How about learning about [X]??It is a school after all. I remember my school librarian used to get all worked up because I'd quit "Oregon Trail", and fool around at the DOS prompt instead. She watched me like a hawk, which was the old fashioned equivalent of a keystroke logger.
"Hey, you don't need to be fooling around in there! Why are you always doing things you're not supposed to be doing?"
"We'll, I can learn how to shoot "Indians" with the space bar, or I can learn about this computer." She basically loathed me after I said that. Sad to see things haven't changed much since then.
Do you get that awful little square within a big square when watching non-widescreen HD shows?
I'd love to understand that. Why is there no setting between shrunken square HD and full square low-D? Size that thing up to full square medium-D how about?!? For an HD broadcast- If I put it on 480p or 480i and I get Full-screen "old style" quality. 720p or 1080i gives me that big black frame all the way around the picture (unless it's a widescreen broadcast). I know if I could "zoom in" on that to full screen size it would still be much better looking than 480. WTF?
Obviously video and broadcast tech is not my forte.
Not as drastic as giving up driving or moving closer...
Change your schedule by 15-30 minutes.
Awhile back, I realized that if I left my house at 7:30 I'd get through traffic and land at work at 8:30, BUT if I left my house at 8:15 (45 minutes later) I could get to work by 8:45. That's a half hour cut off my commute each way, or an hour a day, gained by simply letting everybody else fight to get to work first. When the masses are mostly in town and parked, I leave my house. My work hours are only shifted 15 minutes! I arrive at 8:45 instead of 8:30, I save an hour a day on my commute, not to mention the reduced gas consumption, pollution, and aggravation.
Leaving 45 minutes earlier just to sit still on the parkway did seem pretty silly. Am I the only one with a wee bit of flexibility in my schedule?
>it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM.
Should be true. Isn't though. Just watch the Perf Mon.
[time passes...]
Ok, I just spent an hour reading/googling up on this. Apparently the MS link I give above is highly disputed. XP has an option for no-page-file, but MS says it'll make one anyway. But people who have done this can only find the evidence in the Perf monitor. No file anywhere. The mess doesn't stop there.
Apparently there is much hullabaloo about what actually happens with a W2K/XP page file. My newly acquired lack of understanding here leaves me... clueless.
>You would be much better off simply specifiying to Windows to use no swap space at all.
That's the whole crux of my original post. You ever try that? I already understand everything you're saying and it falls severely short of the truth on a windows box.
How aggravating. Anyway, there are many people today who have windows with "more ram than they'll ever need". Since Windows is too stubborn to run w/o swap, I say throw it back into RAM where it belongs in the first place. Heck, isn't that part of why you bought the ram? 1 gig of 400MHz DDR and the only time I can get XP to use more than 650M or so is when gaming. Meanwhile that page file is still there, thrashing occasionally.
I say heck with PDA's and cell phones. I want this for wall mounted flat panels. So I can holler at it for goodeats.com while in the kitchen with my hands messy. Or in the basement in dire need of plumbing.com or whatever when I'm trying to prove (erroneously) that I can fix ANYTHING.
So many times while putzing around the house or driving I've wanted to bark out a command a la Star Trek and having Google answer me. Very cool.
Although if it chimes in with - "It sounds like you are trying to browse the internet, would you like me to help you?", then someone will surely have to die.
I can't believe this doesn't already exist
on
Mice Get Human Breasts
·
· Score: 4, Funny
With a soft breast-shaped mouse, we could teach half the population to be skilled computer users! Straight males, lesbians, etc.
Just think of all those "Joe Users" just looking for a reason to click on one more thing, to mouse around just a bit more. They'd learn every single menu item in every app on their PC!
"Son, why don't you go play on the internet some more." "OK Ma, But I've already finished it once."
Heck, I want one myself!
The new office catch-phrase: "Sorry, been mousing around, can't stand up for awhile.
