Would CNN also be so kind to announce that I *may be* on the verge of receiving a very large raise?
I could really use the dough.:)
*Taking responsibility - I'm glad people thought this funny; I had to post anonymously in case nobody shared my sense of humor about the rumormongering.:) Especially since I posted early-- mods were sure setting their browsers on "Troll."
That's a bit of revisionist history... The first "real" laptops (386 and up) that I saw with 640x480 had 10.3 inch screens... then you went up to 12 inch screens for 800x600. Any modern PC is pretty much useless in anything less than 1024x768; except special-use PCs like my PVR/MAME box, which drives my TV at 640x480. It's ugly, but it works well enough. Yes, they make 6-9 inch 640x480 LCDs, but you have to get close, which was the point of my post.
And I'm sorry that putting a PC in his old Mac case is considered "sacrilege" to all you cult worshippers still inside the Reality Distortion Field. "If it ain't a Mac, it's clearly crap!" That's the rallying cry, isn't it? Guess I shouldn't show you this!
While I'm aware of DirecTV's shenanigans, the fact is that he had 6 loopers, six receivers, and at least one hax0red card. Now it's *POSSIBLE* that somebody just happened to give him all that nice stuff, or he had an academic purpose, but... this ain't a jury trial, it's an opinion. I think he's guilty.:)
Ohio, Grafton Correctional Institution. There's a "SuperMax" in Youngstown, about two hours away. They have various "pods" where various segments of the population server their sentences.
When I talked to him, he told me nobody's really messing with him, but there are "troublemakers."
Sad thing is, he has an above-average IQ and a high school diploma. He's good with PCs, he's just lazy as hell. He's been addicted to Acid, X, and weed for 8 or 9 years, been through rehab three times, but keeps going back. Basically, he wants just spend his life reading books, surfing the web, and getting high.
That's a mindset I can't understand. Begging others for gifts for survival while "researching"... Wow! It sounds like most of the college faculty I've met, except they generally put on a tough face and stand in front of a couple of classes a day to get a regular paycheck.
*Ducks the grant proposals being checked by the academes.:)
I'm sick of people thinking they have a god-given right to enjoy entertainment they don't pay for (as crappy as it may actually be).
I think you say that without thinking about the words that you're typing.
God gives each of us a different idea of entertainment. Just because something's labelled "Entertainment" does not mean that I will be entertained, or that it has a curtural or financial value.
My brother's in state prison for a drug offense (smoked weed while on probation for being convicted of drug possession-- don't get me wrong, he needed the kick in the butt of prison to get the message-- but that seems kind of scary for all those potheads out there, huh?:), and his last call indicated that they are "required" to keep non-violent offenders away from the "general population" of rapists, murderers, etc.
I think it's time we re-evaluate our value system. Fiscal values, I mean.
Why *should we* pay so much to consume things with our eyes and ears, and have them placed-- temporarily or permanently-- in our memory? Shouldn't this "consumption" be valued differently than food or solid goods?
I know why we *do* pay so much, because corporations want to make money, and "the consumers" (the ones with enough money so as to make the expense of free acquisition a waste of time, which currently means the majority) are willing to pay the asking price no questions asked. The vocal minority wants cheaper prices for their "entertainment," the silent back-roomers just continue to acquire and consume before moving on.
I personally believe that if money can be made on the consumption of entertainment, it should be considered 100% bonus. People should be able to see and hear things at will. The logic that follows is that without fiscal incentive, there will be no more creation. I call shenanigans.
Between marketing tie-ins, merchandising, and the continuing (and likely perpetual) sale of physical media that provides a sense of "ownership" to the consumer, there is *plenty* of money to go around for *good* entertainment. (e.g. The Lord of The Rings - about 300 million dollars to manufacture, another few hundred mill to market (they could have done well with much less, IMHO), and the net result will be between four and five *billion* dollars in return.)
