A lot of component prices have been "stuck there" for several years now -- we're no longer seeing the precipitous annual price drop in last year's model, in part because some components are already about as cheap as they can get and there's not much room for improvement. Frex, there's nothing commonly available and technically above a Blu-Ray to drive down that price. Unlike DVD drives, which are now in the $20 range (and unlikely to go lower, given there's a certain manufacturing cost that has to be met).
Then how it it LiteOn stays in business? They've been near the bottom of the price ladder since the beginning, despite having the best longevity outside of maybe Panasonic.
As I say above, I doubt HP's purchasing dept. really looked at the market options; rather, they went with one of the big companies because, well, they're like HP, rather than being some supplier-of-rebadges like LiteOn largely is. Which in my mind is not due diligence, as they could probably have bought 3 LiteOns (and had happier customers) for the price of one of the others... some of which might even have been rebadged LiteOns.
A wise AC says, "Can't say I've ever used the listed companies' optical drives when I can get one for twenty bucks retail."
I did note LiteOn was conspicuously absent from the lawsuit list. Makes me wonder not about the other drive mfgrs, but rather about HP's purchasing department, which clearly did not do due diligence in surveying the total options available. It's not like LiteOn objects to being resold/rebranded, either -- a large chunk of other-brand optical drives (including standalone players) are LiteOns in disguise.
I've been using LiteOn exclusively for ~15 years, not only for the lower price (tho not the cheapest available) but also the durn things LAST longer, often by orders of magnitude. (First one I ever bought still works, despite being worked like a, uh, slave.)
They need look no further than domestic dogs... the way other critters (fossilized or otherwise) are classified is frequently akin to deciding that since they look so dissimilar in size and everything else, Chihuahuas and Great Danes are different species, or that white Dobermans are an uber-rare endangered species rather than just a rare color variant (to purists: yes, I know it's a single-source mutation). This leads to classification and rarity-status nonsense like the spotted owl (color variant of the common barred owl) and red wolf (crossbred of wolf and coyote, where the coyote had the dominant but not universal tanpoint pattern).
My college roommates' family escaped from the old Soviet Union for the same reasons.
Too many people don't remember what it was like before, and elsewhere.:(
Re:statistically, cyclists don't hit pedestrians
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
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I read a study recently which noted that some signifcant percentage of car vs pedestrian involved a drunk pedestrian, and that even more involved a drunk driver AND a drunk pedestrian. (I take this to mean one should not walk across a bar's parking lot.)
Road maintenance costs are largely tied to the climate. Making it federal, thus one-size-fits-all, would be great for states without winter, but hell for states that need to repair winter damage every year.
That Montana's four seasons are "winter, winter, winter, and road construction" isn't entirely a joke.
Having lived 29 years in SoCal... I'd make an educated guess that fewer than 1% (probably more like 1/10th of 1%) of all running vehicles in CA are of 1975 or older vintage. IOW, negligible. Which is probably why that date was picked when they extended the age exemption a few years ago.
You just described how it for farmers across the world. Even in rural America, a great deal of fixing happens of stuff that's not meant to be fixed, or is too expensive to replace. Unfriendly climate, of course, means lots more to fix.:(
I agree about Johnson; that's part of why I use that quote: It pulls the rug out from under the people who would otherwise insist that I'm just hating on Democrats.
Yeah, that part's unlikely in the extreme, but... I knew someone who did American Indian genealogies for a living. She'd found that the Book of Mormon was surprisingly accurate (correlated well with other records). Going back to a lost tribe of Israel, tho... no. Back to escaped slaves and occasional stolen white children, yes.
As to the other reply's link and the stuff about steel... well then, why have no prehistoric steel artifacts been found in North America? they're not unknown elsewhere in the world, and we've had fewer upheavals here to destroy stuff.
The very first spam I ever got was from beard.com (this was back in 1995) -- it was just a text description of whatever the guy was doing at the time. After that they came 3 or 4 times a year (finally seem to have petered out a couple years ago) and I actually kinda looked forward to 'em, because they were halfway interesting AND they were unobtrusive.
Same for a couple of Chinese companies looking for legit business (one makes those outdoor kiddie gyms you see at Walmart). I don't mind their very occasional, non-annoying emails.
Neither has anything I want to buy, but they don't flood me with shit, either.
But they're *looking* for customers. Conversely, the blast-your-face advertisers of today's internet are not. Rather, WE are the product they sell -- the eyeballs they collect and sell TO the companies that buy ad space.
There's the difference. I don't mind someone asking, "Hey, maybe you want to buy this?" I *do* mind being SOLD as if I'm a commodity.
There probably were a lot more of these travellers than we know of... anyone who didn't keep a journal, or show up in someone else's preserved writings, is lost to history.