-Your car can do ONE thing plus some comforts, your computer can do many many things. Therefore it behooves a user to learn how to apply the computer to many different tasks. The car.. you just drive it.
-People don't expect to be able to call somebody on the phone and get walked through an oil filter change - a simple thing. But they do expect a help desk to be able to "just fix" their computer over the phone, automagically. Their ignorance causes their frustration as much as anything.. so that ignorance should be the first thing to fix.
-You can't pull your computer into jiffy lube and have all the routine maintenance done for you while you read People Magazine. Therefore you need to learn how to do it yourself, or pay for a service that comes to you, like lawn care. Those are the 2 choices. Ignoring routine maintainence through ignorance is in no way excusable. Your worm ridden machine effects everybody! Same as an unsafe car.
-If you're so ignorant you don't know the difference between the steering wheel and the other 4 wheels, you can't get a car, but if you think your monitor is your computer and your computer is your pentium hard drive you can still get a computer, yet you have no business owning one. I can forsee a day when people have to pass a netizens test just like a drivers test. Ignorance is EXPENSIVE. And there's no damn excuse for that level of ignorance.
AFAIK, only in the USA is it cool to boast ignorance. I.e. - "Antivirus stuff, firewalls, I don't have time for that techie crap, can't you just make it work?" -- that's acceptable to most, but "Oil change, radiator fluid? Tread wear on my tires, I don't have time for that mechanic crap? Just fix it" Everybody knows THAT's unacceptable. WTF???
I see how you could come to that conclusion. Apology accepted. See my above posts and others regarding the warranty thing. It was that, or pay more, or take one year.
Truthfully the more I dig into these forums and hear about what he had on his site since then the more happy I am he stopped offering his run-of-the-mill PC which I was recommending to folks for about 2 months. I WAS really impressed with his service remember, and the 7 year warranty has it's charms. See above poster on why it could be a good idea. His site looked naive then, it sounds pathological now but it went down and will surely be redesigned if somebody's lawyers don't get him first. Hey can you analyze writing styles?
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael (Michael's SuperComputers)
[mailto:michael@michaelscomputers.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 3:44 PM
Subject: RE: PC
I was all ready to ship yesterday. I had everything ready to be boxed up...but I knew inside that something had to be up since the benchmark always crashed. I had played a few games on it and nothing went wrong, but that benchmark...that is my bread and butter of showing off performance...it really bothered me. I sent off emails to gigabyte...they got back to me and said they couldn't figure it out.....I sent emails to ATI...they just said download latest drivers...I had done everything...even taken your system apart previously about 3 times in one day. It was turning into a labor of headache and true to a test of how much I love what I do.
What I decided to do ultimately was start testing the system...I did a light 4MHz reduction to the memory which was needed to bring the 2.8 to 2.77. I just wanted to test how the system ran at a different setting. When your system was back on, I rand the benchmark.....WOW.....frame after frame after frame of solid eye candy with no dropouts...then I decided to play the ballerburg game I installed......SHEEEWW boom..cannons firing away, Castles burning down....sure the game worked before...but it just seemed....better? Indeed!
Then after I was elated that I felt more than 100% satisfied (it took a long time to reach that [Strange Ranger]...look how long it's been!)...I received a call from Paul Lee who heads up Gigabyte and he tells me that they don't officially support the 2.8 but it might be supported with a BIOS update. He said I could run it at 2.53 and I said, well, it runs perfect at 2.77 and he was dumbfounded.
This is what I deal with everyday [Strange Ranger].....technology changes/advances all the time...and it's even the manufacturers that lose track of what they are doing so a lot is left up to me.
I am very excited for you bottom line....all hums smooth as can be. You will love it! I will provide you with a tracking # once it is online in a few hours. Thank you again [Strange Ranger]. Your Patience and understanding has been everything to me.
