I remember I got this email from NetworkSolutions promising to hide your contact information so I looked it up in my email archive. It costs an extra 5 bucks and promises to protect you from spammers and telemarketers.
Something about this is ironic.
Someone needs to speak to NetSol about the ICANN report.:)
----- Protect Your Privacy from Spammers and Telemarketers
When you register a domain name, your address, e-mail, and phone number are published in the public WHOIS database. ICANN requires this personal information to be available for anybody to view on the web. With Private Registration you can deter spammers, telemarketers, identity thieves, harassers, stalkers and others who access this database.
Private Registration provides you with alternate contact information for your domain name registrations. The contact information you want to keep private is kept out of the public WHOIS database.
For a limited time you can add Private Registration to each of your existing domain name registrations for the introductory price of just $5 a year. Terms and conditions are included in our Service Agreement.
To add Private Registration 1) Log into your Network Solutions Account 2) From the Account Details page, click on one of your domain names 3) In Domain Details, click "Make this a private registration" 4) Check the domain name registration(s) you want to make private and
click continue
"At the end of the day they said, We're going to trust Microsoft. It does require us to be responsive in providing the kind of licensing terms that the industry can accept."
Sometimes the shortest sentences can mean the most. Here's one: Uh oh.
Here are the immportant parts of the article from CNET:
Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.
"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.
Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.
I was with my girlfriend at the time and one of these virtua fighter type games was hooked up to the big screen. I wanted to try it out but there were a group of about five of these virtua fighter masters sitting around, playing, smoking and basically owning the virtua fighter joint. I had never played before.
So finally these guys aren't playing and I play against my girlfriend and I beat her. So I start the beginner rounds with the computer with basically NO IDEA what I am doing when one of the masters challenges me.
I can't play and my GF is saying get him and jump on him after he's on the ground. Well, I was just screaming back, "I don't know how! I don't know what I'm doing!"
Embarassingly for them, I beat him and the next three or four of the virtua fighter masters, all the while screaming, "I don't know HOW to jump on him when he's on the ground!" which was a basic move that I saw EVERYBODY doing after the victim had fallen.
I was finally beaten by one of the guys but they looked pretty pissed being beaten by a first time player who didn't even know how to do a kneee bash on a fallen victim. It goes down as one of my favorite moments in arcade history.
I realize you aren't supporting Intelligent Design but there are two counter-points which are standard and obvious but also one SURPRISING AND SCARY INSIGHT to do with Darwinism and human REVERSE-EVOLUTION.
First the counter-points:
1. Who created the intelligent designer?
2. Evolution works because of the survival of the fittest and that DOES make sense.
The insight:
In today's society, EVERYBODY survives and in many cases the successful are NO MORE LIKELY to reproduce than the poor, unwealthy and/or unsuccessful. In fact, I'm inclined to believe that the OPPOSITE is in fact true and that very successful people rarely have large families (though I'll admit this is anecdotal coming from me at this point).
I find this a surprising trend that goes in the face of evolution. If this is true, are we not, as a species, saying that perhaps we will be DEVOLVING?
Hey, given the reputation for nerds to be simply UNABLE to reproduce, maybe we are even dumbing down the species. Slashdot may be extinct in a few generations.
Does Phoenix ABSOLUTELY have to use acronyms that already stand for something? I mean: CSS and d-NA? I know we are running out of acronyms but there should still be a few million letter combinations left.
Sorry, but just because Blu-Ray is not inherently compatible with the current DVD format DOES NOT MEAN that DVD compatibility will not be offered in Blu-Ray players.
CD is NOT compatibile with DVD (wavelengths, format, etc.) and yet we see practically every DVD player capable of playing CDs.
What a lot of people don't know is that the DVD Forum has a lot less influence than it used to. The Blu Ray group basically hasn't even put their proposals in to the DVD Forum at all! They are surging ahead with hardware and studio backing completely ignoring that the DVD Forum exists.
In other words, high def DVDs may very well still be in for some format wars. The irony, of course, is that format wars never helped anyone and that a unified format is what launched DVD so strongly in the first place. And so soon does everyone forget the danger of competing formats to stunt the entire industry.
