It's normal that a company will be nice to the users who give them the most ammount of money while screwing everybody else.
Personally, I've never been defrauded on ebay and this is how I do it.
Firstly, If its a big purchase (like 500 bucks or more) I tell the seller to send it to me COD but to only specify bank checks, not personal checks. This keeps everybody honest. In all cases, I offer to pay the added expense and have the seller just tack it onto the total cost.
If I'm selling something and the person wants to do it COD, the only way I do it is bank check. I've had people call me up and complain loudly how the person came to the door but wouldn't give them the package because they had a personal check. It's that old saying "Locks keep honest people honest"
Now for smaller things, I'm confortable with paypal, provided that the person is "verified."
I agree as well. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about the BIOS. Microsoft's beef with the modders is that it screws up their revenue stream.
Their okay with losing 100 bucks per Xbox because they intend to make up the difference in all the content you'll buy. As soon as you buy 3 games, they've started making a profit. However, if you mod the thing and install linux on it, they're still out a 100 bucks and you have yourself a cheap linux box. Since Microsoft's internal motto is "Litigate, don't innovate, it's a lot cheaper".
In other posts I've written about this, but it comes down to the same thing. Until Microsoft can start producing an Xbox that they can make a profit from just selling the box, they've got a major uphill battle, because both Sony and Nintendo's apporach is just that. They make it a point of almost never losing money on the production of a console.
Now that you can get 512mb of ram for like 3 dollars I'd love to see a box that has a gig of front end cache with a ultrawide scsi connection out the front of one end and a whole bunch of ide connections out the back. So I could go out and buy a whole bunch of cheap IDE drives and have a superfast interface out the front. As for creating of the raid set, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.
Yeah I could see that happening. As soon as it hit the presses that some company was going to sue Slashdot, that person/entities ISP would call them and say "Dude, were yanking your site, unless you'd like to start paying us 10,000 dollars a second. Also we need you to hire about 50 people to repair all the damage./'ers are going to inflict on our network."
Lilly is to Lousiana what the slasheffect is to Novak's site... When it's all said and done its going to be messy and expensive.
Keeping an in house sysadmin who knows their shit is still cheaper than having sun monitor your whole cluster.
Also, without a sysadmin, there'd be nobody for the engineers to bitch at when 25 all decide to run thermo and verlog sims all at the same time on the cluster...
As long as you have a big room full of really expensive computers, you'll need a goto person who knows what cable goes where and what script does what. Even when you don't have a big room, but everybody's got a super computer at their desk and their all tied into a cluster, you still need someone who arbitrates the whole thing.
(could you imagine the workplace strife if (l)users were allowd to kill each others jobs...)
Actually it could be argued that a manufacturer of a DVD player might turn a blind eye to their product being chipped on the pure notion that It'll sell more boxes. I know personally, I purchased my DVD player because It allows me to play homemade VCD's.
Doom III... Games have always pushed the state of the art. I know more than a couple of people who went out and bought 486-66's just to play Doom. Those same people then turned around and bought Pentium 133's to play Quake... One of my co-workers just built a machine in the anticipation of playing Doom III (128mb video card and all) If I was at Intel (or Nvidia), I'd be discreetly sending people over to ID to help them get done with Doom III and get the damn thing out the door! Then intel and AMD can watch with glee as the whole (take game home/install/runs like shit/upgrade) cycle continues... Another good example of game that's forced alot of people to spring for better hardware is NWN.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe we were all the same things would be different. It's some big cosmic joke, our creators and the natural processes therein find beauty in diversity, but we as a species do not. We hate all that is different and as groups strive to render our species into a physical/spiritual/theological singularity. I wonder where we would be as a world if our urges to dominate and repress were replaced with a willingness to cooperate and celebrate our species diversity. We are all different, but we are all the same. We in a tick of a second on the cosmic clock have changed this world for better and for worse. Where this path will lead us, nodoby knows. What we do know, but dare not contemplate is that we will be our own unmaking. Despite all our technology, our own hatred of each other will consume our minds and energy and waste them on futile fighting while the world slips from beneath our feet. The tragety is that we fight over gifts, given by a roll of the cosmic dice. I hope that as a species we all see the futility and short sightedness of our actions (or the actions of those who don't have the best interest of our species in mind). One day, I hope to build a space ship and leave this land of hatred and bigotry and find a place were people can find harmony.
Too bad it's a bit of a pipe dream, but we can always have hope. Those of the world can steal my freedom, kill my family and poison my water, but they can't take my hope away.