The problem is that many people do not want to pay unless they know something is worthwhile... they should be allowed to view or listen to the entertainment before deciding it is worth "owning." The current corporate construct of the capitalist world is not engineered to understand and respond to that mentality.
That's not an "everything's free, man" hippie point of view, it's a challenge to change the world. Capitalism can work, but not in a vacuum. Corporations devoid of intelligence and accountability cannot be trusted to evolve into entities that understand and value like advanced human beings. (I'm giving people the benefit of the doubt here.:)
According to the FBI, Sprague admitted receiving screeners from Caridi and said that he used the software program Copy Guard Breaker to copy the VHS tapes to DVD and then returned the original VHS tapes and two VHS copies of each to Caridi.
Sprague said that he'd made as many as six duplicate copies of each DVD and distributed them to family and friends. He supplied copies to another friend in exchange for using a FedEx shipping account, the FBI said.
The FBI affidavit does not explain how the films were uploaded to the Internet.
So they found the "source," and it was really Caridi, not Sprague. Caridi was getting "keeper" copies of all of the movies, so who cares that Sprague was making the dupes? Sprague was just the guy that had the equipment and expertise to do it, with a few buddies on the side. He didn't seem to have financial motive. One of his "friends" was kind enough to rip and upload his backroom work for him. Sprague's a hacker but now he faces three years for someone else uploading his hack.
Sprague's a pirate, no question. What he did was wrong. But three years of Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison for copying movies? (It's probably be low security, but still...) Caridi is the violator and should be held liable for the movie piracy, especially after the agreement he signed.
Separately, DirecTV filed a civil lawsuit against Sprague in May over his alleged theft of its satellite signal. In 2002, Sprague had been named, along with hundreds of other suspects, in a massive crackdown on equipment that can be used to reprogram satellite television access cards, a method by which pirates illegally get programming for free. Paying customers are issued personally encoded cards with their subscription.
Sprague stole satellite TV and made cards for others to do it also... yes the whole debate about "you can't steal signals that reach everyone" will rage on, but there's no question they were defrauding DirecTV. On the other hand, that carries a potential five year prison term, is that appropriate for a first offense?
I don't know that this will help. DS9 lost me after season 2, so I only found out about cool stuff like the Dominion years later.
Enterprise doesn't seem to be showing any signs of getting better, nor is there any indication by "management" that it will be changed to "work better.":)
Disclaimer: This is not a troll nor flamebait, but a talking point.
Much of the discussion about "how much Trek sucks" usually ends up blaming Rick Berman. How much of this is his fault here? I have no judgement, but I'm tossing this out for discussion's sake.
I think my personal opinion is thus: Create work that is quality, and I will consume it.
I thought that's how the system was supposed to work... but yet, somehow, shows like UPN's planned "reality" show chronicling the wacky misadventures of Amish teens have more marketability than (insert your genre of interest here).
Well, the Athlon FX line seems to have been aborted shortly after birth...
Actually, read the roadmap. AthlonFX and Athlon64 will both be Socket939 and dual-channel memory controller products by the end of 2004. The chips will be the same, except A64 will have 512k cache and AFX will have a full meg.
This actually makes a lot of sense, and should have been the way it was done from the start. No socket 754, no socket 940 (except Opterons), just a "mainstream" and a "performance" product.
Nice response, anonymous coward. First of all, I wasn't karma-whoring, I was making three (in my opinion) logical points about what I dislike in AMD's processor architecture choices.
If you don't like reading informative remarks, well-reasoned opinons, or getting factual link, I guess you can go somewhere else.
On the other hand, your question about having the memory processor directly on the processor. It is the best idea ever, and you may not understand this, being a desktop user, but being in IT when I was young, and now in the money end of IS, I understand the value of the system amd is implementing, for instance sometimes I would purchase a quad Xeon system but it irritated me to do so, because I knew that because of the bottleneck to the memmory, my fourth processor was almost worthless. But with the memory controller on the proc, you amazingly reduce latency, and every time you add another processor you add more memory bandwidth, as apposed to each processor having to share a limited amount of memmory bandwidth on the board.