I even cancelled my trip to Comdex in Las Vegas which I do yearly to stay in touch with my customers including you. My business is very important to me and I am working very hard on sales letters that will be going out to clients in my area.
I could type forever...I will type more later [Strange Ranger]. Thank you again,
Michael
Funny thing is, it wasn't the processor speed that was making it crash, I fiddled a ton and found it was the bus speed. The damn MB or more likely RAM didn't support a full 400MHz, so once I reduced the multiplier and now run stable at 2.98GHz but have the DDR set to 384 IIRC. Been awhile since I looked.
If that doesn't clear my good pseudonym I give up. Read that again too, he does sound enthusiastic and friendly. Maybe I was a sucker. But he did deliver for me, the pc and good service. That's all I can say for my part.
How could he never deliver a computer? He's just taking people's money and sending them nothing and nobody prosecutes... I mean where's the scam in that. His home address sure was easy to find.
I'll look in the wayback machine when I get home, but I don't remember any outright lies. At the time I remember thinking he seemed like the over-zealous salesman. I was thinking, geez if I (and most "geeks") tried to be a salesman... well I KNOW I would suck at it, same as salesmen suck at tech.
I'm not defending him at, I'm just relating one relevant personal experience. That's it.
Shit I don't think he's going to be around in 7 minutes! Haha. He made his bed so to speak.
Hmmm... any problems and I guess I'll deal with the OEMs, of course they're all quite reputable.
All I did was pick out every single component I wanted and then I looked for somebody to build it for me. He even had to order the SIS 648 board because he didn't carry it. Everything I said is the damn truth though. For the same price I picked him over the competition for 7 years vs. 1 year (1 is not very customer oriented and is unacceptable for anything costing thousands), and looking back I think it was mostly because he seemed eager to build it vs. "we don't carry that yet".
Even w/o the warranty, in the end I paid him about 370 for labor, got good support, a free 40 dollar firewire card overnighted to solve a problem, etc. I had a good experience. Maybe it's because he knew after 1 minute on the phone that couldn't fool me, or maybe it's because I told him what to build instead of asking for his "standard". Or maybe, just maybe, the guy means well and knows how to build a pc, but has A TON to learn about running and esp. marketing a business. Maybe he's a pathological liar and I got off lucky because the only thing he lied to me about was the warranty since that's the only thing he COULD lie to me about. I doubt that given the card he shipped me without me asking for it. (I wanted to make the audigy port work) But I'll never know. Other than wishing to see goodness in people, I have no reason to care at this point.
Oh geez alright then I hate the guy, whatever.
I really don't care.
I do care just a little about my rep here on/. though. How about googling for "Strange Ranger"? Unless you think I opened this account years ago and have been posting lies all along because I was planning to someday defend my false advertising? Get real.
I'll check that link out at home, blocked from here/work. But I do remember the cheesy giant eagle and such.
If you look at what I wrote I said it was LESS over the top, I didn't say he wasn't making claims, but yes he has gotten worse, much worse. Maybe he's not selling enough and got more desperate. I really don't know. I also said, "I always ignored his marketing", I knew he was a one man show so the marketing foibles didn't bother me. I got what I wanted out of him at a decent price. And the service HAS BEEN good. I wouldn't buy again because instead of exaggerating in his marketing (oh yeah like THAT's so rare, esp for a one-man operation) now he seems to have gone off the deep end. He's got a "sound system" he says is louder than a space shuttle launch and a cooling system that is quieter than soft human breathing on a heavily overclocked PC?? I dunno, maybe he hit his head! Haha. My main point of the post was the last few lines...
IT takes more than a $Widget expert to run a $Widget business. Case-in-point - his site is now down and he's not selling anything at all.
Funny. I was being honest. My comment history may bear me out on this. Or my user ID that is many years old, older than yours. I couldn't understand the troll mod until I read your comment. I work at a financial institution that is on the other side of the country from this guy.
I'd call you the troll here, but that was pretty funny.