I might not agree with what the university is doing, but in this case the university can differentiate between the private property (the computer) and the public property (the bandwidth). Note I didn't say I agree with them but at least they are making this separation to the students.
However, one thing I think the University is doing that they need to be VERY CONCERNED with for themselves (and not the students) is that they are now EDITORIALIZING. In other words, they are now saying they have looked at the content and this makes them RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. As soon as you do this, you are legally in a much worse position than you were before.
A bookstore that claims that it has reviewed the titles on its shelves is in a worse position than one that hasn't. It cannot now claim that it didn't know that there was lewd material in one of its books.
This is dangerous because once the law considers it the norm for a university to monitor its bandwidth usage (and not just the amount of bandwidth but the content), they are now open to litigation much more easily. In the end, it is possible that universities might just have to forego much of their Internet access to protect themselves legally. A lose-lose situation for everyone.
I, for one, do not welcome the interference from BPL in the HF bands.
Well, I, for one, welcome our interference creating overlords.
Walk before you run, talk before you sing
on
Synthesized Singers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Considering that normal speech synthesis has not been done well, singing seems to be hard. Already people can take a bad singer and turn them into a good singer but complete synthesis seems unlikely.
Furthermore, this tech is likely not going to be what you think. What makes a singer good is their INTERPRETATION of the notes. Even with proper synthesis, at its best, it will be like computer animation. It could be very good and maybe even perfect but it would be TIME CONSUMING. Watch the making of Making Nemo on the DVD to get an idea of how hard it is to understand emoting.
You would really need to spend a large amount of time figuring out how to make the voice sound EMOTIONAL.
I have to agree with this and take it a little further.
Interestingly enough, if you get together a group of successful (wealthy and happy) people and talk about how school should help, they almost will invariable come up with the idea that they should teach more about social interaction at school.
Sure you have your school counselors and a few "guidance" days but they are next to useless and too far in between. Ironically, at best only half of "real life" consists of what you do with your skills and talents. The other half or more is how you deal with people and I don't care if you are a computer programmer: You will get a lot farther if you have good, if not great, people skills.
Thank you for your elegant explanation of the agreements for Microsoft Word's XML format. While you are no doubt now familiar with the XML format, Microsoft's development team has also enabled other valuable features including one that will help when inadvertently enabling the Caps Lock key.
Simply select capitalized (read Yelling) text then click:
Probably nobody will be reading this except maybe you but thank you for pointing this out. In fact, I am a CEO and sometimes it is hard to take listening to the Slashdot crowd bash CEOs for greed. Hey, we're just like any other guys.
Well, I was going to post this next week but this is a real job posting for a real job in my company which I own. Honestly, please tell me what you think because I'm looking to hire somebody who is either already really good or with great potential.
Note: some formatting got lost including bullets and heading.
----- Vancouver: Bleeding Edge ColdFusion Developer needed to work on Bleeding Edge Project
What your job is Do not apply if you want to experience boilerplate coding. In fact, stay far away. That doesn't happen here. Do apply if you expect to be challenged (heavily), to learn, and to grow as a developer. Do apply if you want to implement new ideas that nobody has done before, to write code that is challenging to develop, and to push the envelope of development.
We will pay:
$36,000 to $60,000 per year to start depending on experience.
You will be granted stock options (We are profitable and expect to be in the top 10 fastest growing companies in BC very soon. These options have value. If you come in, we will show you our operation.)
Who are we? MeZine.com is the developer of CityMax.com and dozens of other industry leading site builders. We released the first website builder on the Internet in early 2000 before anybody was doing it. Our website builder has more features than any other and, most importantly, the website is easy to use and elegant. Our lead developer developed one of the first web-based collaborative community on the Internet before most people knew what the Internet was. The next version of our software will include new technologies that have never been implemented in a site builder.
What is your challenge? Your challenge is not to build websites. That's easy and everybody does it. Your challenge is to build and work on a website that builds websites.
Our site builder is actually a website builder-builder. You will be working on a website builder that builds hosting websites. These hosting websites then builds end user websites.