I'm sure Sony lost a little bit of money on the original playstation way back in the day, but they haven't lost a cent on the PS2. Microsoft has been betting on Moore's law as a way to make money eventually on the Xbox. Sony has taken a seperate approache to making money on the PS2, they've continued to refine the PS2 and more tightly integreate all the components so a 4th generation PS2 has about 20% less parts than a 1st gen PS2 but works the same. Here's a good example... The Xbox has an intel cpu and a nvidia gpu. Do you ever think intel and nvidia would ever agree to put these on the same die? The answer would be no. There competitors, they'd have to work too closely and would invariably end up seeing the guts of each others processors. Intel has nothing to fear from nvidia seeing the inside of the P3, but nvidia definity doesn't want intel getting a good look at the gforce core.
Now the PS2 on the other hand has a sony owned cpu and a sony owned gpu. One of the last revisions they've made to the PS2 was to stuff the cpu and gpu on the same die. So sony was able to save a bunch of substrate and move the cpu->gpu bus onto one piece of silicon.
Now imagine that sony was to take every little bit of the PS2 and make one big ass substrate out of it and ended up with a chip that was something the size of 2 p3 cpu's stuck side by side (though I could imagine it would probably be smaller), your PS2 would now become a motherboard with a couple of transistors and ceramic chunk in the middle of it with some leads to all the other bits (dvd drive, usb, etc) and the power supply. Now sony has just shrunken, simplified and improved the reliability of the PS2, while increasing their margins.
That is the kind of competiton that the Xbox has to compete with.
One of the reasons why I like your show so much is that you take the time to go into the science behind the food.
How much atonomy and decision making power do you have in deciding the topics for your shows? Has the food network ever told you that a particular show was a bad idea?
As for your truck carrying troops, its more likely that the first 4 second burst would be used to cut the soldiers in the back of the truck in half. The second 4 second pulse would then be used to cut the truck in half...
I think patton made that quote: "Nobody ever won a war dying for his country! You win the war by making some other damned fool die for his!"
So they want to build a plane that files in atmostphere at mach 5+?
Lets think about the plane that closest fit the bill, the SR-71.
It was capable of mach 3+ and flew at an altitude of ~120,000 ft.
It was made completely out of titanium and the body of the plane got so hot that the pilot had to wear a space suit and couldn't touch the cockpit glass. The plane leaked fuel on the tarmac because it had to be designed with gaps that would close once the frame expanded from the extreme heat. In order to maintain mach 3, it had to run at full afterburners, burning a special fuel that had a super high temperature of ignition. And this was so it could carry 2 guys and a camera.
See the problems I have with this? Now granted, I'm not an airanotical engineer by any stretch of the imagination (or literate for that matter, based on my inability to spell...)
It was hard enough to get a moderately large plane going mach 3, now imagine what kind of energy you'd have to exert to get something the size of a 737 going?
But aren't you doing exactly that? So I use some MS application to rip a cd track into a.WMA file. Now it'll only play on my machine, but if I use the Real media mega player I can play it on other machines. Doesn't that make the Realmedia player a curcumvention device?
I can't wait until I goto work and when I sit down at my chair I slide forward into a "cave" and its a "U" shaped enclosure and my desktop is all around me.
I could apply this to the walls and ceiling of every room in my house.
I can see it now. Someone needs to setup a camera pointed at the sky in a part of the world with no light pollution (middle of the saharia?) and beam the image to a satalite so I could display it on my ceiling!
I could lay on my back and watch TV without sitting up!
I'm very excited about this! (if you couldn't tell!)
I've downloaded and looked at it, but I haven't really brought myself to install it.
I'm sure it's legit through and through, but my Orwellian tendancies flare up when I think about patching the kernel of my machine with something developed by one of the most secretive organizations on the planet, whose primary job is snooping on everybody and everything...
It's really not the place for the goverment to encouraging people to start installing goverment sanctioned patches. If your a goverment agency, that's a different matter. What the goverment should do is lean very hard on those who are providing unsecure software and enviroments.
Here's the problem I have... The Senate and House of represenatives are way too friendly with big business (read: DMCA/SSCEA), this includes the current administration as well... What this means is that I don't trust them to not put all kinds of provisions to entitle them to stomp all over my civil and constitutional rights based on the premise that they're doing the common good... 'cause their not, they're merely ensuring that the current regime keeps it monopolyies.
A terabyte on a single disk is sweet, but I've got a couple of thoughts...
1. Demoed and "We've got readers and writers going on sale next year" are two extremes. Just because you can demo a technology doesn't mean it's mass productable or stable enough.
2. how delicate is the media going to be. I noticed on their website they show the disk in a cd caddy. the last thing I want is a scratch taking 100gigs worth of data with it.
3. 100Mbit/s sucks. I probably did the math wrong but that's like 12.5 Megabytes per second. Just to read a gigabyte is going to take 80 seconds. To read a 50gigabyte file is going to take 67 hours.
Just a few things that I see offhand. Other than that, I think the technology is sweet. I will be much happier when they come out with a solid state terabyte device the size of a postage stamp, but beggers can't be choosers.
They've been building machines that provide 99.999% uptime for something like 20 years.
I've got a lab full of those bastards. Everything is redudant. CPU/memory/powersupplies/ups/disk/network/backplan e you name it
I've had a chance to open the thing up and look inside and its amazing!
My only gripes have ever been that their a bit esoteric at times and their generally behind the technologiy curve a bit, but I think they do it purposely so they know that their putting out a tested product. Nobody wants a machine running the stock market to be on anything but throughly tested hardware. Sort like how all the computer systems on the ISS are only 386 level...
I'm not sure what the internal dynamic of tivo is, but either way I think its cool that they've just turned a blind eye towards the whole thing.
Though I think a couple of things have to be put into context here.
As far as Tivo is concerned, they're not losing out in any way. If someone goes out and buys a tivo with the intent of putting a 120gb drive in it, their stilling getting the inital payout of 300 bucks.
Plus I think by turning a blind eye, they've allowed a "cult of tivo" to grow by getting the reputation of building heavily modifyable units.
I just hope tivo doesn't forsake their userbase in the name of profits...
I took the other approach... I rented the game, played it and liked it. I then went to the store and bought the game because I wanted the game company to keep making good games...
Slashdot Mirror
In other news: 20% of Chinese computers are currently being used as SPAM servers...
As for the virutal items, you could just write something up and then mail it to them...
Ala...
Diablo 2 Account:
Username: Darknight
Password: blahblah
Server: US East
Then have a blurb like "We recommend that you change the password on this account immediately."
It's normal that a company will be nice to the users who give them the most ammount of money while screwing everybody else.
Personally, I've never been defrauded on ebay and this is how I do it.
Firstly, If its a big purchase (like 500 bucks or more) I tell the seller to send it to me COD but to only specify bank checks, not personal checks. This keeps everybody honest. In all cases, I offer to pay the added expense and have the seller just tack it onto the total cost.
If I'm selling something and the person wants to do it COD, the only way I do it is bank check. I've had people call me up and complain loudly how the person came to the door but wouldn't give them the package because they had a personal check. It's that old saying "Locks keep honest people honest"
Now for smaller things, I'm confortable with paypal, provided that the person is "verified."
I agree as well. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about the BIOS. Microsoft's beef with the modders is that it screws up their revenue stream.
Their okay with losing 100 bucks per Xbox because they intend to make up the difference in all the content you'll buy. As soon as you buy 3 games, they've started making a profit. However, if you mod the thing and install linux on it, they're still out a 100 bucks and you have yourself a cheap linux box. Since Microsoft's internal motto is "Litigate, don't innovate, it's a lot cheaper".
In other posts I've written about this, but it comes down to the same thing. Until Microsoft can start producing an Xbox that they can make a profit from just selling the box, they've got a major uphill battle, because both Sony and Nintendo's apporach is just that. They make it a point of almost never losing money on the production of a console.
Now that you can get 512mb of ram for like 3 dollars I'd love to see a box that has a gig of front end cache with a ultrawide scsi connection out the front of one end and a whole bunch of ide connections out the back. So I could go out and buy a whole bunch of cheap IDE drives and have a superfast interface out the front. As for creating of the raid set, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.
Yeah I could see that happening. As soon as it hit the presses that some company was going to sue Slashdot, that person/entities ISP would call them and say "Dude, were yanking your site, unless you'd like to start paying us 10,000 dollars a second. Also we need you to hire about 50 people to repair all the damage ./'ers are going to inflict on our network."
Lilly is to Lousiana what the slasheffect is to Novak's site... When it's all said and done its going to be messy and expensive.
That's a great idea! Now if they could only use something cheaper than a snowboard binding for the foot holder they'd be all set.
Keeping an in house sysadmin who knows their shit is still cheaper than having sun monitor your whole cluster.
Also, without a sysadmin, there'd be nobody for the engineers to bitch at when 25 all decide to run thermo and verlog sims all at the same time on the cluster...
As long as you have a big room full of really expensive computers, you'll need a goto person who knows what cable goes where and what script does what. Even when you don't have a big room, but everybody's got a super computer at their desk and their all tied into a cluster, you still need someone who arbitrates the whole thing.
(could you imagine the workplace strife if (l)users were allowd to kill each others jobs...)
Actually it could be argued that a manufacturer of a DVD player might turn a blind eye to their product being chipped on the pure notion that It'll sell more boxes. I know personally, I purchased my DVD player because It allows me to play homemade VCD's.
Doom III...
Games have always pushed the state of the art. I know more than a couple of people who went out and bought 486-66's just to play Doom. Those same people then turned around and bought Pentium 133's to play Quake...
One of my co-workers just built a machine in the anticipation of playing Doom III (128mb video card and all)
If I was at Intel (or Nvidia), I'd be discreetly sending people over to ID to help them get done with Doom III and get the damn thing out the door!
Then intel and AMD can watch with glee as the whole (take game home/install/runs like shit/upgrade) cycle continues...
Another good example of game that's forced alot of people to spring for better hardware is NWN.
Wearing headphones on the slopes is like driving with headphones. All you'll end up doing is getting someone or yourself hurt.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe we were all the same things would be different. It's some big cosmic joke, our creators and the natural processes therein find beauty in diversity, but we as a species do not. We hate all that is different and as groups strive to render our species into a physical/spiritual/theological singularity. I wonder where we would be as a world if our urges to dominate and repress were replaced with a willingness to cooperate and celebrate our species diversity. We are all different, but we are all the same. We in a tick of a second on the cosmic clock have changed this world for better and for worse. Where this path will lead us, nodoby knows. What we do know, but dare not contemplate is that we will be our own unmaking. Despite all our technology, our own hatred of each other will consume our minds and energy and waste them on futile fighting while the world slips from beneath our feet. The tragety is that we fight over gifts, given by a roll of the cosmic dice. I hope that as a species we all see the futility and short sightedness of our actions (or the actions of those who don't have the best interest of our species in mind). One day, I hope to build a space ship and leave this land of hatred and bigotry and find a place were people can find harmony.
Too bad it's a bit of a pipe dream, but we can always have hope. Those of the world can steal my freedom, kill my family and poison my water, but they can't take my hope away.
I'm sure Sony lost a little bit of money on the original playstation way back in the day, but they haven't lost a cent on the PS2. Microsoft has been betting on Moore's law as a way to make money eventually on the Xbox. Sony has taken a seperate approache to making money on the PS2, they've continued to refine the PS2 and more tightly integreate all the components so a 4th generation PS2 has about 20% less parts than a 1st gen PS2 but works the same. Here's a good example...
The Xbox has an intel cpu and a nvidia gpu. Do you ever think intel and nvidia would ever agree to put these on the same die? The answer would be no. There competitors, they'd have to work too closely and would invariably end up seeing the guts of each others processors. Intel has nothing to fear from nvidia seeing the inside of the P3, but nvidia definity doesn't want intel getting a good look at the gforce core.
Now the PS2 on the other hand has a sony owned cpu and a sony owned gpu. One of the last revisions they've made to the PS2 was to stuff the cpu and gpu on the same die. So sony was able to save a bunch of substrate and move the cpu->gpu bus onto one piece of silicon.
Now imagine that sony was to take every little bit of the PS2 and make one big ass substrate out of it and ended up with a chip that was something the size of 2 p3 cpu's stuck side by side (though I could imagine it would probably be smaller), your PS2 would now become a motherboard with a couple of transistors and ceramic chunk in the middle of it with some leads to all the other bits (dvd drive, usb, etc) and the power supply. Now sony has just shrunken, simplified and improved the reliability of the PS2, while increasing their margins.
That is the kind of competiton that the Xbox has to compete with.
I think the difference was that NASA was designing a scramjet that actually did something, like carry a payload, not just work.
Building a rocket to test a theory and building a lifting craft to lift a 1000kg load into orbit are two different problems.
The theories of scramjet technology have been throughly explored in wind tunnels, they didn't need to strap the thing to a rocket to test that.
One of the reasons why I like your show so much is that you take the time to go into the science behind the food.
How much atonomy and decision making power do you have in deciding the topics for your shows? Has the food network ever told you that a particular show was a bad idea?
Keep up the great work!
As for your truck carrying troops, its more likely that the first 4 second burst would be used to cut the soldiers in the back of the truck in half. The second 4 second pulse would then be used to cut the truck in half...