That argument makes sense for Opteron, but not Athlon 64/FX. OK, you want your cores as similar as possible to reduce costs, so you can argue that point... and I did acknowledge the performance increase; but does it make sense for the mainstream product line at this point, especially if it's not reducing the costs of mainboards?
There's no question Athlon 64 and AthlonFX are great products. That being said:
*Do they really need to be different products? Opteron is your product for server/high-end workstations, Duron (and now Athlon XP) is low-end... you want Athlon64 to be mainstream, right?
*Is it really a good idea to have the memory controller on the CPU? OK, I buy that it increases performance, but it hasn't lowered mainboard costs and all I've seen it doing is causing a rift between the A64 and AFX product lines, since Athlon64 doesn't have a dual-channel memory controller.
*Why in the world introduce an AthlonFX based on Socket 940, especially at the outrageous price, when you're moving to socket 939 imminently?
I think it would have been more of a slam-dunk as a platform and a "brand" to release Athlon64 as all dual-channel, all Socket 939 (or some standard), and left Opteron as the high-end platform. Any other takers?
The nVidia render bug for HL2 was overblown, and fixed pretty much before it even went public.
The only real FUD going on is that ATI and Valve are cross-promoting eachother's products, and to that end, Valve is coming out saying "the way we wrote the game, it's going to perform better on ATI's current cards."
Nice anonymous response. How long have you been working for Sun?
Sun has proven to be exceptionally expensive in maintenance costs. Performance is OK, but we get more bang for our buck with AIX servers. The support costs were trivial when added to all the other IBM contracts we have (20,000 desktops nationwide, 1000 Intel servers at offices, and support for all above).
Do any of you people work in an honest-to-Bob datacenter/NOC?
First off, to the guy suggesting Sun 4500s, our company is phasing them out due to maintenance costs and poor performance. For internal, relatively low-traffic applications.
Secondly, if you are talking about real servers, in a rack in a colo, you are NOT talking about some "amazingly cheap Pentium 667s I found on eBay." You are talking about SCSI-driven, redundant-disk, redundant NIC, redundant PS machines. We buy really nice dual Xeon 2.4GHz machines, 1U/2U, and they start around $5k apiece with drives and remote management hardware. (That does include a Windows 2000 Server license, FYI.:)
You're a smart man. My extensive search for IT work in Wyoming revealed approximately 100 programming jobs in a land area roughly equivalent to... the UK.:)
I first found slashdot while living in Wyoming in the late 90s. The problem was, even in the tech boom, tech workers either worked for minimum wage as students at the University of Wyoming, or got one of MAYBE 200 government/University IT jobs available in the state. I couldn't qualify for jobs that paid $16 to $18,000 a year; but I moved back to Ohio and had offers for well more than double that.
It's beautiful country, and short of ugly politics in some of the aforementioned departments, the people are quite nice. There's just not much of an IT economy, except as support to the other niche economies (mining, tourism, etc.).
Fun fact: As of early 1998, there were TWO indoor shpping malls in Wyoming; one in Casper and one in Cheyenne.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Would CNN also be so kind to announce that I *may be* on the verge of receiving a very large raise?
:)
:) Especially since I posted early-- mods were sure setting their browsers on "Troll."
I could really use the dough.
*Taking responsibility - I'm glad people thought this funny; I had to post anonymously in case nobody shared my sense of humor about the rumormongering.
That's a bit of revisionist history... The first "real" laptops (386 and up) that I saw with 640x480 had 10.3 inch screens... then you went up to 12 inch screens for 800x600. Any modern PC is pretty much useless in anything less than 1024x768; except special-use PCs like my PVR/MAME box, which drives my TV at 640x480. It's ugly, but it works well enough. Yes, they make 6-9 inch 640x480 LCDs, but you have to get close, which was the point of my post.