This is an overview of our project:
Master Controls Allows Staff to Oversee Everything
| Website Reseller Hosting interface let's users build and manage their "Hosting Website Builder"
| The "Hosting Website Builder" that is built by the reseller hosting interface is then used by visitors to build "End User Websites".
|
"End User Website" is the final product used by the end user.
Both end user websites and hosting websites are customizable.
About the Site Builder There is no other website builder with the completeness of features. You will get to learn about all this and then expand on it:
Best of breed shopping cart (multiple catalog layouts, multiple options for each item, shipping calculators, comments, secure, etc).
Message boards, guest book, photo albums and other site building features
Autoresponders (web-based), mailing lists (web-based), email are all integrated
Custom form builder
Recommend site feature
Calendaring and Events
Article posting
Coupons
Auto linking to mapping sites
Custom Online WYSIWYG editor
Template builder
Licensed stock photo library
Password protected pages
Host/Master controlled resources
There is more but suffice it to say the application is complete.
Your Position Your position will be to take over the management and building of this website builder system. The original architect is still working for the company but is working on a new style of website builder. Your job is to continue the development of the current version, to take care of it and to expand it. It is a big and important job.
Note: We don't expect you to know everything about this from the beginning. We are looking for talent and a willingness to learn.
Your Skillz The leading candidate must have strong ColdFusion skills but will also benefit from strengths in othe
What Microsoft doesn't realize is that Novell or Red Hat asking for money doesn't have anything to do with the future of Linux.
It has everything to do with when the developers of Linux (Linus and his hard working team) decide to charge money. Since they are still working and not charging, Microsoft's points are moot.
Speaking of lightbulbs, here's the truth about the physics of light. The article is titled "The Truth About Light Bulbs" which details the "Dark Sucker Theory." By the way, notice that the URL is at Novell.
In fact, this 1 million pages of documents is my favorite line. Next time I'm in court, I'm going to hand over an Internet account with a piece of paper that says www.google.com. Beat that for disclosure. I'm sure somewhere in there will be my case.
This Article suggests that the population flux may be strongly linked to the evolution of the species through natural selection. Here is the relevant quote:
Although several species of small rodents that live in temperate climates also reach peaks of abundance about every four years and some of them reach much higher densities at the peak than lemmings do, none can equal the extreme scarcity of lemmings at the nadir. Such extreme scarcity raises the spectre of extinction. But passing through a population "bottleneck" probably strongly favours the individuals best adapted to survival in harsh arctic conditions. Doing it once every four years or so may be a device to keep selection abreast of the changes continually going on in the Arctic.
While I agree that reviewers may sometimes receive the best of the crop, I don't think this example shows any such planned discrepancy (or certainly doesn't prove it).
A 0-60 time difference of half a second could easily be attributed to a natural difference in each car. Cars differ more than you think from one to the other and I have read more than once about discrepancies in cars within the same model.
In fact (I was trying to find it) but I believe Car and Driver (or some other car mag) said exactly this in a "letters to the editor" reply in a recent issue. Sometimes discrepancies of over a full second will also happen depending on where the car is in the life cycle. I agree that this isn't the case here since they received a "lifetime" car but it just shows you the number of variables a car goes through. By the way, sometimes they start fast and slow down and sometimes they are slow and speed up.
At any rate, I agree that it is odd, but I don't believe this is proof of deception.
Here's the intro but read the FULL STORY through the link above for the details. StorageReview is a website devoted solely to benchmarking and reviewing drives:
Since the market has come to be dominated by the two interface standards, IDE/ATA and SCSI, the question of "which is better" has been bandied about endlessly on the Internet and in other places as well. The simple answer is that neither is better than the other, absolutely. Why? Because if one were clearly superior to the other in every way, the superior one would have taken over the market completely and forced the other one out. The fact that both are in common use (and have been for many years) proves that both have valid reasons for being on the market. Contrast this to the older ST-506/412 interface, for example, which was made obsolete by IDE/ATA since it had no advantages to cause it to persist, and disappeared very quickly.