OK troll this is for anyone ELSE who is intested: Pricegrabber total plus $370 but no tax.
Right in line with all the other quotes I got from the custom build shops on resellerratings.com, only real difference was a 7 year warranty for free instead of an extended 3-year that costs extra. A sucker is someone who thinks he's getting something he's not. I got exactly what I wanted. Maybe next time YOU'LL build it for me and warranty it for less (while I go fishing)?
A little background: About a year and half ago I found myself needing/wanting a monster PC, P4 2.8, 5 WD drives, 4 in a raid 10 array for photography, music, video, etc. Gotta protect all those thousands of pictures. For fun I also wanted a gaming config as well, Radeon 9700 Pro, DDR 400, etc. Long story short, I wanted a top of the line Voodoo PC or Alienware, or Hypersonic, custom built for me, not built by me. But in NO WAY did I want the silly paint job or the price that came with it.
I also do enough hardware fiddling at work that I just didn't want to deal with it at home (busy + lazy). I wanted Uber Box to show up at my door. Go ahead poke fun, I wanted it, I could get it, so I got it.
Back then his site was much less over-the-top, he had a 7 year warranty, etc. I dealt with Michael over the phone and we came to a price which was quite agreeable for the parts and labor. I knew the pricegrabber price for every part in there, MB, sticks of memory, etc. The spec sheet he sent was right on.
The PC is great, nice build, no widgets, no crapware, XP Pro with all MS-Phone-Home-ware removed or disabled, all those services in XP that most of us know to turn off, he had them off, etc, etc. When I had trouble with the Firewire ports, he walked me through the pin-outs on the Audigy 2, when that didn't work due to meager support from Creative, he overnighted me a firewire card. He has been outstanding as far as customer service is concerned, I'm quite happy with the "uber-box", yes it's over the top, but i like it that way and in a few years I won't be aching for a complete replacement.
I always ignored his marketing. He's a VERY exhuberant fellow in person, and it shows! HA. He's a one-man-show. He knows how to build a nice PC, and is willing to do it, where I am not. I disapprove of the direction his marketing has taken (who wouldn't). Because of it, I've taken to sending folks here and elsewhere who want a PC built for them.
It's sad because if you remove the marketing aspect, and of course haggle on price, he DOES do just as good a job as the Alienware / Voodoo PC folks. Actually better because I hate that tricked out case stuff, and I have yet to hear of Alienware calling or emailing you back in 5 minutes with a fix or a tracking number to a free replacement part you haven't asked for yet.
Just goes to show that running a [Widget] business takes a lot more than being a [Widget] expert. You've got to have your marketing, order processing, legal angles, etc., all figured out as well.
Maybe this "expose" will help him improve. I wish him luck. He's a real nice guy.
Music on the other hand is a different story. If you're writing music, then sell the written music for others to play. If you're performing music, the PERFORM it! If you want paid again, go perform it again. People don't tend to read the same book over and over, and they don't watch the same movie over and over again, but if you're a good enough musician they'll pay to hear you play, over and over again.
Secondly, a copy of a book is an exact copy of that book. A copy of a film is an exact copy of that film. Those art forms are inherently tied to their respective media. Music has NEVER been tied to any form of media. As such, a playback of a studio recording is a sterile imperfect recreation of a real performance (maybe a terrible reproduction depending on your sound system). A recording never properly captures the experience of being there and hearing it for real. In fact, a studio recording never properly captures the real thing for the artist either. There's no crowd to play to, no atmosphere to guide the mood of the performance, etc. A studio recording is a way to approximate a live performance. As such, they should be treated like flyers.. "Here take one, come see me play if you like it."
The only "musicians" I've ever come across who are opposed to file sharing are the ones dependant on mass marketing in order to sell their latest album (aka Brittany Spears) and most of them are NOT what real musicians consider peers. Real musicians are about making music, not albums, and real musicians are about connecting with an audience, not a studio exec.
