Um, excuse me but most people would think that the western digital drivers were the schiznit. In fact Gateway and Dell used those exclusively in a large percentage of their model lines for years. I owned at least 7-8 myself, and did work/assistance for users and saw at least 22 more. While personal experience != statistics, at least my sample is bigger than yours ! =)
I'm guessing my sample size is roughly the square of your sample size. I've probably handled just shy of a thousand WD drives. My current employer has Dells, so once more WD drives abound. Yes, between the 540meg Caviars and the current drives, my WD experience has been virtually nil for the reasons stated, and those reasons still stand.
My experiences... (and my opinions and speculation and take it with a grain of salt)
Seagate was the worst in the pre-1gb days; it was rare to have a drive last more than 18 months. Since then, they've steadily become better. I'd trust my life with a Seagate before anything else.
Quantum was absolutely great up until their LC10/LC15 line, which was the last before that division was folded into Maxtor. Something went terribly wrong with the LC series, and I'd expect any of these you have in use to die if they're not power cycled very often.
Maxtor is an odd bird. Half their drive models seem to be made of wet cardboard, half seem to be steel. Any time they jump to a new size, the drives are great. Then subsequent revisions at the same size start to fail; perhaps they're cutting too many corners as they try to reduce cost.
IBMs have been solid all along for me. I don't think I've ever had an IBM drive go bad, though several have been DOA. I use several 75GXPs (60 and 75g) in portable caddies. These have been dropped from 3-4 feet a number of times without incident.
Western Digital, I won't touch. I've yet to see a Western Digital last two years:
The Western Digital Caviar series was the worst, especially around the 540mb mark, where half my drives would die in the first 4 months. WD is also the only manufacturer who's never admitted to me, in relative confidence or otherwise, that there's been a bad run of drives. Even after my 9th return of a bad Caviar drive, they maintained that my situation was absolutely unique, only to issue a recall several months later, as I remember it. Every hardware manufacturer makes periodic mistakes; the ones who won't admit even the possibility of a problem don't deserve my returned trust.
Something that's easier to work with, and more readily available for Joe Linux User is an LCD from Crystal Fontz. You can control these over a serial line with a pretty basic protocol. They even have one with a Linux name plate.
I've been trying to stop myself from wasting money on one of these for a while now. Maybe posting a link to Slash means they'll sell out before I make the wasteful decision... neat toy, but so are the other 1,001 things sitting about which I haven't found time for!
It's a publicity stunt, I say. If the protection gets play in mainstream media, how many teen-age 1337 dewdz are going to go running out to buy the disc and try their hand at ripping? Even better, with the different versions having slightly different packaging, how many will try to buy multiple versions?
It seems to me that for-profit software developers like Netscape and Microsoft never had much use for the W3C. They made sure their products would be as compatible as necessary (and as incompatible as possible) with whatever else was in use, but they never paid more than lip service to real standards. The real supporters of the W3C mandate have always been the very people who stand to lose the most from this turn of events.
If I were a cynic, I would suggest that someone at w3c realized that they could get wonderful funding from MS and friends for a while if they became a mouthpiece, claiming that "yes - of course, MS is supporting open standards - the open standard _is_$financial_supporter's_product!"
If the w3c begins to support non-free standards, the free software crowd will look elsewhere. In turn, this just leaves the w3c as a "yes man" for Microsoft and a pocketfull of big money plugin authors. I suspect that, shortly after, w3c would find themselves optimized out of the development process.
I love the Boston Acoustics BA-635 speakers - it's a 2.1, but it's a good one, and if you want surround, two sets of these are a better investment than most 5 speaker systems. I got a set of these with a Gateway machine, and it was the only worthwhile bit from that setup.
The price is almost too good to be true: you can find these for about $45 at PriceWatch and Shop.Yahoo by searching on "BA635". But these sure as hell don't sound like $45 speakers.
Totally... mp3 or anything else in that category, is lossy compression. If you're willing to live with lossy compression, making it analog rather than digital won't really kill you. It's just the time factor (5 minutes to rip digital vs. 45 minutes analog), which the poster was commenting on
For those that do mind the longer rip - what they're doing is ineffective. Basically, they're stepping on the heads of people (like myself) who buy CDs and rip them for their own use.
Here's the brilliant bit - if I expect that I can't buy CDs and store the tunes on my home and work boxen without much work, my path of least resistance becomes to just start downloading tunes instead.
Why doesn't the ruggedized PC hit the mainstream market?
Panasonic seems pretty mainstream. They have the ToughBook line of computers. My girlfriend stumbled across one at a bargain price, and I've been drooling over it ever since.
I use http://shop.yahoo.com for most things. This lets you search for products, and sort on most by price including shipping. Most of the lowest-priced sellers on Pricewatch really gouge you on shipping.
