Was that the pitch? I like it. Alot. I am a big Blade Runner fan and just love all that 'machines deliberating about their emotions and place in the world' thing. That's my favorite part. The whole 'revenge of the evil machines' thing is ok but it doesn't have as much philosophical meat to it.
I have never liked any SciFi TV series except for ST:TNG, but I liked this movie. I cannot recall seeing such a close Blade Runner rip off before.
Boomer was way, way hotter. Man, I really dig her. I'm not usually so much into Asian chicks. But that girl is HOT. She's also hotter than the blonde Cylon model. Makes me want to move to Japan/China/Taiwan/Korea/Singapore. Does anyone know the name of that actress?
If Starbuck would just cut her hair short she could pass for a guy. In fact, they should definitely have made her a lesbian. I have to admit, that as much as I liked the pilot, she comes pretty close to ruining the show for me.
I have played System Shock 2 a great deal. I didn't like it as much as Thief, but it was fun for a while. As always the sameness of just running around shooting everything really got to me. By the end I was using cheat codes for unlimited ammo and shooting things just for the sound effects.
I would place System Shock 2 a bit higher than the average FPS. It has a bit more complexity and immersion.
FPS devs seem to be paying more attention to immersion and complexity these days. I will be interested to see if even the story-hostile Carmack actually does make an effort to create a deeper, more immersive game with Doom3. I predict that such efforts will always lead back to Doom clones eventually due to the additional cost and time involved in creating complex, immersive game worlds.
Which are basically action games. Warren goes way back to the Ultima Underworld days when he was a producer. There was a spectre named "Warren" in Ultima Underworld as a tribute to him.
I think his heart really is in the right place, but he also needs to make money. So he stays away from the riskier, more immersive, and complex, CRPGs and just tries to make action games that are as interesting as possible. I didn't like Deus Ex, but I did like Thief, up to a point. But they are both basically action games.
LGS sold out to popular tastes and the least common denominator long before the whole fiasco that ended them. It was interesting to watch Black Isle do the same. Just compare Icewind Dale II to their earlier titles to see this. In my view such pandering to the tastes of the average person is always the beginning of the end for any company that did not start out doing that. The core fans feel betrayed.
Bethesda is one of the last remaining old timers in the CRPG world, and their games get prettier, but more boring with every new release. But they cater more to the "power-gamer" who just wants to level up.
Hopefully the main players in the studio can pick themselves up and create a situation like Warren Spector did after Looking Glass Studios was shut down.
And what situation would that be? Ion Storm? Hardly a worthy succesor to LGS. Ion Storm is mostly an action game developer. Although, that is essentially what LGS was trying to become (that's where the money is) before their fall.
Let us not forget that the project that turned into Thief was originally intended to be a CRPG, a sort of sequel-in-spirit to Ultima Underworld II. Many fans of the Ultima Underworld series wanted to see them create an actual Ultima Underworld III, but LGS cited licensing issues with Origin. Origin was not interested in another unprofitable Underworld title.
Then consider yourself lucky. 99% of games produced today are made just for you. I don't have a problem with that, but I cannot be entertained by a game that does not deeply immerse me in its world and give me some reason to do what it wants me to do.
I don't know if it's an age thing or not. When I was a teenager, I was able to enjoy shoot-em up games with no story whatsoever. I played countless hours with Castle Wolfenstein and Archon, and then later with Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem and Doom, before starting to get tired of the whole run around and shoot things kind of game. Doom II was really the last action game that I ever enjoyed. By the time Quake appeared those kind of games already made me yawn just thinking about them.
The kind of games I like tend to be much more expensive, difficult, and time consuming to make. Some of my favorite games are: Planescape: Torment, Ultima Underworld I and II, Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall (but not Morrowind), Might and Magic 6,7, and 8, Fallout 1 and 2, Baldurs Gate 2, and recently Arx Fatalis. Also Black and White and Icewind Dale get honorable mentions.
It's not that I like D&D settings or RPGs so much per se. I like to use two words to describe the difference between these types of games and the latest, greatest DOOM clone: Immersion and Complexity (in the sense of a reality simulation). A small illustration is the differences between the old Castle Wolfenstein game and the more modern versions: Wolf3D and RTCW. While the graphics of the original were very bad, there were more options than just shooting. You could knock out walls with grenades and stick a gun in the back of a guard and take his ammo and (I think) weapons without having to kill him. This is what I mean by complexity: having more of the same choices that you would have in the real world.
Yeah, you're right. A sequel-in-spirit to Torment with Chris Avellone, Dave Maldonado, and John Deiley all working on the most immersive, story driven, CRPG since Torment, would have been a very BAD thing.
The same sour grapes enthusiasts who were claiming that cancelling Torn was a great decision (and not in a business sense) are now claiming that the closing down of BIS entirely could only be a good thing.
I guess the closing down of Looking Glass Studios could only have been a good thing too, even though, until the recent Arx Fatalis (although I don't doubt that LGS could have done a much better job), no one has since produced a game in the way that LGS might have had they continued with CRPGs.
The only hope for Torment and Fallout fans is that Avellone (who left BIS some months ago) and Maldonado have both expressed a fondness for making more in depth, complex, immersive, story-driven games like PS:T. Even Feargus Urquhart, the ex-president of the BIS division who rumour has it is now starting a new game company, was interested in some kind of sequel-in-spirit to Torment. All they wanted was another opportunity, which Iply clearly had no intention of giving them.
Irrational Games does not consist of ex-Looking Glass devs, although they were helped a bit by some of them. And aside from Warren Spector can you name any other Looking Glass people who work at Ion Storm? Maybe one or two others because of Warren.
Some of the original Looking Glass guys like Doug Church are not even working in the game industry anymore. I'm still waiting for an Ultima Underworld III.
The problem with using body parts like fingers, retinas, or faces for access control security is that one's physical body can be coerced. No one can force me to reveal my secure password. I can choose to die rather than reveal it, and if I die, the protected data will die with me.
A few scenarios come to mind. I'm walking in a city late at night near an ATM. A thief puts a gun to my head and tells me to go to my ATM and withdraw funds for him. I can refuse, but if he kills me he will get no money. With a fingerprint, retina, or facial scan, he can shoot me first and just drag my body to the ATM.
Another scenario is private data on my computer that I want to be kept safe from everyone including governments. A government can physically coerce a citizen into using his fingerprint scanner to retrieve the data that they want. They can do nothing about a strong password, and, again, if they kill you they lose any chance of getting the data.
Of course, this is where torture comes in, but I'd rather have the choice of being tortured or even dying to protect sensitive data. Biometrics take away that choice.
Having said all this, voice print ID avoids many of these pitfalls. It seems the most promising since no one can physically force you to speak your password, and if you die the data remains protected.
You may have already tried it, but suspending the drives with gasket or any elastic straps in your 5 1/4" bays does wonders. I would never use a directly coupled drive (even with rubber grommets) again. The drives do run hotter since none of the heat can conduct through the sides, but it is extremely effective. The difference is truly dramatic.
Start with a quiet drive and then suspend it and you may not need an enclosure. In any case, the best system is to enclose the drive and then suspend the enclosure. Although MikeC on SPCR did some testing and found that a suspended enclosure was not much quieter than the suspended drive alone, at least in his system.
No matter what, it's likely that hard drives will remain the most difficult to quiet noise source. Ramdrives are the way to go for a silent system.
Actually, in an otherwise quiet system, those Seagates tend to sound like buzzing bees when they are seeking. Samsung seems to be making the quietest all around drives these days. Of course, compared to Western Digital and Maxtor, my vacuum cleaner is quiet.
Or maybe the US has way too many stupid, draconian laws, with more on the way. I'd venture to guess that only a small fraction of those "criminals" actually hurt anyone else. Of course, when they are released, they will all be so pissed off about it that they will start to commit real crimes. That's what we call "justice".
That's like comparing the US with Canada. We both speak English, we both are former colonies of England, but our govenments and society are vastly different.
I have lived in both Canada and the US, and, culturally there is almost no difference. In fact I was surprised at how truly similar both cultures really were. And I was living in Quebec!
If there is any difference, aside from buying over the internet being much easier (and cheaper) in the US, it is in the attitude that they are not bound to the US, that they are a truly separate culture. They may believe this. But I don't think most of the ones who do have really spent much time living in the US. Living in a place and just visiting it are not the same thing.
Certainly the Francophones in Quebec are a bit different. The tend to speak French with an almost American sounding accent (which I always found comic), and tend to try to be a bit more "European" in some ways.
I'll suggest that the first $20,000 is tax free. No income tax on the money required for living at a subsistence level.
I certainly love this idea. Just don't exempt social security/medicaire from this. That can be a very large percentage of a low paid (subsistence) worker's salary. It would be interesting to see how this would be portrayed as helping the rich. I suppose they would argue that rich corporations could get away with paying their employees less (ignoring market factors of course) because employees wouldn't have to earn as much to survive.
It has always been interesting (and depressing) to watch low paid workers vote themselves tax increases all the time. I guess they must be thinking in terms of increasing taxes on the rich and not on themselves.
But the supply of housing is relatively fixed. It cannot (or at least does not) increase nearly as quickly as the demand. Population increases constantly, and the supply of housing doesn't seem to be keeping pace. You can't "manufacture" more land. Property values did dip once around 1990 or so, but it's been rising skyward ever since at an incredible rate. Real estate is considered one of the safest investments there is.
Capitalism (market economics) really does work better than any other "system". In fact, strictly speaking, there really isn't anything else that could even be described as a "system". That's not to say that capitalism is all that great, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternatives (no system at all). If you know of a better way, by all means share.
Wages are just another price, the price of what an employer (anyone who pays anyone to do anything) must pay to to obtain the services of another person. So, yes, in any economy (capitalist or not) everyone will try to get the most goods/services for the least amount of money. The supply of labor, especially unskilled labor, tends to be quite high mostly due to the inherent difficulties in setting up one's own business.
A minimum wage is just a form of price fixing, with all the same results that price fixing has on any good. Rent control is another example of this kind of simplistic economic thinking.
When the market price is lower than the fixed price, buyers will simply purchase less than they otherwise would. In the case of the price of labor, this just means that the government prices those few who might have sold their labor for less out of the market entirely. All you have to do to see this is to imagine what would happen if the minimum wage were raised to a much higher level. Obviously, employers would simply make do with fewer workers.
The reason the price of labor is so high in the US has nothing to do with price fixing. Labor is just another supply and demand based commodity. There are simply more jobs in the US per capita than in many other countries. There is no magic as to why the US, which like India, is just another ex-British colony, has done so well economically. Historically, it has been easier to start and run businesses in the US than elsewhere due to a relative lack of taxes and regulations.
The US historically (not so much anymore) had a very Laissez Faire approach to economics. In fact, the colonial British-Americans started a war precisely because they felt they were taxed and regulated too heavily.
The Marxist employee/employer conflict you speak of always occurs in any economy. It is the same conflict that any buyer/seller pair experiences. Haven't you ever haggled for anything?
Socialist policies are precisely the reason that most other countries have done so poorly, why they were playing catchup to the US for so many years. Do you think that socialist policies are the reason that the US is so rich, and, say, Uganda, is so poor? The US was a colony too. You don't see the US blaming the British for everything that goes wrong.
The reason is that it used to be relatively easy to start and run a business in the US. Of course, now the US is mostly living off the momentum of the past. Every year the government makes it more and more difficult for individuals to start and run their own businesses. Everyone will have more or less no choice but to be an employee of some mega-corporation with lobbyists who can afford to buy the right legislation.
I don't know what country you live in, but in my country the cost of housing has consistently increased (by at least 5%) every year for at least the past 14 years and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. How is cheap foreign labor going to help with this?
It may amuse some countries to see the citizens of most first world countries squatting in the streets because they can't afford a place to live on world wages, but I won't be too happy about it. Other than housing costs, however, I would tend to agree with your premise. Wages are always relative to what you can buy with them.
I haven't noticed this prices-falling-faster-than-wages phenomenon you refer to though. While the prices of some goods have fallen, mostly due to Chinese labor, the prices of most non-technological goods seem unaffected. I have not seen any drop in basic cost of living goods. If anything the cost of food, electricity, water etc have increased.
I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy my new $5 70" plasma HDTV television with Blueray DVD player (built by 10 year old kids in Port Moresby being paid in fishing hooks) while living in a tent on public land. Where am I going to plug it in?
Most of all get the hell out of the software industry. It's a house of cards. I'm dead serious
Well said. I believe property values are at least partially responsible for this. How can a worker who must pay $800/month in rent for even the smallest apartment compete with one who need only spend $30/month?
How can a worker who must pay at least $200,000 for a house and then at least $300/month in property taxes compete with one who can buy a house for $5000 and pay no property taxes?
Differences in other cost of living factors like food, water, and electricity are less important but can become significant in closely competing countries.
I guess the moral of this is that any country that wants to compete for this kind of thought-labor or cyber-laber had better start thinking about its cost of living inflation.
This issue is not one that workers in the building trades (for instance) are too worried about because their jobs cannot be shipped overseas. They are also often protected by union and licensing schemes which limit competition even *within* their own countries.
Of course their high wages are one of the reasons that housing is so expensive in such countries. So I see a circular pattern developing here. The bottom line is that, short of some Draconian labor legislation, those of us in high cost of living countries who would like at least some hope of not having to live in a tent deep in the woods somewhere or in a homeless shelter, had better start thinking about professions that do not face world competition, at least not in such a direct form.
At least get his name right.It's Wyle. I guess he's the new Ipod spokesman. I saw that episode, and the obvious Ipod marketing made me sick. They practically devoted a whole plot thread to it.
I'd like to know the story behind that. Was it an outright marketing sell-out or is the writer just an Ipod fan? Since it added nothing whatsoever to the story I strongly suspect that apple paid a lot of mony for those scenes.
I realize that his character is supposed to be rich, but carrying around an Ipod (and 20k in cash in his pocket) in an active war zone in Africa seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Frankly, I don't really care when advertisers pay for elements that are essentially already in the script. It's when the advertisers start negotiating for the contents of the story that a line seems to be crossed, IMO.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that MS avoids sqaushing bugs due to costs. I don't believe this is the case. They are willing to live with bugs because they do not directly affect their bottom line.
If MS decides to increase their budget for a particular application, it will be to add features. Features tend to add even more bugs (and bloat), but they are great for marketing and hence sales. Features directly add value. Bugfixes do not. People (naively) expect their software to work as advertised. Customers don't want to have to pay extra for the company to fix something that was never supposed to have been broken.
Commercial customers with tech-savvy sys-admins can be a problem here. This is the only reason that MS ever developed the NT series of OSes. At least there MS paid at least some attention to reliability and bugfixes. But the point is that it was only because they felt they had no choice. Below a certain level of reliability Linux/Unix would just be too tempting an alternative for this market segment.
I realize that many/.ers see MS's problem as one of its commercial nature and monopolistic ambitions to dominate the world etc. While I agree with those criticisms, the essential nature of their problem from my POV as a potential customer is this features-not-bug-fixes philosophy of theirs. From a strictly profit-making, shareholder-value POV, I can see their point, but from an end-user perspective it does make me despise them and their slimy make-a-fast-buck used car salesman ethics.
Except that we buy a lot of our stuff from China now. I do tend to agree that China is sort of poised to take over the world or whatever. If they could just give up that whole Communist ideology they could very well be the next economic superpower. Communism is so 1920s.
So much manufacturing is moving to China because they know how to make things cheaply. The cost of living is too high in most Asian countries, most of Europe, and the US/Canada to hire workers cheaply enough to make low cost products profitable.
I don't recall signing some kind of agreement saying that anyone can call me at anytime in order to harass me until I give them money. I believe that crank calls are illegal in my state. Telemarketers are simply a subset of harassing phone calls, but a far more serious one due to their sheer numbers. The amount of unhappiness that they cause cannot be underestimated.
If you would be so kind as to post your home telephone number here on slashdot, I'm sure that quite a few people would be willing to exercise their right to speak with you about this in person. I can't see why you should object since it sounds like you may have the ringer turned off on your phone anyway. Always a good precaution in this world of rude, uncaring folk who believe that their "rights" are so much more important than yours.
I hope you are at least consistent and believe that crank calls and death threats and bomb threats should be perfectly legal as long as they are done over the phone, since you can just turn that ringer off. It's your own fault for answering, right? Freedom of Speech, right?
Unfortunately there is no system in place to electronically block only telemarketers. If there were and the system were free or paid for by the telemarketers, there would be no need for The List.
A law would still be necessary for telemarketers who placed calls without registering for the electronic block list. Either way violators need to be pursued. This method may save a lot of unnecessary expense in terms of development of a new telco blocking system as well as the additional electronics in telephones and caller ID boxes.
The ideal system would be one in which all telemarketers had to sign up for a system for which they would have to pay the TELCO for the priviledge of using their system for advertising. Then, if they pay sufficient fees they would be allowed to register as a legal telemarketer and be allowed to call only the TELCO customers who specifically request the Telemarketing "feature" for their phone. In addition, TELCOs should be allowed to charge the customer for this feature as well. Those who wish to recieve all of those wonderful telephone offers would surely be willing to pay for that privilege.
Wow. I thought I recognized that name. I can't believe he's in congress. In Texas no less. I guess this is one of the few issues I disagree with Libertarians on. In the modern world, a phone number should not be considered public property. Telemarketing is the commercial equivalent of a crank call. It should be illegal, even in a "free" society. Spam and direct mail advertising should be illegal as well.
The first amendment was never intended to protect this kind of privacy invasion. Speech should be legal only where the recipients have the option not to "listen" while on their own property. For instance, no one is forced to buy the Sunday newspaper, of which half, is dead tree advertising. But everyone is forced to check their own mailbox and now internet mail as well. Since a phone is literally inside one's house, it is even more obvious that the recipient is forced to listen.
I actually don't think the do-not-call list goes far enough. Telemarketing, as such, should be illegal even to those who haven't signed up for the List. Also, if code is not considered speech, then this stuff most certainly should not be.
Slashdot Mirror
Was that the pitch? I like it. Alot. I am a big Blade Runner fan and just love all that 'machines deliberating about their emotions and place in the world' thing. That's my favorite part. The whole 'revenge of the evil machines' thing is ok but it doesn't have as much philosophical meat to it.
I have never liked any SciFi TV series except for ST:TNG, but I liked this movie. I cannot recall seeing such a close Blade Runner rip off before.
oh yeah, and Starbuck was hot.
Boomer was way, way hotter. Man, I really dig her. I'm not usually so much into Asian chicks. But that girl is HOT. She's also hotter than the blonde Cylon model. Makes me want to move to Japan/China/Taiwan/Korea/Singapore. Does anyone know the name of that actress?
If Starbuck would just cut her hair short she could pass for a guy. In fact, they should definitely have made her a lesbian. I have to admit, that as much as I liked the pilot, she comes pretty close to ruining the show for me.
I have played System Shock 2 a great deal. I didn't like it as much as Thief, but it was fun for a while. As always the sameness of just running around shooting everything really got to me. By the end I was using cheat codes for unlimited ammo and shooting things just for the sound effects.
I would place System Shock 2 a bit higher than the average FPS. It has a bit more complexity and immersion.
FPS devs seem to be paying more attention to immersion and complexity these days. I will be interested to see if even the story-hostile Carmack actually does make an effort to create a deeper, more immersive game with Doom3. I predict that such efforts will always lead back to Doom clones eventually due to the additional cost and time involved in creating complex, immersive game worlds.
Which are basically action games. Warren goes way back to the Ultima Underworld days when he was a producer. There was a spectre named "Warren" in Ultima Underworld as a tribute to him.
I think his heart really is in the right place, but he also needs to make money. So he stays away from the riskier, more immersive, and complex, CRPGs and just tries to make action games that are as interesting as possible. I didn't like Deus Ex, but I did like Thief, up to a point. But they are both basically action games.
LGS sold out to popular tastes and the least common denominator long before the whole fiasco that ended them. It was interesting to watch Black Isle do the same. Just compare Icewind Dale II to their earlier titles to see this. In my view such pandering to the tastes of the average person is always the beginning of the end for any company that did not start out doing that. The core fans feel betrayed.
Bethesda is one of the last remaining old timers in the CRPG world, and their games get prettier, but more boring with every new release. But they cater more to the "power-gamer" who just wants to level up.
Hopefully the main players in the studio can pick themselves up and create a situation like Warren Spector did after Looking Glass Studios was shut down.
And what situation would that be? Ion Storm? Hardly a worthy succesor to LGS. Ion Storm is mostly an action game developer. Although, that is essentially what LGS was trying to become (that's where the money is) before their fall.
Let us not forget that the project that turned into Thief was originally intended to be a CRPG, a sort of sequel-in-spirit to Ultima Underworld II. Many fans of the Ultima Underworld series wanted to see them create an actual Ultima Underworld III, but LGS cited licensing issues with Origin. Origin was not interested in another unprofitable Underworld title.
Then consider yourself lucky. 99% of games produced today are made just for you. I don't have a problem with that, but I cannot be entertained by a game that does not deeply immerse me in its world and give me some reason to do what it wants me to do.
I don't know if it's an age thing or not. When I was a teenager, I was able to enjoy shoot-em up games with no story whatsoever. I played countless hours with Castle Wolfenstein and Archon, and then later with Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem and Doom, before starting to get tired of the whole run around and shoot things kind of game. Doom II was really the last action game that I ever enjoyed. By the time Quake appeared those kind of games already made me yawn just thinking about them.
The kind of games I like tend to be much more expensive, difficult, and time consuming to make. Some of my favorite games are: Planescape: Torment, Ultima Underworld I and II, Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall (but not Morrowind), Might and Magic 6,7, and 8, Fallout 1 and 2, Baldurs Gate 2, and recently Arx Fatalis. Also Black and White and Icewind Dale get honorable mentions.
It's not that I like D&D settings or RPGs so much per se. I like to use two words to describe the difference between these types of games and the latest, greatest DOOM clone: Immersion and Complexity (in the sense of a reality simulation).
A small illustration is the differences between the old Castle Wolfenstein game and the more modern versions: Wolf3D and RTCW. While the graphics of the original were very bad, there were more options than just shooting. You could knock out walls with grenades and stick a gun in the back of a guard and take his ammo and (I think) weapons without having to kill him. This is what I mean by complexity: having more of the same choices that you would have in the real world.
Yeah, you're right. A sequel-in-spirit to Torment with Chris Avellone, Dave Maldonado, and John Deiley all working on the most immersive, story driven, CRPG since Torment, would have been a very BAD thing.
The same sour grapes enthusiasts who were claiming that cancelling Torn was a great decision (and not in a business sense) are now claiming that the closing down of BIS entirely could only be a good thing.
I guess the closing down of Looking Glass Studios could only have been a good thing too, even though, until the recent Arx Fatalis (although I don't doubt that LGS could have done a much better job), no one has since produced a game in the way that LGS might have had they continued with CRPGs.
The only hope for Torment and Fallout fans is that Avellone (who left BIS some months ago) and Maldonado have both expressed a fondness for making more in depth, complex, immersive, story-driven games like PS:T. Even Feargus Urquhart, the ex-president of the BIS division who rumour has it is now starting a new game company, was interested in some kind of sequel-in-spirit to Torment. All they wanted was another opportunity, which Iply clearly had no intention of giving them.
Irrational Games does not consist of ex-Looking Glass devs, although they were helped a bit by some of them. And aside from Warren Spector can you name any other Looking Glass people who work at Ion Storm? Maybe one or two others because of Warren.
Some of the original Looking Glass guys like Doug Church are not even working in the game industry anymore. I'm still waiting for an Ultima Underworld III.
The problem with using body parts like fingers, retinas, or faces for access control security is that one's physical body can be coerced. No one can force me to reveal my secure password. I can choose to die rather than reveal it, and if I die, the protected data will die with me.
A few scenarios come to mind. I'm walking in a city late at night near an ATM. A thief puts a gun to my head and tells me to go to my ATM and withdraw funds for him. I can refuse, but if he kills me he will get no money. With a fingerprint, retina, or facial scan, he can shoot me first and just drag my body to the ATM.
Another scenario is private data on my computer that I want to be kept safe from everyone including governments. A government can physically coerce a citizen into using his fingerprint scanner to retrieve the data that they want. They can do nothing about a strong password, and, again, if they kill you they lose any chance of getting the data.
Of course, this is where torture comes in, but I'd rather have the choice of being tortured or even dying to protect sensitive data. Biometrics take away that choice.
Having said all this, voice print ID avoids many of these pitfalls. It seems the most promising since no one can physically force you to speak your password, and if you die the data remains protected.
You may have already tried it, but suspending the drives with gasket or any elastic straps in your 5 1/4" bays does wonders. I would never use a directly coupled drive (even with rubber grommets) again. The drives do run hotter since none of the heat can conduct through the sides, but it is extremely effective. The difference is truly dramatic.
Start with a quiet drive and then suspend it and you may not need an enclosure. In any case, the best system is to enclose the drive and then suspend the enclosure. Although MikeC on SPCR did some testing and found that a suspended enclosure was not much quieter than the suspended drive alone, at least in his system.
No matter what, it's likely that hard drives will remain the most difficult to quiet noise source. Ramdrives are the way to go for a silent system.
Actually, in an otherwise quiet system, those Seagates tend to sound like buzzing bees when they are seeking. Samsung seems to be making the quietest all around drives these days. Of course, compared to Western Digital and Maxtor, my vacuum cleaner is quiet.
Or maybe the US has way too many stupid, draconian laws, with more on the way. I'd venture to guess that only a small fraction of those "criminals" actually hurt anyone else. Of course, when they are released, they will all be so pissed off about it that they will start to commit real crimes. That's what we call "justice".
That's like comparing the US with Canada. We both speak English, we both are former colonies of England, but our govenments and society are vastly different.
I have lived in both Canada and the US, and, culturally there is almost no difference. In fact I was surprised at how truly similar both cultures really were. And I was living in Quebec!
If there is any difference, aside from buying over the internet being much easier (and cheaper) in the US, it is in the attitude that they are not bound to the US, that they are a truly separate culture. They may believe this. But I don't think most of the ones who do have really spent much time living in the US. Living in a place and just visiting it are not the same thing.
Certainly the Francophones in Quebec are a bit different. The tend to speak French with an almost American sounding accent (which I always found comic), and tend to try to be a bit more "European" in some ways.
I'll suggest that the first $20,000 is tax free. No income tax on the money required for living at a subsistence level.
I certainly love this idea. Just don't exempt social security/medicaire from this. That can be a very large percentage of a low paid (subsistence) worker's salary. It would be interesting to see how this would be portrayed as helping the rich. I suppose they would argue that rich corporations could get away with paying their employees less (ignoring market factors of course) because employees wouldn't have to earn as much to survive.
It has always been interesting (and depressing) to watch low paid workers vote themselves tax increases all the time. I guess they must be thinking in terms of increasing taxes on the rich and not on themselves.
But the supply of housing is relatively fixed. It cannot (or at least does not) increase nearly as quickly as the demand. Population increases constantly, and the supply of housing doesn't seem to be keeping pace. You can't "manufacture" more land. Property values did dip once around 1990 or so, but it's been rising skyward ever since at an incredible rate. Real estate is considered one of the safest investments there is.
Capitalism (market economics) really does work better than any other "system". In fact, strictly speaking, there really isn't anything else that could even be described as a "system". That's not to say that capitalism is all that great, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternatives (no system at all). If you know of a better way, by all means share.
Wages are just another price, the price of what an employer (anyone who pays anyone to do anything) must pay to to obtain the services of another person. So, yes, in any economy (capitalist or not) everyone will try to get the most goods/services for the least amount of money. The supply of labor, especially unskilled labor, tends to be quite high mostly due to the inherent difficulties in setting up one's own business.
A minimum wage is just a form of price fixing, with all the same results that price fixing has on any good. Rent control is another example of this kind of simplistic economic thinking.
When the market price is lower than the fixed price, buyers will simply purchase less than they otherwise would. In the case of the price of labor, this just means that the government prices those few who might have sold their labor for less out of the market entirely. All you have to do to see this is to imagine what would happen if the minimum wage were raised to a much higher level. Obviously, employers would simply make do with fewer workers.
The reason the price of labor is so high in the US has nothing to do with price fixing. Labor is just another supply and demand based commodity. There are simply more jobs in the US per capita than in many other countries. There is no magic as to why the US, which like India, is just another ex-British colony, has done so well economically. Historically, it has been easier to start and run businesses in the US than elsewhere due to a relative lack of taxes and regulations.
The US historically (not so much anymore) had a very Laissez Faire approach to economics. In fact, the colonial British-Americans started a war precisely because they felt they were taxed and regulated too heavily.
The Marxist employee/employer conflict you speak of always occurs in any economy. It is the same conflict that any buyer/seller pair experiences. Haven't you ever haggled for anything?
Socialist policies are precisely the reason that most other countries have done so poorly, why they were playing catchup to the US for so many years. Do you think that socialist policies are the reason that the US is so rich, and, say, Uganda, is so poor? The US was a colony too. You don't see the US blaming the British for everything that goes wrong.
The reason is that it used to be relatively easy to start and run a business in the US. Of course, now the US is mostly living off the momentum of the past. Every year the government makes it more and more difficult for individuals to start and run their own businesses. Everyone will have more or less no choice but to be an employee of some mega-corporation with lobbyists who can afford to buy the right legislation.
I don't know what country you live in, but in my country the cost of housing has consistently increased (by at least 5%) every year for at least the past 14 years and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. How is cheap foreign labor going to help with this?
It may amuse some countries to see the citizens of most first world countries squatting in the streets because they can't afford a place to live on world wages, but I won't be too happy about it. Other than housing costs, however, I would tend to agree with your premise. Wages are always relative to what you can buy with them.
I haven't noticed this prices-falling-faster-than-wages phenomenon you refer to though. While the prices of some goods have fallen, mostly due to Chinese labor, the prices of most non-technological goods seem unaffected. I have not seen any drop in basic cost of living goods. If anything the cost of food, electricity, water etc have increased.
I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy my new $5 70" plasma HDTV television with Blueray DVD player (built by 10 year old kids in Port Moresby being paid in fishing hooks) while living in a tent on public land. Where am I going to plug it in?
Most of all get the hell out of the software industry. It's a house of cards.
I'm dead serious
Well said. I believe property values are at least partially responsible for this. How can a worker who must pay $800/month in rent for even the smallest apartment compete with one who need only spend $30/month?
How can a worker who must pay at least $200,000 for a house and then at least $300/month in property taxes compete with one who can buy a house for $5000 and pay no property taxes?
Differences in other cost of living factors like food, water, and electricity are less important but can become significant in closely competing countries.
I guess the moral of this is that any country that wants to compete for this kind of thought-labor or cyber-laber had better start thinking about its cost of living inflation.
This issue is not one that workers in the building trades (for instance) are too worried about because their jobs cannot be shipped overseas. They are also often protected by union and licensing schemes which limit competition even *within* their own countries.
Of course their high wages are one of the reasons that housing is so expensive in such countries. So I see a circular pattern developing here. The bottom line is that, short of some Draconian labor legislation, those of us in high cost of living countries who would like at least some hope of not having to live in a tent deep in the woods somewhere or in a homeless shelter, had better start thinking about professions that do not face world competition, at least not in such a direct form.
At least get his name right.It's Wyle. I guess he's the new Ipod spokesman. I saw that episode, and the obvious Ipod marketing made me sick. They practically devoted a whole plot thread to it.
I'd like to know the story behind that. Was it an outright marketing sell-out or is the writer just an Ipod fan? Since it added nothing whatsoever to the story I strongly suspect that apple paid a lot of mony for those scenes.
I realize that his character is supposed to be rich, but carrying around an Ipod (and 20k in cash in his pocket) in an active war zone in Africa seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Frankly, I don't really care when advertisers pay for elements that are essentially already in the script. It's when the advertisers start negotiating for the contents of the story that a line seems to be crossed, IMO.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that MS avoids sqaushing bugs due to costs. I don't believe this is the case. They are willing to live with bugs because they do not directly affect their bottom line.
/.ers see MS's problem as one of its commercial nature and monopolistic ambitions to dominate the world etc. While I agree with those criticisms, the essential nature of their problem from my POV as a potential customer is this features-not-bug-fixes philosophy of theirs. From a strictly profit-making, shareholder-value POV, I can see their point, but from an end-user perspective it does make me despise them and their slimy make-a-fast-buck used car salesman ethics.
If MS decides to increase their budget for a particular application, it will be to add features. Features tend to add even more bugs (and bloat), but they are great for marketing and hence sales. Features directly add value. Bugfixes do not. People (naively) expect their software to work as advertised. Customers don't want to have to pay extra for the company to fix something that was never supposed to have been broken.
Commercial customers with tech-savvy sys-admins can be a problem here. This is the only reason that MS ever developed the NT series of OSes. At least there MS paid at least some attention to reliability and bugfixes. But the point is that it was only because they felt they had no choice. Below a certain level of reliability Linux/Unix would just be too tempting an alternative for this market segment.
I realize that many
Except that we buy a lot of our stuff from China now. I do tend to agree that China is sort of poised to take over the world or whatever. If they could just give up that whole Communist ideology they could very well be the next economic superpower. Communism is so 1920s.
So much manufacturing is moving to China because they know how to make things cheaply. The cost of living is too high in most Asian countries, most of Europe, and the US/Canada to hire workers cheaply enough to make low cost products profitable.
I don't recall signing some kind of agreement saying that anyone can call me at anytime in order to harass me until I give them money. I believe that crank calls are illegal in my state. Telemarketers are simply a subset of harassing phone calls, but a far more serious one due to their sheer numbers. The amount of unhappiness that they cause cannot be underestimated.
If you would be so kind as to post your home telephone number here on slashdot, I'm sure that quite a few people would be willing to exercise their right to speak with you about this in person. I can't see why you should object since it sounds like you may have the ringer turned off on your phone anyway. Always a good precaution in this world of rude, uncaring folk who believe that their "rights" are so much more important than yours.
I hope you are at least consistent and believe that crank calls and death threats and bomb threats should be perfectly legal as long as they are done over the phone, since you can just turn that ringer off. It's your own fault for answering, right? Freedom of Speech, right?
Unfortunately there is no system in place to electronically block only telemarketers. If there were and the system were free or paid for by the telemarketers, there would be no need for The List.
A law would still be necessary for telemarketers who placed calls without registering for the electronic block list. Either way violators need to be pursued. This method may save a lot of unnecessary expense in terms of development of a new telco blocking system as well as the additional electronics in telephones and caller ID boxes.
The ideal system would be one in which all telemarketers had to sign up for a system for which they would have to pay the TELCO for the priviledge of using their system for advertising. Then, if they pay sufficient fees they would be allowed to register as a legal telemarketer and be allowed to call only the TELCO customers who specifically request the Telemarketing "feature" for their phone. In addition, TELCOs should be allowed to charge the customer for this feature as well. Those who wish to recieve all of those wonderful telephone offers would surely be willing to pay for that privilege.
Who else besides Ron Paul is a Libertarian? Forgive my ignorance.
Wow. I thought I recognized that name. I can't believe he's in congress. In Texas no less. I guess this is one of the few issues I disagree with Libertarians on. In the modern world, a phone number should not be considered public property. Telemarketing is the commercial equivalent of a crank call. It should be illegal, even in a "free" society. Spam and direct mail advertising should be illegal as well.
The first amendment was never intended to protect this kind of privacy invasion. Speech should be legal only where the recipients have the option not to "listen" while on their own property. For instance, no one is forced to buy the Sunday newspaper, of which half, is dead tree advertising. But everyone is forced to check their own mailbox and now internet mail as well. Since a phone is literally inside one's house, it is even more obvious that the recipient is forced to listen.
I actually don't think the do-not-call list goes far enough. Telemarketing, as such, should be illegal even to those who haven't signed up for the List. Also, if code is not considered speech, then this stuff most certainly should not be.