I'd be surprised if Kare took the RETURN into proper account. Riding an elevator down a gravity well is CHEAP. Especially if we're mining in space..where it would be good to allow for many more "returns" than launches.
I think the forward says it all about the authors, they couldn't possibly hate it so well if they didn't love it too.
Microsoft would actually help themselves by letting it stand on it's own - dumb gall of them take and/or allow themsleves to hold that "I'm Feeling Lucky" slot.
You posted the perfect first half to this followup:
In total contrast, Unix developers advance systems research to provide both long-term continuity and continuous improvement in the software's ability to do more or better with respect to things like throughput, reliability, security and communications.
-Paul Murphy
In contrast with
Ironically, the very attributes and design goals that made Unix a success
when computers were much smaller, and were expected to do far less, now
impede its utility and usability. Each graft of a new subsystem onto the
underlying core has resulted in either rejection or graft vs. host disease with
its concomitant proliferation of incapacitating scar tissue. The Unix networking
model is a cacophonous Babel of Unreliability that quadrupled the
size of Unix's famed compact kernel. Its window system inherited the
cryptic unfriendliness of its character-based interface, while at the same
time realized new ways to bring fast computers to a crawl. Its new system
administration tools take more time to use than they save. Its mailer makes
the U.S. Postal Service look positively stellar.
The passing years only magnify the flaws. Using Unix remains an unpleasant
experience for beginners and experts alike. Despite a plethora of fine
books on the subject, Unix security remains an elusive goal at best. Despite
increasingly fast, intelligent peripherals, high-performance asynchronous I/
O is a pipe dream. Even though manufacturers spend millions developing
"easy-to-use" graphical user interfaces, few versions of Unix allow you to
do anything but trivial system administration without having to resort to
the 1970s-style teletype interface. Indeed, as Unix is pushed to be more and
more, it instead becomes less and less. Unix cannot be fixed from the
inside. It must be discarded. - The Unix-Hater's Handbook
Yes the handbook is old and quite tongue in cheek, but it was always +5 insightful.:]
Slashdot Mirror
> They have no need to ever run [X]
How about learning about [X]??It is a school after all. I remember my school librarian used to get all worked up because I'd quit "Oregon Trail", and fool around at the DOS prompt instead. She watched me like a hawk, which was the old fashioned equivalent of a keystroke logger.
"Hey, you don't need to be fooling around in there! Why are you always doing things you're not supposed to be doing?"
"We'll, I can learn how to shoot "Indians" with the space bar, or I can learn about this computer."
She basically loathed me after I said that.
Sad to see things haven't changed much since then.
Do you get that awful little square within a big square when watching non-widescreen HD shows?
I'd love to understand that. Why is there no setting between shrunken square HD and full square low-D? Size that thing up to full square medium-D how about?!? For an HD broadcast- If I put it on 480p or 480i and I get Full-screen "old style" quality. 720p or 1080i gives me that big black frame all the way around the picture (unless it's a widescreen broadcast). I know if I could "zoom in" on that to full screen size it would still be much better looking than 480. WTF?
Obviously video and broadcast tech is not my forte.
Not as drastic as giving up driving or moving closer...
Change your schedule by 15-30 minutes.
Awhile back, I realized that if I left my house at 7:30 I'd get through traffic and land at work at 8:30, BUT if I left my house at 8:15 (45 minutes later) I could get to work by 8:45. That's a half hour cut off my commute each way, or an hour a day, gained by simply letting everybody else fight to get to work first. When the masses are mostly in town and parked, I leave my house. My work hours are only shifted 15 minutes! I arrive at 8:45 instead of 8:30, I save an hour a day on my commute, not to mention the reduced gas consumption, pollution, and aggravation.
Leaving 45 minutes earlier just to sit still on the parkway did seem pretty silly. Am I the only one with a wee bit of flexibility in my schedule?
see my response to above poster.