Whether IDE/ATA or SCSI is better depends on what your needs are, and how much you are willing to spend. In this section I attempt to put the issue in perspective by looking at various performance and quality aspects of the interface and seeing how IDE/ATA and SCSI stack up at each. Of course this will be colored somewhat by my own experience and biases (the entire web site is--that's just life). However, I am attempting here to be as objective as possible in contrasting the two interfaces, and trying to be comprehensive in looking at all of the aspects that are relevant to making a decision.
A primary deciding factor in the SCSI vs. IDE/ATA question is the number of devices you plan to use (or use in the future) in your system. In many respects, IDE/ATA is superior if you are using only one, two or three devices such as hard disks or CD-ROMs. If you are using many devices, say over four, then SCSI is superior to IDE/ATA in several different respects. I should also mention that many times people make the decision about what interface to use based on what interface they began with; few are willing to buy all new devices in making an interface switch. And of course, it's quite possible to use both interfaces in the same system.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember I got this email from NetworkSolutions promising to hide your contact information so I looked it up in my email archive. It costs an extra 5 bucks and promises to protect you from spammers and telemarketers.
:)
Something about this is ironic.
Someone needs to speak to NetSol about the ICANN report.
-----
Protect Your Privacy
from Spammers and Telemarketers
When you register a domain name, your address, e-mail, and phone number are published in the public WHOIS database. ICANN requires this personal information to be available for anybody to view on the web. With
Private Registration you can deter spammers, telemarketers, identity thieves, harassers, stalkers and others who access this database.
Private Registration provides you with alternate contact information for your domain name registrations. The contact information you want to keep private is kept out of the public WHOIS database.
For a limited time you can add Private Registration to each of your existing domain name registrations for the introductory price of just $5 a year. Terms and conditions are included in our Service Agreement.
To add Private Registration
1) Log into your Network Solutions Account
2) From the Account Details page, click on one of your domain names
3) In Domain Details, click "Make this a private registration"
4) Check the domain name registration(s) you want to make private and
click continue
Introductory Offer Only $5 a year
Looks like This is their April fools joke.
Which is not to say very fast at all and furtherm.. wha? Holy shit! Your hamster can read?
"At the end of the day they said, We're going to trust Microsoft. It does require us to be responsive in providing the kind of licensing terms that the industry can accept."
Sometimes the shortest sentences can mean the most. Here's one: Uh oh.
Here are the immportant parts of the article from CNET:
Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.
"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.
Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.
For the full article:
Article at CNet
I was with my girlfriend at the time and one of these virtua fighter type games was hooked up to the big screen. I wanted to try it out but there were a group of about five of these virtua fighter masters sitting around, playing, smoking and basically owning the virtua fighter joint. I had never played before.
So finally these guys aren't playing and I play against my girlfriend and I beat her. So I start the beginner rounds with the computer with basically NO IDEA what I am doing when one of the masters challenges me.
I can't play and my GF is saying get him and jump on him after he's on the ground. Well, I was just screaming back, "I don't know how! I don't know what I'm doing!"
Embarassingly for them, I beat him and the next three or four of the virtua fighter masters, all the while screaming, "I don't know HOW to jump on him when he's on the ground!" which was a basic move that I saw EVERYBODY doing after the victim had fallen.
I was finally beaten by one of the guys but they looked pretty pissed being beaten by a first time player who didn't even know how to do a kneee bash on a fallen victim. It goes down as one of my favorite moments in arcade history.
I realize you aren't supporting Intelligent Design but there are two counter-points which are standard and obvious but also one SURPRISING AND SCARY INSIGHT to do with Darwinism and human REVERSE-EVOLUTION.
First the counter-points:
1. Who created the intelligent designer?
2. Evolution works because of the survival of the fittest and that DOES make sense.
The insight:
In today's society, EVERYBODY survives and in many cases the successful are NO MORE LIKELY to reproduce than the poor, unwealthy and/or unsuccessful. In fact, I'm inclined to believe that the OPPOSITE is in fact true and that very successful people rarely have large families (though I'll admit this is anecdotal coming from me at this point).
I find this a surprising trend that goes in the face of evolution. If this is true, are we not, as a species, saying that perhaps we will be DEVOLVING?
Hey, given the reputation for nerds to be simply UNABLE to reproduce, maybe we are even dumbing down the species. Slashdot may be extinct in a few generations.
