend" was usually in the middle of the week, allowing me to get as drunk as possible without having to worry about the damn no-alcohol-sales-on-sunday crap...goddamn bible belt blue laws.
The article notes that the school's AUP clearly states that any and all use may be monitored. Of course, how many students A) bothered to read the AUP, B) really thought about that monitoring clause, and C) gave any consideration that someone outside the school system would demand the logs through the FOIA?
My biggest question is...what the hell does he want with the logs?
The phone company is a company, as in a business. This story is about a school. A public school. The rules are completely different. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.
The root of the problem is that open source software has never really had to worry about release dates before. Just about everyone who was working on it tended to be doing it in their spare time. Those who used it usually had a pretty good understanding that code done in one's spare time is not necessarily going to be completed by any given date. This new age of open source mixed with corporations causes us to have to worry about many of the same issues as traditional software companies do, including release dates, feature demand, and other nasty things that don't always jive with the "I wrote it to scratch a personal itch" mentality.
Personally, I'd rather wait for a release and know the code has been tested and is done right, rather than demand the developers set a release date, build a few binaries, run em overnight, cross their fingers, and ship.
The moral argument is indeed strong, but my morals and your morals do not necessarily match the morals of anyone else in this matter. Morals exist at an extremely low level in our minds...they influence everything we do. Call it a kernel-level feature.
The problem is not that the moral stance of censorware proponents is that censorship is an outright good thing. The moral ideal they are normally working with is that certain things (pornography/drugs/hate/whatever) should not exist at all. Obviously, a solid moral stance against censorship will conflict with this, resulting in one ideal being chosen over the other.
Changing someone else's morals is not easy. It usually requires a desire to change from within. What you can do, however, is make slow headway on other items related to the moral question. For example, do you think the US population in, say, 1850 would do nothing if the law/tax/etc systems of the time were immediately changed to the way things are nowadays? But it wasn't an immediate change...it was a gradual change with one item at a time.
If we can convince people that current censorware solutions are wrong, then at least we've gained some ground. And with the nature of the internet, I really doubt that anyone will ever make "perfect" censorware. There will always be "bad" things that slip through the cracks, and "good" things that get blocked from view. Sure you could make a censorware product whose lists are updated daily by actual humans, but the internet is simply too big and too ephemeral for this to ever be a practical solution.
When both sides of an issue like this are very dedicated to their stances, you have to try to find ways that don't necessarily outright discredit the other view. If you just walk up to a pro-censorware person and shout, "Censorship is wrong!", they'll just say back "We have to protect our children's eyes!" And you'll have many merry hours of saying basically the same things to each other for as long as the both of you can put up with each other.
But, if you can give a censorware advocate firm examples of the failures of such products, you run a slight chance of putting a crack in their defenses on the subject. With enough examples, you may even be able to convince them that there is no current censorware solution that doesn't have these problems. Then you can work on convincing them that automated censorware that actually has a 100% success rate is probably never going to happen. Then you can get them to realize that the only blocking software you really need is heavy parental involvement in children's lives.
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A more likely scenario is that it's a symptom of our economy's drive to keep making things faster and cheaper. Products get rushed out the door without enough time for a truly thorough QA process. Little things that the design engineers may miss, or discard as "nah, that'll hold fine!", can very easily come back and bite you in the ass later.
I do think your statement is right in a sense. We see more recalls, and a public recall is often preferable to the cost and bad pr of a lawsuit. At the same time, I think there's a lot more really shoddy products out there than ever before. The statement "They don't make em like they used to" has a lot of truth in it.
Not all LEDs give off pure light (all of one wavelength). Especially with cheaper LEDs with not-quite-so-pure stuff used in the construction, it's possible to have other wavelengths coming out.
It's been a while since I sold anything on ebay, so some things could be different now, but the price you pay to have the auction posted is a percentage of the starting price. I never did a reserve auction, so I don't know if that is also factored into the auction fee. So, I suppose it is possible that you set a low starting price but high reserve to save on the auction fee.
Additionally, if the item in question has a lot of emotional value, the seller may still be questioning his desire to sell, and want the ability to gracefully back out.
And yes, there will always be speculators, testing the waters in many markets and pissing people off left and right.
You can avoid the neck pain problems if you lay flat on your back and set the unit such that the stand rests on your chest. I've had many hours of pain-free fun that way (bought a VB for $30 brand new after Nintendo abandoned it). Now if I could just do something about the horrible disorientation experienced upon standing up after playing Red Alarm for a couple hours...
Thinking BACK?! I still get serious over video games sometimes. Then again, I'm a collector as well (though at the low end of the spectrum). I love running a little super breakout (I have the arcade machine) tournament in my apartment. Well, used to anyway. One of the fuses on the power supply board went out...need to order a replacement. Thank god it was a generic part that blew.
It's getting harder and harder to find a lot of the older systems, and rare carts are even harder. Throw in that a lot of these systems have had years of punishment at the hands of many a child, and finding mint-condition equipment gets really difficult.
Yeah, most of us can relieve our nostalgia with emulators, or maybe picking up a beat-up-but-still-working 2600 and a handful of games at a flea market, but some people want more. Some people are collectors. And those people are willing to pay a premium for well maintained and functional equipment. You get this with a lot of things...it's really no different than any other sort of collector...comic book, beanie baby, whatever. Only reason anyone here cares in this case is the intersection of the Geek Set and the Gamer Set is fairly large.
Older chips are more of a known factor. They've had more time to determine the necessary power and radiation shielding levels. Plus, if you write your software right, there's not a whole lot of things you really need a high speed processor for. Not like they're going to be doing some Q3 deathmatches up there.
There is a big difference between latest-and-greatest and that which is suitable for the needs of a particular product. After all, what's the point of the latest drivers for the latest whiz-bang device when the device doesn't, and possibly never will, have said device?
If the embedded software used is stable enough and sufficiently featureful, there's really no need to install kernel 2.9.10001030-pre5004-AC234 or whatever.
I love it when people think that if they just ban/ignore/whatever else something that it will just go away.
Do you honestly think that whether or not Nazi memorabilia is for sale on Yahoo will affect in any way the number of Nazi sympathizers and imitators in Europe or anywhere else? Do you think that a budding neo-Nazi recruit in France is going to change his beliefs solely on the fact that he cannot order an authentic artifact or two?
Yes, the Nazis were responsible for many atrocities in the past. But PRETENDING THINGS DON'T EXIST DOESN'T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. In fact, all too often it increases the mystique as perceived by the minds of those who are already easily lead into such things.
That's copyrights, not patents. I don't think the same rule applies.
Outlook isn't free. Doing a quick price check on CDW, it costs $97 for Outlook 2000. Of course, it also comes with pretty much any Office install (SBE, Professional, Premium) so the cost has most likely been paid already in any organization that standardizes on Office as the main productivity suite. Plus there's those goddamned CALs you gotta buy.
(time to go offtopic for a sec)
Speaking of licenses and crap, what is with all the different licensing schemes available for NT? Most annoying one has to be the Small Business Server edition of Backoffice. God forbid you ever realize down the road that you might need more than a single server in your environment. When that point comes, get ready to reinstall, cause there's no way to get it to join another NT domain, and it won't let you add other servers to its domain. There's also that 50-user absolute cap.
Probably not...I remember talking to the guy who made this a long time ago on IRC. He's a collector...there's a good chance he actually owns the vast majority of the carts whose roms reside inside Bankzilla. And unless something's changed (can't check the site, it's being hit hard), it was more of a personal project than something he intended to sell.
From www.m-w.com:
,it's alright by me.
Main Entry: joystick
Pronunciation: -"stik
Function: noun
Etymology: perhaps from English slang joystick penis
Hell, if the dictionary thinks that's where it came from
There's a couple reasons...first of all, anything that's gonna go in a rack needs to be 19" wide, and thick enough for some mounting brackets to be securely attatched. Then there's the ventilation aspect. The manufacturers can't count on Joe Schmoe to leave adequate spacing between devices and have the room properly air conditioned, so they compensate by having large airflow spaces within the device itself. Third, and possibly most important, a lot of stuff like this is really expensive...and stupid managers don't like to spend several grand on something that comes in a tiny box.
I used to work in a support center as well. The best schedule I ever had there was a 4 10-hour days on, 3 days off schedule. Sure by the end of that 4th day you feel like dogshit, but ohh the continual 3-day weekends. Heck, there was one time they shifted around what days I was working, and I ended up with a (one-time-only) 6-day weekend. Plus, my "weekend" was usually in the middle of the week, allowing me to get as drunk as possible without having to worry about the damn no-alcohol-sales-on-sunday crap...goddamn bible belt blue laws.
Yeah....to be quite honest, I'm not sure why I even bothered to go and plop "pcmcia acronym" into google. Guess it's a slow day for more than just me.
From http://www.nalda.navy.mil/3.6.2/ame/acrony~1.html :
PCMCIA = "PC Memory Card International Association"
Also, I believe XWindows grew from an earlier project named "W", but don't quote me on that or anything.
Well of course it's a basic rule...I know that, you know that, but how many average high school students are going to care?
The article notes that the school's AUP clearly states that any and all use may be monitored. Of course, how many students A) bothered to read the AUP, B) really thought about that monitoring clause, and C) gave any consideration that someone outside the school system would demand the logs through the FOIA?
My biggest question is...what the hell does he want with the logs?
The phone company is a company, as in a business. This story is about a school. A public school. The rules are completely different. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.
The root of the problem is that open source software has never really had to worry about release dates before. Just about everyone who was working on it tended to be doing it in their spare time. Those who used it usually had a pretty good understanding that code done in one's spare time is not necessarily going to be completed by any given date. This new age of open source mixed with corporations causes us to have to worry about many of the same issues as traditional software companies do, including release dates, feature demand, and other nasty things that don't always jive with the "I wrote it to scratch a personal itch" mentality.
Personally, I'd rather wait for a release and know the code has been tested and is done right, rather than demand the developers set a release date, build a few binaries, run em overnight, cross their fingers, and ship.
The moral argument is indeed strong, but my morals and your morals do not necessarily match the morals of anyone else in this matter. Morals exist at an extremely low level in our minds...they influence everything we do. Call it a kernel-level feature.
The problem is not that the moral stance of censorware proponents is that censorship is an outright good thing. The moral ideal they are normally working with is that certain things (pornography/drugs/hate/whatever) should not exist at all. Obviously, a solid moral stance against censorship will conflict with this, resulting in one ideal being chosen over the other.
Changing someone else's morals is not easy. It usually requires a desire to change from within. What you can do, however, is make slow headway on other items related to the moral question. For example, do you think the US population in, say, 1850 would do nothing if the law/tax/etc systems of the time were immediately changed to the way things are nowadays? But it wasn't an immediate change...it was a gradual change with one item at a time.
If we can convince people that current censorware solutions are wrong, then at least we've gained some ground. And with the nature of the internet, I really doubt that anyone will ever make "perfect" censorware. There will always be "bad" things that slip through the cracks, and "good" things that get blocked from view. Sure you could make a censorware product whose lists are updated daily by actual humans, but the internet is simply too big and too ephemeral for this to ever be a practical solution.
When both sides of an issue like this are very dedicated to their stances, you have to try to find ways that don't necessarily outright discredit the other view. If you just walk up to a pro-censorware person and shout, "Censorship is wrong!", they'll just say back "We have to protect our children's eyes!" And you'll have many merry hours of saying basically the same things to each other for as long as the both of you can put up with each other.
But, if you can give a censorware advocate firm examples of the failures of such products, you run a slight chance of putting a crack in their defenses on the subject. With enough examples, you may even be able to convince them that there is no current censorware solution that doesn't have these problems. Then you can work on convincing them that automated censorware that actually has a 100% success rate is probably never going to happen. Then you can get them to realize that the only blocking software you really need is heavy parental involvement in children's lives.
Umm...
1) Slashdot book reviews almost always contain a link to purchase a book.
2) The reviews are also generally written by people who are not Slashdot employees.
3) The general response in the comments so far also show a large amount of support for this book.
So you don't have any fears of that old 1Gb drive going kaput any time soon?
One copy of a critical file is never enough.