And I'm sorry that putting a PC in his old Mac case is considered "sacrilege" to all you cult worshippers still inside the Reality Distortion Field. "If it ain't a Mac, it's clearly crap!" That's the rallying cry, isn't it? Guess I shouldn't show you this!
It would have been far cooler if he'd fitted a TFT screen instead of his window.
And a right-nice little 9" jobbie it would have been too. Why, you could almost read a 640x480 display at two feet away!
While I'm aware of DirecTV's shenanigans, the fact is that he had 6 loopers, six receivers, and at least one hax0red card. Now it's *POSSIBLE* that somebody just happened to give him all that nice stuff, or he had an academic purpose, but... this ain't a jury trial, it's an opinion. I think he's guilty. :)
Ohio, Grafton Correctional Institution. There's a "SuperMax" in Youngstown, about two hours away. They have various "pods" where various segments of the population server their sentences.
:)
When I talked to him, he told me nobody's really messing with him, but there are "troublemakers."
Sad thing is, he has an above-average IQ and a high school diploma. He's good with PCs, he's just lazy as hell. He's been addicted to Acid, X, and weed for 8 or 9 years, been through rehab three times, but keeps going back. Basically, he wants just spend his life reading books, surfing the web, and getting high.
That's a mindset I can't understand. Begging others for gifts for survival while "researching"... Wow! It sounds like most of the college faculty I've met, except they generally put on a tough face and stand in front of a couple of classes a day to get a regular paycheck.
*Ducks the grant proposals being checked by the academes.
I'm talking about the evolution of public awareness (unlikely without activism, sadly) and eventual adoption by legislative and corporate entities.
:)
I'm not saying we start forcing people to adopt this model tomorrow; I'm saying that I believe in trying to pursue the ideal whenever possible.
I live my life trying to manage, moderate and merge ideology and reality. I stumble often, as the two are largely incongruous.
I'm sick of people thinking they have a god-given right to enjoy entertainment they don't pay for (as crappy as it may actually be).
I think you say that without thinking about the words that you're typing.
God gives each of us a different idea of entertainment. Just because something's labelled "Entertainment" does not mean that I will be entertained, or that it has a curtural or financial value.
I posted a deeper brain-dump here.
My brother's in state prison for a drug offense (smoked weed while on probation for being convicted of drug possession-- don't get me wrong, he needed the kick in the butt of prison to get the message-- but that seems kind of scary for all those potheads out there, huh? :), and his last call indicated that they are "required" to keep non-violent offenders away from the "general population" of rapists, murderers, etc.
I think it's time we re-evaluate our value system. Fiscal values, I mean.
:)
Why *should we* pay so much to consume things with our eyes and ears, and have them placed-- temporarily or permanently-- in our memory? Shouldn't this "consumption" be valued differently than food or solid goods?
I know why we *do* pay so much, because corporations want to make money, and "the consumers" (the ones with enough money so as to make the expense of free acquisition a waste of time, which currently means the majority) are willing to pay the asking price no questions asked. The vocal minority wants cheaper prices for their "entertainment," the silent back-roomers just continue to acquire and consume before moving on.
I personally believe that if money can be made on the consumption of entertainment, it should be considered 100% bonus. People should be able to see and hear things at will. The logic that follows is that without fiscal incentive, there will be no more creation. I call shenanigans.
Between marketing tie-ins, merchandising, and the continuing (and likely perpetual) sale of physical media that provides a sense of "ownership" to the consumer, there is *plenty* of money to go around for *good* entertainment. (e.g. The Lord of The Rings - about 300 million dollars to manufacture, another few hundred mill to market (they could have done well with much less, IMHO), and the net result will be between four and five *billion* dollars in return.)
The problem is that many people do not want to pay unless they know something is worthwhile... they should be allowed to view or listen to the entertainment before deciding it is worth "owning." The current corporate construct of the capitalist world is not engineered to understand and respond to that mentality.
That's not an "everything's free, man" hippie point of view, it's a challenge to change the world. Capitalism can work, but not in a vacuum. Corporations devoid of intelligence and accountability cannot be trusted to evolve into entities that understand and value like advanced human beings. (I'm giving people the benefit of the doubt here.
According to the FBI, Sprague admitted receiving screeners from Caridi and said that he used the software program Copy Guard Breaker to copy the VHS tapes to DVD and then returned the original VHS tapes and two VHS copies of each to Caridi.
Sprague said that he'd made as many as six duplicate copies of each DVD and distributed them to family and friends. He supplied copies to another friend in exchange for using a FedEx shipping account, the FBI said.
The FBI affidavit does not explain how the films were uploaded to the Internet.
So they found the "source," and it was really Caridi, not Sprague. Caridi was getting "keeper" copies of all of the movies, so who cares that Sprague was making the dupes? Sprague was just the guy that had the equipment and expertise to do it, with a few buddies on the side. He didn't seem to have financial motive. One of his "friends" was kind enough to rip and upload his backroom work for him. Sprague's a hacker but now he faces three years for someone else uploading his hack.
Sprague's a pirate, no question. What he did was wrong. But three years of Federal-Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison for copying movies? (It's probably be low security, but still...) Caridi is the violator and should be held liable for the movie piracy, especially after the agreement he signed.
Separately, DirecTV filed a civil lawsuit against Sprague in May over his alleged theft of its satellite signal. In 2002, Sprague had been named, along with hundreds of other suspects, in a massive crackdown on equipment that can be used to reprogram satellite television access cards, a method by which pirates illegally get programming for free. Paying customers are issued personally encoded cards with their subscription.
Sprague stole satellite TV and made cards for others to do it also... yes the whole debate about "you can't steal signals that reach everyone" will rage on, but there's no question they were defrauding DirecTV. On the other hand, that carries a potential five year prison term, is that appropriate for a first offense?
global welfare state for fat guys in suits.
:)
Most of the suits at MY corporation appear pretty fit; a couple of fatties but most aren't.
(We don't screw people, but we also don't care much about our "consumers" as people either. Lets me sleep at night, anyway.)
I don't know that this will help. DS9 lost me after season 2, so I only found out about cool stuff like the Dominion years later.
:)
Enterprise doesn't seem to be showing any signs of getting better, nor is there any indication by "management" that it will be changed to "work better."
Disclaimer: This is not a troll nor flamebait, but a talking point.
Much of the discussion about "how much Trek sucks" usually ends up blaming Rick Berman. How much of this is his fault here? I have no judgement, but I'm tossing this out for discussion's sake.
I think my personal opinion is thus: Create work that is quality, and I will consume it.
I thought that's how the system was supposed to work... but yet, somehow, shows like UPN's planned "reality" show chronicling the wacky misadventures of Amish teens have more marketability than (insert your genre of interest here).
You'll never be able to conttrol what happens between management's ears...
:)
But you are in complete control over what commes out of your mouth.
(Hopefully there isn't a better quote expressing this notion somewhere else!
Well, the Athlon FX line seems to have been aborted shortly after birth...
Actually, read the roadmap. AthlonFX and Athlon64 will both be Socket939 and dual-channel memory controller products by the end of 2004. The chips will be the same, except A64 will have 512k cache and AFX will have a full meg.
This actually makes a lot of sense, and should have been the way it was done from the start. No socket 754, no socket 940 (except Opterons), just a "mainstream" and a "performance" product.
Nice response, anonymous coward. First of all, I wasn't karma-whoring, I was making three (in my opinion) logical points about what I dislike in AMD's processor architecture choices.
If you don't like reading informative remarks, well-reasoned opinons, or getting factual link, I guess you can go somewhere else.