Does Phoenix ABSOLUTELY have to use acronyms that already stand for something? I mean: CSS and d-NA? I know we are running out of acronyms but there should still be a few million letter combinations left.
Sorry, but just because Blu-Ray is not inherently compatible with the current DVD format DOES NOT MEAN that DVD compatibility will not be offered in Blu-Ray players.
CD is NOT compatibile with DVD (wavelengths, format, etc.) and yet we see practically every DVD player capable of playing CDs.
What a lot of people don't know is that the DVD Forum has a lot less influence than it used to. The Blu Ray group basically hasn't even put their proposals in to the DVD Forum at all! They are surging ahead with hardware and studio backing completely ignoring that the DVD Forum exists.
In other words, high def DVDs may very well still be in for some format wars. The irony, of course, is that format wars never helped anyone and that a unified format is what launched DVD so strongly in the first place. And so soon does everyone forget the danger of competing formats to stunt the entire industry.
I might not agree with what the university is doing, but in this case the university can differentiate between the private property (the computer) and the public property (the bandwidth). Note I didn't say I agree with them but at least they are making this separation to the students.
However, one thing I think the University is doing that they need to be VERY CONCERNED with for themselves (and not the students) is that they are now EDITORIALIZING. In other words, they are now saying they have looked at the content and this makes them RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. As soon as you do this, you are legally in a much worse position than you were before.
A bookstore that claims that it has reviewed the titles on its shelves is in a worse position than one that hasn't. It cannot now claim that it didn't know that there was lewd material in one of its books.
This is dangerous because once the law considers it the norm for a university to monitor its bandwidth usage (and not just the amount of bandwidth but the content), they are now open to litigation much more easily. In the end, it is possible that universities might just have to forego much of their Internet access to protect themselves legally. A lose-lose situation for everyone.
Well, I, for one, welcome our interference creating overlords.
Considering that normal speech synthesis has not been done well, singing seems to be hard. Already people can take a bad singer and turn them into a good singer but complete synthesis seems unlikely.
Furthermore, this tech is likely not going to be what you think. What makes a singer good is their INTERPRETATION of the notes. Even with proper synthesis, at its best, it will be like computer animation. It could be very good and maybe even perfect but it would be TIME CONSUMING. Watch the making of Making Nemo on the DVD to get an idea of how hard it is to understand emoting.
You would really need to spend a large amount of time figuring out how to make the voice sound EMOTIONAL.
I have to agree with this and take it a little further.
Interestingly enough, if you get together a group of successful (wealthy and happy) people and talk about how school should help, they almost will invariable come up with the idea that they should teach more about social interaction at school.
Sure you have your school counselors and a few "guidance" days but they are next to useless and too far in between. Ironically, at best only half of "real life" consists of what you do with your skills and talents. The other half or more is how you deal with people and I don't care if you are a computer programmer: You will get a lot farther if you have good, if not great, people skills.
Dear Microsoft Lawyers:
Thank you for your elegant explanation of the agreements for Microsoft Word's XML format. While you are no doubt now familiar with the XML format, Microsoft's development team has also enabled other valuable features including one that will help when inadvertently enabling the Caps Lock key.
Simply select capitalized (read Yelling) text then click:
Format -> Change Case > Sentence Case
Best regards
I have to say that until recently, there was one thing MSIE had that nobody else did: WYSIWYG editing.
As a developer of web software, I'm glad I can finally support all platforms including Linux (and Mac) with the new Mozilla.
Probably nobody will be reading this except maybe you but thank you for pointing this out. In fact, I am a CEO and sometimes it is hard to take listening to the Slashdot crowd bash CEOs for greed. Hey, we're just like any other guys.
Well, I was going to post this next week but this is a real job posting for a real job in my company which I own. Honestly, please tell me what you think because I'm looking to hire somebody who is either already really good or with great potential.
Note: some formatting got lost including bullets and heading.
-----
Vancouver: Bleeding Edge ColdFusion Developer needed to work on Bleeding Edge Project
What your job is
Do not apply if you want to experience boilerplate coding. In fact, stay far away. That doesn't happen here. Do apply if you expect to be challenged (heavily), to learn, and to grow as a developer. Do apply if you want to implement new ideas that nobody has done before, to write code that is challenging to develop, and to push the envelope of development.