There are a few old geezers staggering around my lawn... LIST, I still use every day... I think the oldest thing I still use is WAITN.COM, 1982? and it took Frhed to finally wean me off the old CalTech File Modify hex editor (1985). I never did the type 'em in yourself stuff, tho I PKLited plenty back in the era of 20mb HDs...
I'm widely feared as "the beta tester who can break anything"... partly because I do stuff like rightclick on a defragger display!:)
VMarkBad was different (and faster) because it condemned a sector as 'bad' for ONE retry. Everything else (including Spinrite, AFAIK) did 5 retries. That made the results more reliable, since it would condemn marginal sectors that were iffy today and might be dead tomorrow, while other tools would let that sector go for now... oops tomorrow! Unfortunately, it was never updated past the FAT16 version.:(
The most beautiful program ever coded in assembly was Vern Buerg's LIST, so there.:D (And the v6 source was made public domain, but I've lost track of my copy and can't find it online anymore.:(
That's the other tool I want for my brain, LIST, so I can look inside all my weird thoughts.:)
Wow, it's old... I miss the VMarkBad util that came with the old DOS version of VOpt; no other bad-sector marking tool was so fast or so accurate. Back when disk space was precious and expensive, I nursed along a number of failing drives using VMarkBad.
I did find I could crash v5/Win pretty much on demand, which kinda spoiled my trust.:( (Just RClick on the display while it's running. About half the time it would crash.) Seems to be fixed in v7, tho.
I want a defragger that can sort by date (like the old Norton/Win3x did); this pretty much eliminates chronic fragmentation.
I want one to defrag my brain by date too; that way maybe I could find stuff in my mental junkpile, instead of having it fall out at random.:)
I'd say rather it's like rifling through your mailbox, in search of postcards to read. Since when do you expect anyone to root thru your mailbox, no matter what's in it?
As a crude example that might be easier for some folks to grok, it's a lot like this:
Say you rent storage space. The police want to search your storage space, but lacking probable cause, they can't get a warrant. However, they =can= get a warrant to make the landlord let them in so they can search your storage space. Thus they can search your storage space despite not having a warrant to search YOUR storage space.
An end run, indeed. I see no difference just because it's email stored at some hosting company rather than physical goods stored at a self-serve storage unit.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of component prices have been "stuck there" for several years now -- we're no longer seeing the precipitous annual price drop in last year's model, in part because some components are already about as cheap as they can get and there's not much room for improvement. Frex, there's nothing commonly available and technically above a Blu-Ray to drive down that price. Unlike DVD drives, which are now in the $20 range (and unlikely to go lower, given there's a certain manufacturing cost that has to be met).
Then how it it LiteOn stays in business? They've been near the bottom of the price ladder since the beginning, despite having the best longevity outside of maybe Panasonic.
As I say above, I doubt HP's purchasing dept. really looked at the market options; rather, they went with one of the big companies because, well, they're like HP, rather than being some supplier-of-rebadges like LiteOn largely is. Which in my mind is not due diligence, as they could probably have bought 3 LiteOns (and had happier customers) for the price of one of the others... some of which might even have been rebadged LiteOns.
A wise AC says, "Can't say I've ever used the listed companies' optical drives when I can get one for twenty bucks retail."
I did note LiteOn was conspicuously absent from the lawsuit list. Makes me wonder not about the other drive mfgrs, but rather about HP's purchasing department, which clearly did not do due diligence in surveying the total options available. It's not like LiteOn objects to being resold/rebranded, either -- a large chunk of other-brand optical drives (including standalone players) are LiteOns in disguise.
I've been using LiteOn exclusively for ~15 years, not only for the lower price (tho not the cheapest available) but also the durn things LAST longer, often by orders of magnitude. (First one I ever bought still works, despite being worked like a, uh, slave.)
They need look no further than domestic dogs ... the way other critters (fossilized or otherwise) are classified is frequently akin to deciding that since they look so dissimilar in size and everything else, Chihuahuas and Great Danes are different species, or that white Dobermans are an uber-rare endangered species rather than just a rare color variant (to purists: yes, I know it's a single-source mutation). This leads to classification and rarity-status nonsense like the spotted owl (color variant of the common barred owl) and red wolf (crossbred of wolf and coyote, where the coyote had the dominant but not universal tanpoint pattern).
No, we let them max out our credit card, and when they threatened to stop making payments, we gave them a credit increase.
My college roommates' family escaped from the old Soviet Union for the same reasons.
Too many people don't remember what it was like before, and elsewhere. :(
I read a study recently which noted that some signifcant percentage of car vs pedestrian involved a drunk pedestrian, and that even more involved a drunk driver AND a drunk pedestrian. (I take this to mean one should not walk across a bar's parking lot.)
Are they going to repeal the gas tax, so people don't wind up double-taxed?
Road maintenance costs are largely tied to the climate. Making it federal, thus one-size-fits-all, would be great for states without winter, but hell for states that need to repair winter damage every year.
That Montana's four seasons are "winter, winter, winter, and road construction" isn't entirely a joke.