You can also see merchants' ratings on Yahoo's service, as entered by other purchasers. And the fact that you're going to have an opportunity to affect their ranking after the sale usually means that sellers bend over backwards to help you if there's been any kind of a problem.
One of the other great things about Yahoo's service is that you can track all your orders (past and present) in one place. This is a godsend if you're like me and you often have 5-6 orders outstanding.
We need to regulate the following items from getting on a plane, as they clearly can be used to hijack a plane
MacGyver and any combination of six airline pillows, two movie headsets, a flight-size bloody mary and a stick of gum is enough to blow a 747 out of the sky.
I'm doing okay, but my girlfriend's having nothing but trouble.
She's a fresh-out-of-school programmer, and she's been looking for C/C++/Java work here in Chicago. Three months of firing off resumes in every direction, and she hasn't gotten so much as a single interview.
It seems like nobody is hiring programmers fresh out of school - or not in Chicago, at least!
What's the experience been like for others who have just graduated? Is this something of a fluke, or something more to do with her gender than her experience? (I don't know if I want to believe that in this day and age...) Or does the surplus of available tech workers from the dot-com fallout mean trouble for entry-level programmers?
Man - no kid should grow up without playing Rocky's Boots. I wish this would be updated, as the graphics are a bit ancient.
What's cooler than a raccoon running about teaching you how to build circuits? Admittedly it's meant for 8-year olds, but all EE courses should be this amusing...
The solution is a simple one - how do you work with the goal of migrating to Linux?
Don't.
Work with the goal of being flexible enough to move in any direction. Don't use proprietary solutions - use open standards. If you use Word in house, make RTF of similar the standard format. Access databases via SQL instead of directly. Never select a product simply because the rest of your products are from the same vendor. Never make a product which may go away, or be "demarketed" in favor of a different product part of your environmet.
Selling these ideas to your employer require work, and some are more difficult to implement up front. Your task is to prove that there are equal or superior options open to you now, and to demonstrate that it is likely to save your employer money.
Every book I've read about/by Piaget covers the same material with different examples and similar interpretations. You can even find enough to work with online if you'd like to save a buck - every educator has probably written at least one paper about Piaget in his or her time.
why the hell did you guys stop making pinball games/parts then:P and go on to casino games:P
I anticipate that Spy Hunter Craps, 5 Card Blitz, Baseball poker and Mortal Roulette are going to knock your fucking socks off. That, or one of us is confusing Midway and Williams.
The very same guys that were doing arcade games are now creating a whole new suite of console titles. Real Midway developers doing next gen console instead of relying on 3rd party arcade-to-console ports equals serious gameplay.
I get frustrated when people talk about authoring tools replacing game development, or holding up storytelling as the holy grail of game design.
If you're looking for the high level "flow of the game," you're better off looking at Jean Piaget's writings than you are any of the authors explaining storytelling-as-game. Take hits like Robotron, Quake or Tetris and try to tell me which of the 36 dramatic situations fit those games. Ask the hard core gamers whether they even know the storyline which was painted on after-the-fact.
Piaget talks about sensorimotor (learning about the self/environment through motor reflex), preoperational (anticipatory cognition), concrete (action based on perceived and anticipated outcomes) and formal operation (master of a system).
Good games drive a player from a stage where they basically learn to move (sensorimotor operations) to one of grossly influencing the environment (concrete or formal operations). The high level flow which I believe should be the real focus of study, is one of making the game teach or reward the player in the first stage, then rise to meet the player thereafter. A good game extends itself to match the player's capabilities as they unfold, guiding and challenging the player in the game's own terms. The degree to which the player has to focus to stay one step ahead of the unfolding system is the degree to which good "flow" is present.
That hasn't got a thing to do with the story.
If the player cannot establish a synergistic state with the game early on, the game has failed. A good game rewards the player to draw them in, making them think they've overcome the system, from the state where they're fumbling with the controls to the stage where the control has become transparent through practice - transparent enough that the player feels a more direct interface with the adopted environment and is struggling to participate in the environment itself.
Adventure games are story/game hybrids. Take that as a starting point - there is an element of a game attached to some of these, but only those particular games are more story than game - they are in the minority. When academics grasp the story portion of a select few games and declare that in furthering the story element, they know how games need to work, you see in action the very thing that makes us keep the academics at arm's length: We're not interested in turning our games into books, and we have little patience for ivory tower authors who loudly proclaim that we're failing when we don't do just that.
My opinions are not always those of my employer - they keep us on a long leash and give us amazing amounts of freedom to express ourselves at Midway, etc., etc., etc., and you should feel sorry for yourself if you don't work here.
BTW: does anyone have any info on getting an abacus to use wireless ethernet? I thought linksys made an adapter, but I can't seem to find one at BestBuy...
Best Buy can't help you, but don't abandon hope - just search pricewatch on "up down up up up dot up up down up B."
I think it's shameful the way Slashdot $shameful_adverb dumps on Microsoft, a $supportive_phrase of our community. Without Microsoft, we might all be {a computerless nation|carving our own boot disks}. Thumbs up for Microsoft and its right to {innovate|forcefully monopolize} on our desktop!
My brothers and sisters: the only path to freedom it the one you make for yourself. Learn what other people value, use it industriously and bask in the warm glow of capitalism. Let untrained, unwilling to learn, undisaplined people till the soil and turn the screws.
You couldn't be more right. Every inner-city Chicago Tom, Dick and Jerome who hasn't ever had the opportunity to even -touch- a PC by the time they graduate from high-school has only himself to blame for not capitalizing on the big Internet revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing my sample size is roughly the square of your sample size. I've probably handled just shy of a thousand WD drives. My current employer has Dells, so once more WD drives abound. Yes, between the 540meg Caviars and the current drives, my WD experience has been virtually nil for the reasons stated, and those reasons still stand.
Seagate was the worst in the pre-1gb days; it was rare to have a drive last more than 18 months. Since then, they've steadily become better. I'd trust my life with a Seagate before anything else.
Quantum was absolutely great up until their LC10/LC15 line, which was the last before that division was folded into Maxtor. Something went terribly wrong with the LC series, and I'd expect any of these you have in use to die if they're not power cycled very often.
Maxtor is an odd bird. Half their drive models seem to be made of wet cardboard, half seem to be steel. Any time they jump to a new size, the drives are great. Then subsequent revisions at the same size start to fail; perhaps they're cutting too many corners as they try to reduce cost.
IBMs have been solid all along for me. I don't think I've ever had an IBM drive go bad, though several have been DOA. I use several 75GXPs (60 and 75g) in portable caddies. These have been dropped from 3-4 feet a number of times without incident.
Western Digital, I won't touch. I've yet to see a Western Digital last two years:
The Western Digital Caviar series was the worst, especially around the 540mb mark, where half my drives would die in the first 4 months. WD is also the only manufacturer who's never admitted to me, in relative confidence or otherwise, that there's been a bad run of drives. Even after my 9th return of a bad Caviar drive, they maintained that my situation was absolutely unique, only to issue a recall several months later, as I remember it. Every hardware manufacturer makes periodic mistakes; the ones who won't admit even the possibility of a problem don't deserve my returned trust.
I've been trying to stop myself from wasting money on one of these for a while now. Maybe posting a link to Slash means they'll sell out before I make the wasteful decision... neat toy, but so are the other 1,001 things sitting about which I haven't found time for!
Well, since you commented in the thread, apparently you'll be capable of giving it neither.
w00t!
It's a publicity stunt, I say. If the protection gets play in mainstream media, how many teen-age 1337 dewdz are going to go running out to buy the disc and try their hand at ripping? Even better, with the different versions having slightly different packaging, how many will try to buy multiple versions?
If I were a cynic, I would suggest that someone at w3c realized that they could get wonderful funding from MS and friends for a while if they became a mouthpiece, claiming that "yes - of course, MS is supporting open standards - the open standard _is_ $financial_supporter's_product!"
If the w3c begins to support non-free standards, the free software crowd will look elsewhere. In turn, this just leaves the w3c as a "yes man" for Microsoft and a pocketfull of big money plugin authors. I suspect that, shortly after, w3c would find themselves optimized out of the development process.
The price is almost too good to be true: you can find these for about $45 at PriceWatch and Shop.Yahoo by searching on "BA635". But these sure as hell don't sound like $45 speakers.
For those that do mind the longer rip - what they're doing is ineffective. Basically, they're stepping on the heads of people (like myself) who buy CDs and rip them for their own use.
Here's the brilliant bit - if I expect that I can't buy CDs and store the tunes on my home and work boxen without much work, my path of least resistance becomes to just start downloading tunes instead.
Panasonic seems pretty mainstream. They have the ToughBook line of computers. My girlfriend stumbled across one at a bargain price, and I've been drooling over it ever since.
You can also see merchants' ratings on Yahoo's service, as entered by other purchasers. And the fact that you're going to have an opportunity to affect their ranking after the sale usually means that sellers bend over backwards to help you if there's been any kind of a problem.
One of the other great things about Yahoo's service is that you can track all your orders (past and present) in one place. This is a godsend if you're like me and you often have 5-6 orders outstanding.
MacGyver and any combination of six airline pillows, two movie headsets, a flight-size bloody mary and a stick of gum is enough to blow a 747 out of the sky.
KEEP MacGYVER OFF OUR PLANES!
Let's BOMB BIN LADEN BACK INTO THE STONE AGE! As if he wasn't bad enough, now he's MESSING WITH OUR PORN!
She's a fresh-out-of-school programmer, and she's been looking for C/C++/Java work here in Chicago. Three months of firing off resumes in every direction, and she hasn't gotten so much as a single interview.
It seems like nobody is hiring programmers fresh out of school - or not in Chicago, at least!
What's the experience been like for others who have just graduated? Is this something of a fluke, or something more to do with her gender than her experience? (I don't know if I want to believe that in this day and age...) Or does the surplus of available tech workers from the dot-com fallout mean trouble for entry-level programmers?
Ditto here! I just finished booting the first beta and it's running spiffily on my P3-450.
Next I'm going to try the other three beta releases that were mailed during boot-up!
What's cooler than a raccoon running about teaching you how to build circuits? Admittedly it's meant for 8-year olds, but all EE courses should be this amusing...
Don't.
Work with the goal of being flexible enough to move in any direction. Don't use proprietary solutions - use open standards. If you use Word in house, make RTF of similar the standard format. Access databases via SQL instead of directly. Never select a product simply because the rest of your products are from the same vendor. Never make a product which may go away, or be "demarketed" in favor of a different product part of your environmet.
Selling these ideas to your employer require work, and some are more difficult to implement up front. Your task is to prove that there are equal or superior options open to you now, and to demonstrate that it is likely to save your employer money.
Fetch A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks from your favorite patent-friendly online bookseller. It's simple and fun to read.
Every book I've read about/by Piaget covers the same material with different examples and similar interpretations. You can even find enough to work with online if you'd like to save a buck - every educator has probably written at least one paper about Piaget in his or her time.
I anticipate that Spy Hunter Craps, 5 Card Blitz, Baseball poker and Mortal Roulette are going to knock your fucking socks off. That, or one of us is confusing Midway and Williams.
The very same guys that were doing arcade games are now creating a whole new suite of console titles. Real Midway developers doing next gen console instead of relying on 3rd party arcade-to-console ports equals serious gameplay.
I get frustrated when people talk about authoring tools replacing game development, or holding up storytelling as the holy grail of game design.
If you're looking for the high level "flow of the game," you're better off looking at Jean Piaget's writings than you are any of the authors explaining storytelling-as-game. Take hits like Robotron, Quake or Tetris and try to tell me which of the 36 dramatic situations fit those games. Ask the hard core gamers whether they even know the storyline which was painted on after-the-fact.
Piaget talks about sensorimotor (learning about the self/environment through motor reflex), preoperational (anticipatory cognition), concrete (action based on perceived and anticipated outcomes) and formal operation (master of a system).
Good games drive a player from a stage where they basically learn to move (sensorimotor operations) to one of grossly influencing the environment (concrete or formal operations). The high level flow which I believe should be the real focus of study, is one of making the game teach or reward the player in the first stage, then rise to meet the player thereafter. A good game extends itself to match the player's capabilities as they unfold, guiding and challenging the player in the game's own terms. The degree to which the player has to focus to stay one step ahead of the unfolding system is the degree to which good "flow" is present.
That hasn't got a thing to do with the story.
If the player cannot establish a synergistic state with the game early on, the game has failed. A good game rewards the player to draw them in, making them think they've overcome the system, from the state where they're fumbling with the controls to the stage where the control has become transparent through practice - transparent enough that the player feels a more direct interface with the adopted environment and is struggling to participate in the environment itself.
Adventure games are story/game hybrids. Take that as a starting point - there is an element of a game attached to some of these, but only those particular games are more story than game - they are in the minority. When academics grasp the story portion of a select few games and declare that in furthering the story element, they know how games need to work, you see in action the very thing that makes us keep the academics at arm's length: We're not interested in turning our games into books, and we have little patience for ivory tower authors who loudly proclaim that we're failing when we don't do just that.
My opinions are not always those of my employer - they keep us on a long leash and give us amazing amounts of freedom to express ourselves at Midway, etc., etc., etc., and you should feel sorry for yourself if you don't work here.
If Mr. Elz no longer has the .au domain, I say he should get .Elz to rule as he pleases! All those for, say ".Aye!"
Best Buy can't help you, but don't abandon hope - just search pricewatch on "up down up up up dot up up down up B."
I think it's shameful the way Slashdot $shameful_adverb dumps on Microsoft, a $supportive_phrase of our community. Without Microsoft, we might all be {a computerless nation|carving our own boot disks}. Thumbs up for Microsoft and its right to {innovate|forcefully monopolize} on our desktop!
Yours, etc. -
$name
$address
Mormon City, UT 96629
Geezsh. Somebody's getting OLD!
I'll still be at my desk when you wake.
You couldn't be more right. Every inner-city Chicago Tom, Dick and Jerome who hasn't ever had the opportunity to even -touch- a PC by the time they graduate from high-school has only himself to blame for not capitalizing on the big Internet revolution.