... clueless.
>it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM.
Should be true. Isn't though. Just watch the Perf Mon.
[time passes...]
Ok, I just spent an hour reading/googling up on this. Apparently the MS link I give above is highly disputed. XP has an option for no-page-file, but MS says it'll make one anyway. But people who have done this can only find the evidence in the Perf monitor. No file anywhere. The mess doesn't stop there.
Apparently there is much hullabaloo about what actually happens with a W2K/XP page file. My newly acquired lack of understanding here leaves me
Apparently that's not far from where I started.
>You would be much better off simply specifiying to Windows to use no swap space at all.
That's the whole crux of my original post. You ever try that? I already understand everything you're saying and it falls severely short of the truth on a windows box.
No matter how much main memory your system boasts, Windows XP still creates and uses a page file for virtual memory... If you have a large amount of RAM (at least 1 GB), you might think that Windows XP would never need virtual memory, so that it would be okay to turn off the page file. This won't work, however, because Windows XP needs the page file anyway and some programs may crash if no virtual memory is present.
How aggravating. Anyway, there are many people today who have windows with "more ram than they'll ever need". Since Windows is too stubborn to run w/o swap, I say throw it back into RAM where it belongs in the first place. Heck, isn't that part of why you bought the ram? 1 gig of 400MHz DDR and the only time I can get XP to use more than 650M or so is when gaming. Meanwhile that page file is still there, thrashing occasionally.
Shouldn't that be "E-Launch"?
Parent is not informative. Provocative maybe. In order to be informative, the parent's statement needs a supporting explanation, including what OS.
RAM disks are fast, Windows requires swap no matter your physical RAM size, so why not put it on a RAM disk?
What are us dummies missing mlq? Please elaborate.
I say heck with PDA's and cell phones. I want this for wall mounted flat panels. So I can holler at it for goodeats.com while in the kitchen with my hands messy. Or in the basement in dire need of plumbing.com or whatever when I'm trying to prove (erroneously) that I can fix ANYTHING.
So many times while putzing around the house or driving I've wanted to bark out a command a la Star Trek and having Google answer me. Very cool.
Although if it chimes in with - "It sounds like you are trying to browse the internet, would you like me to help you?", then someone will surely have to die.
With a soft breast-shaped mouse, we could teach half the population to be skilled computer users!
Straight males, lesbians, etc.
Just think of all those "Joe Users" just looking for a reason to click on one more thing, to mouse around just a bit more. They'd learn every single menu item in every app on their PC!
"Son, why don't you go play on the internet some more."
"OK Ma, But I've already finished it once."
Heck, I want one myself!
The new office catch-phrase: "Sorry, been mousing around, can't stand up for awhile.
Maybe they'll hire me to sell Michael's Computers!
[GROAN]
They'd need a cluster of those to run XP! Step 2 complete.
> Thanks for the referrals!
;]
My pleasure. Resellerratings.com makes it easy.
And safer.
What a sorry sordid affair.
Truthfully the more I dig into these forums and hear about what he had on his site since then the more happy I am he stopped offering his run-of-the-mill PC which I was recommending to folks for about 2 months. I WAS really impressed with his service remember, and the 7 year warranty has it's charms. See above poster on why it could be a good idea. His site looked naive then, it sounds pathological now but it went down and will surely be redesigned if somebody's lawyers don't get him first.
Hey can you analyze writing styles? Funny thing is, it wasn't the processor speed that was making it crash, I fiddled a ton and found it was the bus speed. The damn MB or more likely RAM didn't support a full 400MHz, so once I reduced the multiplier and now run stable at 2.98GHz but have the DDR set to 384 IIRC. Been awhile since I looked.
If that doesn't clear my good pseudonym I give up. Read that again too, he does sound enthusiastic and friendly. Maybe I was a sucker. But he did deliver for me, the pc and good service. That's all I can say for my part.
How could he never deliver a computer? He's just taking people's money and sending them nothing and nobody prosecutes... I mean where's the scam in that. His home address sure was easy to find.
I'll look in the wayback machine when I get home, but I don't remember any outright lies. At the time I remember thinking he seemed like the over-zealous salesman. I was thinking, geez if I (and most "geeks") tried to be a salesman... well I KNOW I would suck at it, same as salesmen suck at tech.
I'm not defending him at, I'm just relating one relevant personal experience. That's it.
Shit I don't think he's going to be around in 7 minutes! Haha. He made his bed so to speak. Hmmm... any problems and I guess I'll deal with the OEMs, of course they're all quite reputable.
All I did was pick out every single component I wanted and then I looked for somebody to build it for me. He even had to order the SIS 648 board because he didn't carry it. Everything I said is the damn truth though. For the same price I picked him over the competition for 7 years vs. 1 year (1 is not very customer oriented and is unacceptable for anything costing thousands), and looking back I think it was mostly because he seemed eager to build it vs. "we don't carry that yet".
Even w/o the warranty, in the end I paid him about 370 for labor, got good support, a free 40 dollar firewire card overnighted to solve a problem, etc. I had a good experience. Maybe it's because he knew after 1 minute on the phone that couldn't fool me, or maybe it's because I told him what to build instead of asking for his "standard". Or maybe, just maybe, the guy means well and knows how to build a pc, but has A TON to learn about running and esp. marketing a business. Maybe he's a pathological liar and I got off lucky because the only thing he lied to me about was the warranty since that's the only thing he COULD lie to me about. I doubt that given the card he shipped me without me asking for it. (I wanted to make the audigy port work) But I'll never know. Other than wishing to see goodness in people, I have no reason to care at this point.
Oh geez alright then I hate the guy, whatever. I really don't care.
/. though. How about googling for "Strange Ranger"? Unless you think I opened this account years ago and have been posting lies all along because I was planning to someday defend my false advertising? Get real.
I do care just a little about my rep here on
I'll check that link out at home, blocked from here/work. But I do remember the cheesy giant eagle and such. If you look at what I wrote I said it was LESS over the top, I didn't say he wasn't making claims, but yes he has gotten worse, much worse. Maybe he's not selling enough and got more desperate. I really don't know. I also said, "I always ignored his marketing", I knew he was a one man show so the marketing foibles didn't bother me. I got what I wanted out of him at a decent price. And the service HAS BEEN good. I wouldn't buy again because instead of exaggerating in his marketing (oh yeah like THAT's so rare, esp for a one-man operation) now he seems to have gone off the deep end. He's got a "sound system" he says is louder than a space shuttle launch and a cooling system that is quieter than soft human breathing on a heavily overclocked PC?? I dunno, maybe he hit his head! Haha. My main point of the post was the last few lines...
IT takes more than a $Widget expert to run a $Widget business. Case-in-point - his site is now down and he's not selling anything at all.
Funny. I was being honest. My comment history may bear me out on this. Or my user ID that is many years old, older than yours. I couldn't understand the troll mod until I read your comment. I work at a financial institution that is on the other side of the country from this guy.
I'd call you the troll here, but that was pretty funny.
OK troll this is for anyone ELSE who is intested: Pricegrabber total plus $370 but no tax.
Right in line with all the other quotes I got from the custom build shops on resellerratings.com, only real difference was a 7 year warranty for free instead of an extended 3-year that costs extra. A sucker is someone who thinks he's getting something he's not. I got exactly what I wanted. Maybe next time YOU'LL build it for me and warranty it for less (while I go fishing)?
A little background: About a year and half ago I found myself needing/wanting a monster PC, P4 2.8, 5 WD drives, 4 in a raid 10 array for photography, music, video, etc. Gotta protect all those thousands of pictures. For fun I also wanted a gaming config as well, Radeon 9700 Pro, DDR 400, etc. Long story short, I wanted a top of the line Voodoo PC or Alienware, or Hypersonic, custom built for me, not built by me. But in NO WAY did I want the silly paint job or the price that came with it.
I also do enough hardware fiddling at work that I just didn't want to deal with it at home (busy + lazy). I wanted Uber Box to show up at my door. Go ahead poke fun, I wanted it, I could get it, so I got it.
Back then his site was much less over-the-top, he had a 7 year warranty, etc. I dealt with Michael over the phone and we came to a price which was quite agreeable for the parts and labor. I knew the pricegrabber price for every part in there, MB, sticks of memory, etc. The spec sheet he sent was right on.
The PC is great, nice build, no widgets, no crapware, XP Pro with all MS-Phone-Home-ware removed or disabled, all those services in XP that most of us know to turn off, he had them off, etc, etc. When I had trouble with the Firewire ports, he walked me through the pin-outs on the Audigy 2, when that didn't work due to meager support from Creative, he overnighted me a firewire card. He has been outstanding as far as customer service is concerned, I'm quite happy with the "uber-box", yes it's over the top, but i like it that way and in a few years I won't be aching for a complete replacement.
I always ignored his marketing. He's a VERY exhuberant fellow in person, and it shows! HA. He's a one-man-show. He knows how to build a nice PC, and is willing to do it, where I am not. I disapprove of the direction his marketing has taken (who wouldn't). Because of it, I've taken to sending folks here and elsewhere who want a PC built for them.
It's sad because if you remove the marketing aspect, and of course haggle on price, he DOES do just as good a job as the Alienware / Voodoo PC folks. Actually better because I hate that tricked out case stuff, and I have yet to hear of Alienware calling or emailing you back in 5 minutes with a fix or a tracking number to a free replacement part you haven't asked for yet.
Just goes to show that running a [Widget] business takes a lot more than being a [Widget] expert. You've got to have your marketing, order processing, legal angles, etc., all figured out as well.
Maybe this "expose" will help him improve. I wish him luck. He's a real nice guy.
Movies = agreement w/ you.
Music on the other hand is a different story. If you're writing music, then sell the written music for others to play. If you're performing music, the PERFORM it! If you want paid again, go perform it again. People don't tend to read the same book over and over, and they don't watch the same movie over and over again, but if you're a good enough musician they'll pay to hear you play, over and over again.
Secondly, a copy of a book is an exact copy of that book. A copy of a film is an exact copy of that film. Those art forms are inherently tied to their respective media. Music has NEVER been tied to any form of media. As such, a playback of a studio recording is a sterile imperfect recreation of a real performance (maybe a terrible reproduction depending on your sound system). A recording never properly captures the experience of being there and hearing it for real. In fact, a studio recording never properly captures the real thing for the artist either. There's no crowd to play to, no atmosphere to guide the mood of the performance, etc. A studio recording is a way to approximate a live performance. As such, they should be treated like flyers.. "Here take one, come see me play if you like it."
The only "musicians" I've ever come across who are opposed to file sharing are the ones dependant on mass marketing in order to sell their latest album (aka Brittany Spears) and most of them are NOT what real musicians consider peers. Real musicians are about making music, not albums, and real musicians are about connecting with an audience, not a studio exec.
I'd be surprised if Kare took the RETURN into proper account. Riding an elevator down a gravity well is CHEAP. Especially if we're mining in space..where it would be good to allow for many more "returns" than launches.
Actually that's sort of hilarious that it's at RESEARCH.microsoft.com
I think the forward says it all about the authors, they couldn't possibly hate it so well if they didn't love it too.
Microsoft would actually help themselves by letting it stand on it's own - dumb gall of them take and/or allow themsleves to hold that "I'm Feeling Lucky" slot.
In contrast with Yes the handbook is old and quite tongue in cheek, but it was always +5 insightful.