On the other hand, your question about having the memory processor directly on the processor. It is the best idea ever, and you may not understand this, being a desktop user, but being in IT when I was young, and now in the money end of IS, I understand the value of the system amd is implementing, for instance sometimes I would purchase a quad Xeon system but it irritated me to do so, because I knew that because of the bottleneck to the memmory, my fourth processor was almost worthless. But with the memory controller on the proc, you amazingly reduce latency, and every time you add another processor you add more memory bandwidth, as apposed to each processor having to share a limited amount of memmory bandwidth on the board.
That argument makes sense for Opteron, but not Athlon 64/FX. OK, you want your cores as similar as possible to reduce costs, so you can argue that point... and I did acknowledge the performance increase; but does it make sense for the mainstream product line at this point, especially if it's not reducing the costs of mainboards?
There's no question Athlon 64 and AthlonFX are great products. That being said:
*Do they really need to be different products? Opteron is your product for server/high-end workstations, Duron (and now Athlon XP) is low-end... you want Athlon64 to be mainstream, right?
*Is it really a good idea to have the memory controller on the CPU? OK, I buy that it increases performance, but it hasn't lowered mainboard costs and all I've seen it doing is causing a rift between the A64 and AFX product lines, since Athlon64 doesn't have a dual-channel memory controller.
*Why in the world introduce an AthlonFX based on Socket 940, especially at the outrageous price, when you're moving to socket 939 imminently?
I think it would have been more of a slam-dunk as a platform and a "brand" to release Athlon64 as all dual-channel, all Socket 939 (or some standard), and left Opteron as the high-end platform. Any other takers?
The nVidia render bug for HL2 was overblown, and fixed pretty much before it even went public.
The only real FUD going on is that ATI and Valve are cross-promoting eachother's products, and to that end, Valve is coming out saying "the way we wrote the game, it's going to perform better on ATI's current cards."
Nice anonymous response. How long have you been working for Sun?
Sun has proven to be exceptionally expensive in maintenance costs. Performance is OK, but we get more bang for our buck with AIX servers. The support costs were trivial when added to all the other IBM contracts we have (20,000 desktops nationwide, 1000 Intel servers at offices, and support for all above).
Do any of you people work in an honest-to-Bob datacenter/NOC?
:)
First off, to the guy suggesting Sun 4500s, our company is phasing them out due to maintenance costs and poor performance. For internal, relatively low-traffic applications.
Secondly, if you are talking about real servers, in a rack in a colo, you are NOT talking about some "amazingly cheap Pentium 667s I found on eBay." You are talking about SCSI-driven, redundant-disk, redundant NIC, redundant PS machines. We buy really nice dual Xeon 2.4GHz machines, 1U/2U, and they start around $5k apiece with drives and remote management hardware. (That does include a Windows 2000 Server license, FYI.
I never realized I shared a birthdate with such an important visionary! (Oh and that VonNeumann guy too. :)
Of course, I'm only 28, but after 6 years of Slashdotting, I feel pretty darned old...
Not sure where in Wyoming you are, but when I lived there in the mid 90's, I saw wind turbine farms in southeastern Wyoming.
Agreed, there should be many more, but the question is: who will live there to support the electricity-generation infrastructure?
You're a smart man. My extensive search for IT work in Wyoming revealed approximately 100 programming jobs in a land area roughly equivalent to... the UK. :)
I first found slashdot while living in Wyoming in the late 90s. The problem was, even in the tech boom, tech workers either worked for minimum wage as students at the University of Wyoming, or got one of MAYBE 200 government/University IT jobs available in the state. I couldn't qualify for jobs that paid $16 to $18,000 a year; but I moved back to Ohio and had offers for well more than double that.
:)
It's beautiful country, and short of ugly politics in some of the aforementioned departments, the people are quite nice. There's just not much of an IT economy, except as support to the other niche economies (mining, tourism, etc.).
Fun fact: As of early 1998, there were TWO indoor shpping malls in Wyoming; one in Casper and one in Cheyenne.