Having lived 29 years in SoCal... I'd make an educated guess that fewer than 1% (probably more like 1/10th of 1%) of all running vehicles in CA are of 1975 or older vintage. IOW, negligible. Which is probably why that date was picked when they extended the age exemption a few years ago.
You just described how it for farmers across the world. Even in rural America, a great deal of fixing happens of stuff that's not meant to be fixed, or is too expensive to replace. Unfriendly climate, of course, means lots more to fix. :(
I expect the real benefit isn't the charcoal, but the trace minerals (which can make a huge difference in crop performance).
From your wood-gas article, I got the image of vehicles putting along, extruding little charcoal poops as they go...
I agree about Johnson; that's part of why I use that quote: It pulls the rug out from under the people who would otherwise insist that I'm just hating on Democrats.
Yeah, that part's unlikely in the extreme, but... I knew someone who did American Indian genealogies for a living. She'd found that the Book of Mormon was surprisingly accurate (correlated well with other records). Going back to a lost tribe of Israel, tho... no. Back to escaped slaves and occasional stolen white children, yes.
As to the other reply's link and the stuff about steel ... well then, why have no prehistoric steel artifacts been found in North America? they're not unknown elsewhere in the world, and we've had fewer upheavals here to destroy stuff.
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/scientology/start.a.religion.html
Go down to the bit about Ted Sturgeon.
From what I heard at LASFS, there were other witnesses, too.
Interesting... well, maybe if debt was too expensive or unavailable, the gov't would stop getting into more of it.
The very first spam I ever got was from beard.com (this was back in 1995) -- it was just a text description of whatever the guy was doing at the time. After that they came 3 or 4 times a year (finally seem to have petered out a couple years ago) and I actually kinda looked forward to 'em, because they were halfway interesting AND they were unobtrusive.
Same for a couple of Chinese companies looking for legit business (one makes those outdoor kiddie gyms you see at Walmart). I don't mind their very occasional, non-annoying emails.
Neither has anything I want to buy, but they don't flood me with shit, either.
But they're *looking* for customers. Conversely, the blast-your-face advertisers of today's internet are not. Rather, WE are the product they sell -- the eyeballs they collect and sell TO the companies that buy ad space.
There's the difference. I don't mind someone asking, "Hey, maybe you want to buy this?" I *do* mind being SOLD as if I'm a commodity.
Maybe he's visiting fat-admirer sites on the sly. ;)
There probably were a lot more of these travellers than we know of... anyone who didn't keep a journal, or show up in someone else's preserved writings, is lost to history.
There are a few old geezers staggering around my lawn... LIST, I still use every day... I think the oldest thing I still use is WAITN.COM, 1982? and it took Frhed to finally wean me off the old CalTech File Modify hex editor (1985). I never did the type 'em in yourself stuff, tho I PKLited plenty back in the era of 20mb HDs...
There's a thought: PKLite for brains! :D
I'm widely feared as "the beta tester who can break anything" ... partly because I do stuff like rightclick on a defragger display! :)
VMarkBad was different (and faster) because it condemned a sector as 'bad' for ONE retry. Everything else (including Spinrite, AFAIK) did 5 retries. That made the results more reliable, since it would condemn marginal sectors that were iffy today and might be dead tomorrow, while other tools would let that sector go for now... oops tomorrow! Unfortunately, it was never updated past the FAT16 version. :(
The most beautiful program ever coded in assembly was Vern Buerg's LIST, so there. :D (And the v6 source was made public domain, but I've lost track of my copy and can't find it online anymore. :(
That's the other tool I want for my brain, LIST, so I can look inside all my weird thoughts. :)
Wow, it's old... I miss the VMarkBad util that came with the old DOS version of VOpt; no other bad-sector marking tool was so fast or so accurate. Back when disk space was precious and expensive, I nursed along a number of failing drives using VMarkBad.
I did find I could crash v5/Win pretty much on demand, which kinda spoiled my trust. :( (Just RClick on the display while it's running. About half the time it would crash.) Seems to be fixed in v7, tho.
I want a defragger that can sort by date (like the old Norton/Win3x did); this pretty much eliminates chronic fragmentation.
I want one to defrag my brain by date too; that way maybe I could find stuff in my mental junkpile, instead of having it fall out at random. :)
I'd say rather it's like rifling through your mailbox, in search of postcards to read. Since when do you expect anyone to root thru your mailbox, no matter what's in it?
As a crude example that might be easier for some folks to grok, it's a lot like this:
Say you rent storage space. The police want to search your storage space, but lacking probable cause, they can't get a warrant. However, they =can= get a warrant to make the landlord let them in so they can search your storage space. Thus they can search your storage space despite not having a warrant to search YOUR storage space.
An end run, indeed. I see no difference just because it's email stored at some hosting company rather than physical goods stored at a self-serve storage unit.