Why do people put up with shitty stores and shitty customer service?
Because those things don't mean everything. If a store has great stock, it can more than make up for bad layout, gruff salespeople, etc. (and I'm NOT saying that the people at Active are 'gruff', btw)
As a counter-example, a place could have the best customer service and store layout on the planet, but if they only sold HUGE BAGS OF DOG SHIT, would you shop there?
[I'd like to say that I haven't been to one of these for YEARS so I don't know if they still happen...]
Well, it used to be a closely-guarded secret, but the secret's out now, so I don't care anymore. They have surplus sales on the first wednesday of every month. GOOD stuff, too! The last time I was there, there was a HUGE non-working laser for sale, make an offer, only qualified offers accepted(ie: you could reasonably hope to fix the damn thing - the prof offering it didn't want it sitting as a curiousity in some whackos living room).
Last time (like I said, years ago), I picked up 3 Mac SEs (two dead but fixable) and an SE/30 - after working on them, two of the SEs were ressurected, and the SE/30 worked perfectly (and still does).
The BEST PART however, was that on one of the SEs that had been presumed dead, it was the ROM that was dead, and not the hard drive. "BONUS", I thought! "I'll just swap the ROM from the third one", (which was well and truly dead)... and it worked!
So the hard drive was alive... and it was FILLED with some UW secretary's data. OOPS!
I never had any use for that SE after all (gave the other one to my little cousin, gave the 'shell' of the third to charity). After bringing it back to life, I never got around to reformatting that SE, and I haven't touched it since. To this day, it sits in the basement, a testament to a gargantuan screwup on the part of the U Waterloo staff. I guess I should wipe the drive and chuck it - It's just taking up space.
I actually did see the movie, and I thought it was pretty good, but the songs were a little tedious (I don't understand Japanese). Also, I thought that at some points the characters just seemed to be preaching about the writer's perception of life, consciousness, etc... The boat scene comes to mind.
But yeah, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I give it 4 out of 5.
If you like discussions on he nature of consciousness, as is hapening in this thread, then I would suggest reading the book that I alluded to in my earlier post. "The age of spiritual machines" by Ray Kurzweil. I picked it up for $5 at a rummage sale. Right now, it's $10.47(US) on amazon.com
In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.
What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.
So, I would suggest the following: 1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron. 2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines. 3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you? 4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...
And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following: 1) make copy of person's brain in a computer 2) kill the person
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember. (Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
While it is true that the PS is beating the pants off of every other competitor right now, you're forgetting the volatility of the console market itself. There was a point in time when the NES's lead seemed unassailable, but the SNES was only able to sell 1:1 with the genesis, and then both sega and nintendo were shellacked by the playstation.
So what's the point? The point is that every manufacturer's lead is "tenuous at best" and that the fates of the current generation have little to no effect on the next.
That being said, this is the first generation of systems where backwards compatibility may become widespread. This could act as a wildcard, and reduce some of the historical volatility that we've seen in the industry.
As for 'be the first with the worst' - we've seen that proven untrue time and time again in the games industry.
Finally, towards the end of every console cycle, consoles get so cheap that you can afford to buy more than one of them. When the next generation hits, they'll be so expensive that you'll only be buying one... at least for the first year or two. In fact, I would suggest that you could probably judge the time-to-death of the current life cycle by the relative afforability of the consoles. The more you can afford to buy, the closer they all are to going belly-up.
Actually, while you're right in that many analog 46/49MHz cordless phones were very poor, I had a GE cordless phone that lasted for almost 8 years, until my mother dropped it on the concrete garage floor.
It easily picked up a signal out to nearly two hundred metres, and the battery seemed to last forever. The sound quality was also good (but to be fair, not as good as a 900/2400 MHz set). I wish I could say the same about the 900MHz GE I got to replace it, but sadly, I cannot.
Yeah, no-one's ever been killed in a falling skyscraper, have they
Yes, but look at all the people that haven't been killed by a falling skyscraper. I'd say the mortality rate is pretty good, especially compared to the mortality rate for people who, oh, let's say, drive cars.
I won't download from a paid service until they offer SACD quality files.
But will you download from a _free_ service? Will you burn what you download onto CDs?
If you answer 'yes' to either of the above, you are admitting that sub-cd-quality music has some value to you - it's worth your time to download, it's worth your CD-R's, and it's worth listening to.
Now answer me this: if sub-cd-quality music is worth all that, then isn't it worth a few measly cents?
Answer 'yes' and your contention that you will never download sub-cd-quality from a paid service is made to seem absurd. Answer 'no' and you're a hypocrite.
"I won't download from a paid service - too expensive"...and now songs are 99 cents each (cheap).
"I won't download from a paid service until I can burn to CD"...and now you can burn to CD....and now it becomes "I won't pay for downloads until they offer raw CD files" (at 600-700 megs for a whole CD).
I hate to say it, but sometimes I think the RIAA et al is right - no matter what they do, a large percentage of people will NEVER pay for legitimate downloads so long as free alternatives are available. I'm just trying to antcipate what the excuses will be if and when they DO offer CD audio downloads. Probably something along the lines of "they're too big, why should I use my precious bandwidth, and then burn onto a CD that I buy?". Yeah, that sounds about right.
In any case, I think Apple will make an excellent testing ground for a music service. Small, dedicated, user base, wide acceptance and love of the iPod, etc etc.
Do you have any idea how big & massive the moon is? Do you really? Do you have any idea how much mass even one-billionth of the moon's mass represents? I don't think so.
If we mine the bloody thing, the amount of mass that we could ever remove is negligible compared to the mass of the moon. It simply doesn't matter.
Even though it doesn't matter, let's assume that the matter removed from the moon is then transported to earth...
In this scenario, the earth's mass has increased incrementally, meaning that the earth's gravitational attraction to the moon has increased as well. Therefore, the total mass of the earth-moon system is constant. The earth's attraction to the moon goes up as much as the moon's attaction to the earth goes down. Net effect on the earth-moon system is zero.
The other saide of the moon, that always faces away from the earth, should be kept as pristine as possible for as long as possible. Why? Because it's the only place in the entire solar system that is perfectly and continuously shielded from any and all radio waves coming from the earth!
This is invaluable to astronomers when one considers that the earth is very noisy with respect to radio waves. On the other side of the moon, no satellites, no transmitters, no athmosphere or magnetosphere to distort the view of the cosmos... in a word, perfect for astronomy of all stripes.
Yes, I know that the far side of the moon faces the sun half the time, but the other half, it's perfect... Observatories on earth face the sun half the time, too.
So I have no real objection to mining the moon, so long as we only mine one side of it.
The old hard drives that came with the mac SE's had the same problem.
The solution?
Take off the back cover of the SE, and power it on. If the drive didn't spin up, remove the drive screws, but leave it attached to the MB by the cable. Hold the drive horizontally, and quickly jerk it clockwise 180 degrees.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. The last ditch solution was to take the drive cover off and spin it up yourself. That usually killed the drive after a few times, though.
He had his little half-brother over for the weekend, and I suppose that he wanted to play gameboy. So what did he do? He took a gameboy game, crammed it into the CD drive of the PC, and closed the lid. (Yes, this was back in the old days. The whole drive sort of slid out of the PC on rails, and the lid popped up clamshell style).
We had to take the whole PC apart to get at the CD Drive to get the game out.
Also, one must remember that a lot of the heavy metals that were present during earths' formation have sunk to the center of the earth, during it's big-ball-of-lava stage. It stands to reason, then, that with no 'center' to sink to, those asteroids must be practically loaded with easy-to-access heavy/rare elements! Another big bonus - practically no gravity on the surface of an asteroid makes everything even easier.
I'd love to see this happen, but it probably won't during my lifetime.
...The 'Quadrino', followed closely by the 'PowerPeecino'.
Man, I remember that old PowerPc 601 - That thing ROCKED back in its day! Now, mine's got a 240MHz G3 card inside, and an external 2GB SCSI drive.
I want to migrate all my stuff to an ebook laptop, but can find no good way to do it.:(
Anyone know where I can find the 10-base-T adaptor for the old 6100? It's got a built-in AAUI-15 port (I THINK, not totally sure about the '15' bit). Any way to hook the old SCSI drive to the ebook would also be a good way of moving files. Any success stories?
Mined in the Canadian artic, no DeBeers involved. They're polished and cut by Inuit (eskimo) people, who are paid good money and are happy to have jobs that don't require them to move hundreds or thousands of miles away, while helping to raise the northnern economy out of poverty.
Each is inscribed with a tiny polar bear (viewable only by microscope). Sorry, lost the link!
While it is true that eventually, logically, they will have to break backwards compatibility, there is no logical reason to do it in the near (or far) future.
If the new system decides to enclose the games - I'm sure the door accessing the port will be hinged so that old games can still be inserted.
Why would the cartridges be made any smaller? Aesthetically and functionally, there is an ideal size for all things. If the cartridges were made much smaller, they would be far too easy for children to break/lose/destroy by accident. A child would destroy an MMC-form-factor game in no time flat.
Two cartridge ports? Let's assume that the new cartridges are half the width of the old ones, and that the new ports are stacked.... hmmm.... Where do we put the 'old' cartridge port? Sounds a lot like PCMCIA type III taking up two type II ports.
What if Nintendo is physically unable to get more data through the metallic leads on the next gameboy's cartridge, and wants to increase the number of leads (to address bandwidth constraints)?
Again, not a problem. Take a look at the leads on a gameboy cart, and you will see that the leads are bonded to the bottom of the cartridge on one side, and so are inaccessible. Nintendo could easily add a second row of leads across the top of the cart without breaking the form factor. The game boy is, all in all, a solidly designed, well documented, little system. There is no reason for Nintendo to 'break' the backwards compatibilty.
In the PC world this is a necessity, and if MS decides to break most backwards compatibilty in the next windows release I would have some trouble arguing that they were doing the wrong thing. However, the Gameboy is not a PC, and thus your arguments are much less applicable than they would be in the PC arena.
Microsoft cannot move forward easily while including backwards compatibility for the reason that the PC market is a HUGE, VAST wasteland of disparate components, nonstandard hardware hacks, and kludgy programs.
In contrast, the gameboy, gameboy color, and gameboy advance hardware are well defined and documented by nintendo. Nintendo also provides the media upon which the system gets its programs (the cartridges).
Thus, the gameboy systems are VERY well documented, which is in direct contrast to the PC hardware and software universe.
Therefore, backwards compatibility is (relatively) easy as pie, especially with advances in microprocessors putting more and more power into a smaller and smaller profile every month.
I have read about a small, watch-battery like device being implanted into a women's nether regions and killing sperm with a small current as they pass by.
Lasts for a few years before the battery dies, apparently.
Couldn't they implant something like this somewhere along a guy's plumbing? Sure, it's minor surgery, but it's not permanent, reversable, and lasts years.
I would think that something like a box would be a lot more useful to the vast majority of people. If I ever have to (out of curiousity or stupidity, for example) pop apart a hard drive, it would be nice to have something really dust-free to do it in.
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Why do people put up with shitty stores and shitty customer service?
Because those things don't mean everything. If a store has great stock, it can more than make up for bad layout, gruff salespeople, etc. (and I'm NOT saying that the people at Active are 'gruff', btw)
As a counter-example, a place could have the best customer service and store layout on the planet, but if they only sold HUGE BAGS OF DOG SHIT, would you shop there?
[I'd like to say that I haven't been to one of these for YEARS so I don't know if they still happen...]
... and it worked!
Well, it used to be a closely-guarded secret, but the secret's out now, so I don't care anymore. They have surplus sales on the first wednesday of every month. GOOD stuff, too! The last time I was there, there was a HUGE non-working laser for sale, make an offer, only qualified offers accepted(ie: you could reasonably hope to fix the damn thing - the prof offering it didn't want it sitting as a curiousity in some whackos living room).
Oscilloscopes - $10
Mac SE's - $5
etc etc - $cheap
Last time (like I said, years ago), I picked up 3 Mac SEs (two dead but fixable) and an SE/30 - after working on them, two of the SEs were ressurected, and the SE/30 worked perfectly (and still does).
The BEST PART however, was that on one of the SEs that had been presumed dead, it was the ROM that was dead, and not the hard drive. "BONUS", I thought! "I'll just swap the ROM from the third one", (which was well and truly dead)
So the hard drive was alive... and it was FILLED with some UW secretary's data. OOPS!
I never had any use for that SE after all (gave the other one to my little cousin, gave the 'shell' of the third to charity). After bringing it back to life, I never got around to reformatting that SE, and I haven't touched it since. To this day, it sits in the basement, a testament to a gargantuan screwup on the part of the U Waterloo staff. I guess I should wipe the drive and chuck it - It's just taking up space.
PS: do those sales still happen?
I actually did see the movie, and I thought it was pretty good, but the songs were a little tedious (I don't understand Japanese). Also, I thought that at some points the characters just seemed to be preaching about the writer's perception of life, consciousness, etc... The boat scene comes to mind.
But yeah, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I give it 4 out of 5.
If you like discussions on he nature of consciousness, as is hapening in this thread, then I would suggest reading the book that I alluded to in my earlier post. "The age of spiritual machines" by Ray Kurzweil. I picked it up for $5 at a rummage sale. Right now, it's $10.47(US) on amazon.com
In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.
What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.
So, I would suggest the following:
1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...
And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
2) kill the person
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
(Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
I guess that, just like the apple iMac, (accoring to MSN) a Macintosh computer is "the pc you really want."
While it is true that the PS is beating the pants off of every other competitor right now, you're forgetting the volatility of the console market itself. There was a point in time when the NES's lead seemed unassailable, but the SNES was only able to sell 1:1 with the genesis, and then both sega and nintendo were shellacked by the playstation.
So what's the point? The point is that every manufacturer's lead is "tenuous at best" and that the fates of the current generation have little to no effect on the next.
That being said, this is the first generation of systems where backwards compatibility may become widespread. This could act as a wildcard, and reduce some of the historical volatility that we've seen in the industry.
As for 'be the first with the worst' - we've seen that proven untrue time and time again in the games industry.
Finally, towards the end of every console cycle, consoles get so cheap that you can afford to buy more than one of them. When the next generation hits, they'll be so expensive that you'll only be buying one... at least for the first year or two. In fact, I would suggest that you could probably judge the time-to-death of the current life cycle by the relative afforability of the consoles. The more you can afford to buy, the closer they all are to going belly-up.
Actually, while you're right in that many analog 46/49MHz cordless phones were very poor, I had a GE cordless phone that lasted for almost 8 years, until my mother dropped it on the concrete garage floor.
It easily picked up a signal out to nearly two hundred metres, and the battery seemed to last forever. The sound quality was also good (but to be fair, not as good as a 900/2400 MHz set). I wish I could say the same about the 900MHz GE I got to replace it, but sadly, I cannot.
Yeah, no-one's ever been killed in a falling skyscraper, have they
Yes, but look at all the people that haven't been killed by a falling skyscraper. I'd say the mortality rate is pretty good, especially compared to the mortality rate for people who, oh, let's say, drive cars.
That's what they said about the eiffel tower, the CN tower, the first skyscrapers...
I won't download from a paid service until they offer SACD quality files.
But will you download from a _free_ service? Will you burn what you download onto CDs?
If you answer 'yes' to either of the above, you are admitting that sub-cd-quality music has some value to you - it's worth your time to download, it's worth your CD-R's, and it's worth listening to.
Now answer me this: if sub-cd-quality music is worth all that, then isn't it worth a few measly cents?
Answer 'yes' and your contention that you will never download sub-cd-quality from a paid service is made to seem absurd.
Answer 'no' and you're a hypocrite.
Some of you are never satisfied, are you?
...and now songs are 99 cents each (cheap).
...and now you can burn to CD. ...and now it becomes "I won't pay for downloads until they offer raw CD files" (at 600-700 megs for a whole CD).
"I won't download from a paid service - too expensive"
"I won't download from a paid service until I can burn to CD"
I hate to say it, but sometimes I think the RIAA et al is right - no matter what they do, a large percentage of people will NEVER pay for legitimate downloads so long as free alternatives are available.
I'm just trying to antcipate what the excuses will be if and when they DO offer CD audio downloads. Probably something along the lines of "they're too big, why should I use my precious bandwidth, and then burn onto a CD that I buy?". Yeah, that sounds about right.
In any case, I think Apple will make an excellent testing ground for a music service. Small, dedicated, user base, wide acceptance and love of the iPod, etc etc.
Do you have any idea how big & massive the moon is? Do you really? Do you have any idea how much mass even one-billionth of the moon's mass represents? I don't think so.
The moon has a mass of approximately 7.4*10^22 kg.
That's 74 QUINTILLION tons.
If we mine the bloody thing, the amount of mass that we could ever remove is negligible compared to the mass of the moon. It simply doesn't matter.
Even though it doesn't matter, let's assume that the matter removed from the moon is then transported to earth...
In this scenario, the earth's mass has increased incrementally, meaning that the earth's gravitational attraction to the moon has increased as well. Therefore, the total mass of the earth-moon system is constant. The earth's attraction to the moon goes up as much as the moon's attaction to the earth goes down. Net effect on the earth-moon system is zero.
...and that is the side facing the earth.
The other saide of the moon, that always faces away from the earth, should be kept as pristine as possible for as long as possible. Why? Because it's the only place in the entire solar system that is perfectly and continuously shielded from any and all radio waves coming from the earth!
This is invaluable to astronomers when one considers that the earth is very noisy with respect to radio waves. On the other side of the moon, no satellites, no transmitters, no athmosphere or magnetosphere to distort the view of the cosmos... in a word, perfect for astronomy of all stripes.
Yes, I know that the far side of the moon faces the sun half the time, but the other half, it's perfect... Observatories on earth face the sun half the time, too.
So I have no real objection to mining the moon, so long as we only mine one side of it.
The old hard drives that came with the mac SE's had the same problem.
The solution?
Take off the back cover of the SE, and power it on. If the drive didn't spin up, remove the drive screws, but leave it attached to the MB by the cable. Hold the drive horizontally, and quickly jerk it clockwise 180 degrees.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. The last ditch solution was to take the drive cover off and spin it up yourself. That usually killed the drive after a few times, though.
Well, this happened to a friend of mine.
He had his little half-brother over for the weekend, and I suppose that he wanted to play gameboy. So what did he do? He took a gameboy game, crammed it into the CD drive of the PC, and closed the lid. (Yes, this was back in the old days. The whole drive sort of slid out of the PC on rails, and the lid popped up clamshell style).
We had to take the whole PC apart to get at the CD Drive to get the game out.
You want a car with a genuine manufacturer-installed star trek logo?
Buy an acura.
The acura "A" looks mighty similar...
BBS?? Heck, sounds like my ex-girlfriend.
Also, one must remember that a lot of the heavy metals that were present during earths' formation have sunk to the center of the earth, during it's big-ball-of-lava stage.
It stands to reason, then, that with no 'center' to sink to, those asteroids must be practically loaded with easy-to-access heavy/rare elements! Another big bonus - practically no gravity on the surface of an asteroid makes everything even easier.
I'd love to see this happen, but it probably won't during my lifetime.
...The 'Quadrino', followed closely by the 'PowerPeecino'.
:(
Man, I remember that old PowerPc 601 - That thing ROCKED back in its day! Now, mine's got a 240MHz G3 card inside, and an external 2GB SCSI drive.
I want to migrate all my stuff to an ebook laptop, but can find no good way to do it.
Anyone know where I can find the 10-base-T adaptor for the old 6100? It's got a built-in AAUI-15 port (I THINK, not totally sure about the '15' bit). Any way to hook the old SCSI drive to the ebook would also be a good way of moving files. Any success stories?
Thanks in advance,
So here's the solution - buy Polar Bear diamonds!
Mined in the Canadian artic, no DeBeers involved.
They're polished and cut by Inuit (eskimo) people, who are paid good money and are happy to have jobs that don't require them to move hundreds or thousands of miles away, while helping to raise the northnern economy out of poverty.
Each is inscribed with a tiny polar bear (viewable only by microscope). Sorry, lost the link!
For an illuminating article on how lie detectors work, and how they can be used falsely, see this website.
While it is true that eventually, logically, they will have to break backwards compatibility, there is no logical reason to do it in the near (or far) future.
If the new system decides to enclose the games - I'm sure the door accessing the port will be hinged so that old games can still be inserted.
Why would the cartridges be made any smaller? Aesthetically and functionally, there is an ideal size for all things. If the cartridges were made much smaller, they would be far too easy for children to break/lose/destroy by accident. A child would destroy an MMC-form-factor game in no time flat.
Two cartridge ports? Let's assume that the new cartridges are half the width of the old ones, and that the new ports are stacked.... hmmm.... Where do we put the 'old' cartridge port? Sounds a lot like PCMCIA type III taking up two type II ports.
What if Nintendo is physically unable to get more data through the metallic leads on the next gameboy's cartridge, and wants to increase the number of leads (to address bandwidth constraints)?
Again, not a problem. Take a look at the leads on a gameboy cart, and you will see that the leads are bonded to the bottom of the cartridge on one side, and so are inaccessible. Nintendo could easily add a second row of leads across the top of the cart without breaking the form factor.
The game boy is, all in all, a solidly designed, well documented, little system. There is no reason for Nintendo to 'break' the backwards compatibilty.
In the PC world this is a necessity, and if MS decides to break most backwards compatibilty in the next windows release I would have some trouble arguing that they were doing the wrong thing.
However, the Gameboy is not a PC, and thus your arguments are much less applicable than they would be in the PC arena.
Microsoft cannot move forward easily while including backwards compatibility for the reason that the PC market is a HUGE, VAST wasteland of disparate components, nonstandard hardware hacks, and kludgy programs.
In contrast, the gameboy, gameboy color, and gameboy advance hardware are well defined and documented by nintendo. Nintendo also provides the media upon which the system gets its programs (the cartridges).
Thus, the gameboy systems are VERY well documented, which is in direct contrast to the PC hardware and software universe.
Therefore, backwards compatibility is (relatively) easy as pie, especially with advances in microprocessors putting more and more power into a smaller and smaller profile every month.
I have read about a small, watch-battery like device being implanted into a women's nether regions and killing sperm with a small current as they pass by.
Lasts for a few years before the battery dies, apparently.
Couldn't they implant something like this somewhere along a guy's plumbing? Sure, it's minor surgery, but it's not permanent, reversable, and lasts years.
Just a thought.
I would think that something like a box would be a lot more useful to the vast majority of people. If I ever have to (out of curiousity or stupidity, for example) pop apart a hard drive, it would be nice to have something really dust-free to do it in.
So... has anyone every built a decent clean box?