I think patton made that quote: "Nobody ever won a war dying for his country! You win the war by making some other damned fool die for his!"
So they want to build a plane that files in atmostphere at mach 5+?
Lets think about the plane that closest fit the bill, the SR-71.
It was capable of mach 3+ and flew at an altitude of ~120,000 ft.
It was made completely out of titanium and the body of the plane got so hot that the pilot had to wear a space suit and couldn't touch the cockpit glass. The plane leaked fuel on the tarmac because it had to be designed with gaps that would close once the frame expanded from the extreme heat. In order to maintain mach 3, it had to run at full afterburners, burning a special fuel that had a super high temperature of ignition. And this was so it could carry 2 guys and a camera.
See the problems I have with this? Now granted, I'm not an airanotical engineer by any stretch of the imagination (or literate for that matter, based on my inability to spell...)
It was hard enough to get a moderately large plane going mach 3, now imagine what kind of energy you'd have to exert to get something the size of a 737 going?
Just my thoughts...
But aren't you doing exactly that? So I use some MS application to rip a cd track into a .WMA file. Now it'll only play on my machine, but if I use the Real media mega player I can play it on other machines. Doesn't that make the Realmedia player a curcumvention device?
Or am I missing something?
I can't wait until I goto work and when I sit down at my chair I slide forward into a "cave" and its a "U" shaped enclosure and my desktop is all around me.
I could apply this to the walls and ceiling of every room in my house.
I can see it now. Someone needs to setup a camera pointed at the sky in a part of the world with no light pollution (middle of the saharia?) and beam the image to a satalite so I could display it on my ceiling!
I could lay on my back and watch TV without sitting up!
I'm very excited about this! (if you couldn't tell!)
I've downloaded and looked at it, but I haven't really brought myself to install it.
I'm sure it's legit through and through, but my Orwellian tendancies flare up when I think about patching the kernel of my machine with something developed by one of the most secretive organizations on the planet, whose primary job is snooping on everybody and everything...
It's really not the place for the goverment to encouraging people to start installing goverment sanctioned patches. If your a goverment agency, that's a different matter. What the goverment should do is lean very hard on those who are providing unsecure software and enviroments.
Here's the problem I have...
The Senate and House of represenatives are way too friendly with big business (read: DMCA/SSCEA), this includes the current administration as well... What this means is that I don't trust them to not put all kinds of provisions to entitle them to stomp all over my civil and constitutional rights based on the premise that they're doing the common good... 'cause their not, they're merely ensuring that the current regime keeps it monopolyies.
A terabyte on a single disk is sweet, but I've got a couple of thoughts...
1. Demoed and "We've got readers and writers going on sale next year" are two extremes. Just because you can demo a technology doesn't mean it's mass productable or stable enough.
2. how delicate is the media going to be. I noticed on their website they show the disk in a cd caddy. the last thing I want is a scratch taking 100gigs worth of data with it.
3. 100Mbit/s sucks. I probably did the math wrong but that's like 12.5 Megabytes per second. Just to read a gigabyte is going to take 80 seconds. To read a 50gigabyte file is going to take 67 hours.
Just a few things that I see offhand. Other than that, I think the technology is sweet. I will be much happier when they come out with a solid state terabyte device the size of a postage stamp, but beggers can't be choosers.
They've been building machines that provide 99.999% uptime for something like 20 years.
n e you name it
I've got a lab full of those bastards. Everything is redudant. CPU/memory/powersupplies/ups/disk/network/backpla
I've had a chance to open the thing up and look inside and its amazing!
My only gripes have ever been that their a bit esoteric at times and their generally behind the technologiy curve a bit, but I think they do it purposely so they know that their putting out a tested product. Nobody wants a machine running the stock market to be on anything but throughly tested hardware. Sort like how all the computer systems on the ISS are only 386 level...
I'm not sure what the internal dynamic of tivo is, but either way I think its cool that they've just turned a blind eye towards the whole thing.
Though I think a couple of things have to be put into context here.
As far as Tivo is concerned, they're not losing out in any way. If someone goes out and buys a tivo with the intent of putting a 120gb drive in it, their stilling getting the inital payout of 300 bucks.
Plus I think by turning a blind eye, they've allowed a "cult of tivo" to grow by getting the reputation of building heavily modifyable units.
I just hope tivo doesn't forsake their userbase in the name of profits...
I took the other approach... I rented the game, played it and liked it. I then went to the store and bought the game because I wanted the game company to keep making good games...
If it gets kids into physical activity, I'm cool with it.