We will pay:
$36,000 to $60,000 per year to start depending on experience.
You will be granted stock options (We are profitable and expect to be in the top 10 fastest growing companies in BC very soon. These options have value. If you come in, we will show you our operation.)
Who are we?
MeZine.com is the developer of CityMax.com and dozens of other industry leading site builders. We released the first website builder on the Internet in early 2000 before anybody was doing it. Our website builder has more features than any other and, most importantly, the website is easy to use and elegant. Our lead developer developed one of the first web-based collaborative community on the Internet before most people knew what the Internet was. The next version of our software will include new technologies that have never been implemented in a site builder.
What is your challenge?
Your challenge is not to build websites. That's easy and everybody does it. Your challenge is to build and work on a website that builds websites.
Our site builder is actually a website builder-builder. You will be working on a website builder that builds hosting websites. These hosting websites then builds end user websites.
This is an overview of our project:
Master Controls Allows Staff to Oversee Everything
|
Website Reseller Hosting interface let's users build and manage their "Hosting Website Builder"
|
The "Hosting Website Builder" that is built by the reseller hosting interface is then used by visitors to build "End User Websites".
|
"End User Website" is the final product used by the end user.
Both end user websites and hosting websites are customizable.
About the Site Builder
There is no other website builder with the completeness of features. You will get to learn about all this and then expand on it:
Best of breed shopping cart (multiple catalog layouts, multiple options for each item, shipping calculators, comments, secure, etc).
Message boards, guest book, photo albums and other site building features
Autoresponders (web-based), mailing lists (web-based), email are all integrated
Custom form builder
Recommend site feature
Calendaring and Events
Article posting
Coupons
Auto linking to mapping sites
Custom Online WYSIWYG editor
Template builder
Licensed stock photo library
Password protected pages
Host/Master controlled resources
There is more but suffice it to say the application is complete.
Your Position
Your position will be to take over the management and building of this website builder system. The original architect is still working for the company but is working on a new style of website builder. Your job is to continue the development of the current version, to take care of it and to expand it. It is a big and important job.
Note: We don't expect you to know everything about this from the beginning. We are looking for talent and a willingness to learn.
Your Skillz
The leading candidate must have strong ColdFusion skills but will also benefit from strengths in othe
What Microsoft doesn't realize is that Novell or Red Hat asking for money doesn't have anything to do with the future of Linux.
It has everything to do with when the developers of Linux (Linus and his hard working team) decide to charge money. Since they are still working and not charging, Microsoft's points are moot.
Speaking of lightbulbs, here's the truth about the physics of light. The article is titled "The Truth About Light Bulbs" which details the "Dark Sucker Theory." By the way, notice that the URL is at Novell.
Word Doc
Google's HTML version
In fact, this 1 million pages of documents is my favorite line. Next time I'm in court, I'm going to hand over an Internet account with a piece of paper that says www.google.com. Beat that for disclosure. I'm sure somewhere in there will be my case.
While I agree that reviewers may sometimes receive the best of the crop, I don't think this example shows any such planned discrepancy (or certainly doesn't prove it).
A 0-60 time difference of half a second could easily be attributed to a natural difference in each car. Cars differ more than you think from one to the other and I have read more than once about discrepancies in cars within the same model.
In fact (I was trying to find it) but I believe Car and Driver (or some other car mag) said exactly this in a "letters to the editor" reply in a recent issue. Sometimes discrepancies of over a full second will also happen depending on where the car is in the life cycle. I agree that this isn't the case here since they received a "lifetime" car but it just shows you the number of variables a car goes through. By the way, sometimes they start fast and slow down and sometimes they are slow and speed up.
At any rate, I agree that it is odd, but I don't believe this is proof of deception.
I think you'd be lucky if you "get a second commercial" for $10,000. I'm assuming you meant "a second" literally as in "one second."
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if
Here's the intro but read the FULL STORY through the link above for the details. StorageReview is a website devoted solely to benchmarking and reviewing drives: