Would this be the one off of I-17 around Thunderbird or the one off of I-10 at Baseline?
For the record, most of the problems, including the RAM fiasco, were at the I-10 location simply because I lived within 3 minutes of it.
Since moving, both locations are about the same distance.
The three return policy was confessed to me by store reps at each location. Each told me in a kind of "hush-hush" tone because I was recognized from multiple trips the same day and visibly frustrated. I recently confirmed it with a friend who used to work there.
It's interesting you mention getting the wrong item, as well. I had an issue at the I-10 location where I purchased two IBM DeskStar 40-Gig drives to use in a RAID array. They recorded the serial numbers on the bag on the invoice. When I got home and installed the drives, however, they were 9-Gig drives. It was in interesting experience getting those returned; the return-clerk kept insisting that since I okayed the serial numbers, I couldn't exchange them for the correct drives because it was "my fault" that they gave me the wrong drives.
To Fry's credit, the manager took care of the problem immediately without making me wait in line and such and also dressed down the clerk, explaining to him that, in the future, any time a customer asks to see a manager and is refused, he will be fired with extreme prejudice.
Having made hundreds of trips to Fry's Electronics over the past 5 years or so, I'd have to say that my experience has been anything but pleasant.
First off, there's the cattle-car check-out procedure that, ironically, Best Buy has seemed to institute. With the exception of the Christmas season, I've yet to enter the check-out queue with fewer than 15 people in the line and more than two clerks working the registers.
I can live with that, but I can't live with the return rate. The defect rate that I've experienced with Fry's is about 8 in 10 items. I've had to return numerous products numerous times just to get everything I purchased to work. And the returns are always preceded by the clerk looking up my history in the computer and noting, "You sure have returned a lot of products..." We then engage in 30 minutes of protestation, where I finally convince the clerk to look at my purchase history and correlate them to the return history, and the items returned always match with the original item or the purchase of a better product after 3 or 4 returns.
Then there's the product defect screening they institute. As an example, I purchased some SDRAM a few years back, brought it home and installed into my machine. The power supply wouldn't turn on, so I took the RAM stick out and everything worked fine. Upon further examination of the RAM, the center alignment slot seemed a bit rough an chunky, with a cut copper pad at the top of the notch. Some investigation turned up that the RAM was Macintosh RAM missold to a person who must have notched the RAM to make it fit. When I returned it, the sales clerk nodded, smiled, and immediately took the defective item back to the cage and reinserted it into the RAM bin. An item must be returned 3 times before it's pulled from inventory, it was explained.
I haven't been to Fry's in well over a year now, and I don't think I ever plan on going back. It costs me way too much money in lost time dealing with their idocy.
This idea sounds a lot like A Land Far Away for Neverwinter Nights. Except for the pay-for-play, of course.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to take something like DAoC or EQ, license the engine and server platforms, and set up something similar to this.
I recently moved to Gentoo and did the full recompile of KDE 3.2 when I did it. I had moved from Fedora.
Imagine my surprise when the TwinView stuff suddenly quit working and all of my windows suddenly wanted to maximize across all of the monitors.
Has anybody had any luck with 3.3 and the TwinView extensions? It looks from the nVidia docs like TwinView responds to the Xinerama queries, but KDE didn't seem to respond to them correctly. It did work under Fedora, and Gnome has no problems with Xinerama at all.
So let's say the stores tack on 100% or 50% or the game wholesale cost. That would mean that the distribution house is selling the games wholesale at (100%): $20 - $30 per game or (100%): $10 - $15 per game to the stores.
The company I work for is currently looking into selling console games to the masses and we've been in contact with various distribution channels recently. From what I'm hearing from the distributors, the above statement isn't true.
The weird thing is, no matter who we talk to, the best price we can get for something like, say, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is $1.00 below the suggested retail price. I've been told by our contacts that everybody gets roughly the same price breaks and that the best we'll ever be able to do is two or three dollars below MSRP.
I have no idea where Best Buy, CompUSA, Walmart and all the others who sell games are getting their product. I've been told in various contacts that there is no dealing with publishers unless you're a game distributor, so it appears that a direct deal between Best Buy and, say, Activision isn't what's at play here.
If the large-chain retailers can get price breaks of only $3.00 per copy from these guys, I have to wonder if they're keeping games as a loss leader.
Of course, I've got to wonder if somebody's blowing smoke up my ass regarding the whole supply chain for video games.
The math is mostly sound, but you're a little low in estimation of the production cost. You have to figure overhead into the cost of goods sold. Office rent, utilities, hardware costs, Worker's Comp insurance, company-paid portions of Social Security and other stuff like that inflates your cost to a company a bit. Based on my department, a $70,000 per year employee without health benefits costs the company an additional $20,000 in overhead expenses.
You also need to factor in things like lawyers and licensing. Neither is cheap, and licensing hits in funky places. Look at video formats, for example. You're going to need a lawyer just to work out the contract details for including BIK video codec stuff. BIK wants prominent placement in your product, via a splash video, and the laywers have to argue about the order in the start up animations, if it uses sound, whether or not the user can click through it, etc.
It's clear from the price that somebody's making a killing off of video games, but I'm not really sure where it's going.
Would you sell a product to a customer who came to you and said: "Hey, I like your products. Especially that OSPF thing. I think I'll let my network respond to OSPF packets from anywhere instead of just internal, well-trusted sources"?
As has been pointed out numerous times in the discussion here, if you haven't got OSPF filtered out right after the telco line, you've got bigger issues than a Cisco bug.
My mind thought "cryptographic hash" and immediately assigned the same types of cryptographic problems to them.
You can see my mind was more on the beer than the actual topic, as I used PHP in place of PGP, and didn't stop to think about the nicety of MD5 being, effectively, a one way methodology for password encryption.
Beer was good, my lack of extrapolation bad. Thanks for the correction.
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a cryptographer and I've got about 30 seconds until a beer meeting, so I don't have time to do a Google for it.
In a word, no.
When PHP was brand new, I remember reading an article talking about using multiple crypto systems on the same data. Depending on the systems used, it could actually make the encrypted file much less secure.
It's not a definite bad thing to do, but from what I remember, cryptographers generally avoid it because computing which systems are safe with each other is a pain.
The argument, itself, is inconsistent. Apples to apples, please.
There are laws governing what may be done with people convicted of a crime, and what may be done with people suspected of committing a crime. These are two entirely different situations.
Those who are suspected are just that, suspected. If you have not been proven guilty, you have no conviction. Punnishments for those who have been convicted cannot apply to those who are just suspected. This is the reason why various law enforcement agencies cannot go up to a suspected murderer and just shoot him.
In dealing with those convicted, you have sentences ranging from fines to death, depending upon the perceived severity of the crime an individual was convicted of. The operative word being convicted.
If I remember correctly, the restriction of the cameras is a civil matter, while the execution of convicts is a criminal or Federal civil rights matter.
When comparing laws and complaining about "inconsistent" actions between them, please deal with the same system. I would never want a system of civil justice to be consistent with criminal justice. For example, I should not go to jail for having an auto accident as long as I broke no criminal laws in having the accident. A good comparison of like laws might be life sentences for some drug dealers as opposed to 4-9 years for manslaughter.
Having read all the other Richard Morgan books, may I recommend that if you intend reading "Broken Angels" that you first pick up "Altered Carbon" (another Takeshi Kovacs novel set about 30 years [I think] before Broken Angels) and read that first.
Good to know. That's the way I normally work with books in a loose series about the central character.
I find it kind of annoying to read a book and miss all of the references to similar situations in prior books.
Thanks for the info; I'm hitting Borders tonight to pick them up!
for example, check out peter f. hamilton's "reality dysfunction" series.
I've read this one almost as many times as Ender's Game.:)
I think I drew the correlation to Hyperion because I finished reading the series a couple of days ago. It's been at least a month since I've read the Reality Dysfunction series.
Man, this thread went wild! I was hoping for some more reading material, but the responses have supplied far more than I ever though I'd get.
I didn't mean to imply a "rip". More like a story with some similar themes.
From what everybody's saying, the only similarity is humans who can "live" a really long time; one via actual resurrection, the other via memory download.
It seems like most people liked the book, so I'll have to go and pick up a copy.
I also like how lots of little details and seemingly meaningless things get pulled together at the end of both series to explain the ending.
Cool. That's one of the things I liked most about the Hyperion series. Although, having to read through the second book to appreciate the first was a bit of a drag.
Good to know. I tend to like stories that get into a bit of religion, pointing out the discrepancies between theological and actual actions.
Thanks for the info.
Re:Sounds Like...
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
After reading Hyperion, I had a similar impression. I liked the writing, but felt that the ending was a bit rushed for my taste. It was good reading, but nothing spectacular, I thought. I had bought all four books (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endimion, and Rise of Endimion), so I decided to continue and read the rest of the series.
I'm glad I did.
Hyperion, to me, seems to be more along the lines of The Real Story by Stephen R. Donaldson; it's kind of a set up for the entire cycle of books, rather than a stand-alone novel. While it does stand on its own, it does so more as a collection of similarly themed stories like I Robot.
The Fall of Hyperion finishes up the entire Hyperion tale and begins to explain a little of the Shrike mythology. As much as it wraps the Hyperion story up, it leaves tons of questions about what, exactly, is going on. Not so much that you're dissatisfied as a reader, but enough to make you wanting just a bit more.
Enter Endimion and Rise of Endimion, set 247 years after The Fall of Hyperion. These stories, in concert, wrap up every single loose end left over from Hyperion and leaves only one unanswered question in the last paragraph.
Of all the Sci-Fi I've read, I've never read a story that used time travel so effectively.
Sounds Like...
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The whole "cortical stack" thing sounds like the Endimion portion of Dan Simmons' "Hyperion/Endimion" cycle of books. Although, from the sounds of it, this doesn't go off on the same religious bent.
Does anybody who's read Simmons' stuff and the reviews book care to comment? If you liked Hyperion and liked the reviewed books as well, was it because of similarities?
It took a while, but following many insightful letters, they finally admitted that electronic voting as currently proposed in Alameda had the more serious potential to disenfranchise everyone!
Whoa... You got somebody in Berkeley to change their views from an alarmist, "they're out to get us" view to something that actually matches the facts? And you did this by factual means?
Yes, after all katieT.com is a great catchy memorable name that is easy to pronounce and will make the book fly off the shelves faster than the complementary magnifying glasses the bookstore will have to offer in order to convince people they are not going blind.
Allow me to clarify, I guess...
What the hell happened to caring that actions performed might have an impact on somebody else? I mean, this wasn't exactly and unforseen conflict. The only thought process I can imagine from KT is this: "Well, I don't own the domain name, but once the book is released and becomes popular, the owner will either be so inconvenienced by the attention or we'll take her to court and force the name to be turned over."
That's what I don't understand, I guess. That mindset is just so foreign to me, I just can't comprehend how people can think that way. Does anybody approach any subject an more without the "I want it, fuck everybody else" attitude?
The author of the book has her own "vanity" domain name, katieT.com. Why the hell wouldn't you just use this for the title instead of dragging somebody else through all of this crap.
"Today SCO CCBE (Chief CryBaby Executive) announced that Lindon, Utah based SCO Group has discovered a butload of emails that ammount to a smoking gun in their fight against the libelous actions of Linuxdom."
I don't think anybody would be impressed by a "butload" of emails. Common usage suggests that a buttload is in between 3 and a dozen.
Clearly, impressive levels would be more in the "metric fuck ton" range.
While reading the article, two phrases struck me: a research group is prepared to list 283 patents violated by Linux; and half of all patents are defeated in courts. (I believe the latter is half of all challenged patents.)
Would it be difficult for an organization, say the EFF or the GNU foundation, to set up a specific fund for collecting donations to be used only to defend patent law suits?
Imagine the war chest available if half of the Linux users donated $10 to this fund... And it'd be tax deductable in the States, too!
Slashdot Mirror
Talk about ironic... Exactly the stores I go to.
Would this be the one off of I-17 around Thunderbird or the one off of I-10 at Baseline?
For the record, most of the problems, including the RAM fiasco, were at the I-10 location simply because I lived within 3 minutes of it.
Since moving, both locations are about the same distance.
The three return policy was confessed to me by store reps at each location. Each told me in a kind of "hush-hush" tone because I was recognized from multiple trips the same day and visibly frustrated. I recently confirmed it with a friend who used to work there.
It's interesting you mention getting the wrong item, as well. I had an issue at the I-10 location where I purchased two IBM DeskStar 40-Gig drives to use in a RAID array. They recorded the serial numbers on the bag on the invoice. When I got home and installed the drives, however, they were 9-Gig drives. It was in interesting experience getting those returned; the return-clerk kept insisting that since I okayed the serial numbers, I couldn't exchange them for the correct drives because it was "my fault" that they gave me the wrong drives.
To Fry's credit, the manager took care of the problem immediately without making me wait in line and such and also dressed down the clerk, explaining to him that, in the future, any time a customer asks to see a manager and is refused, he will be fired with extreme prejudice.
I wish I could say the same...
Having made hundreds of trips to Fry's Electronics over the past 5 years or so, I'd have to say that my experience has been anything but pleasant.
First off, there's the cattle-car check-out procedure that, ironically, Best Buy has seemed to institute. With the exception of the Christmas season, I've yet to enter the check-out queue with fewer than 15 people in the line and more than two clerks working the registers.
I can live with that, but I can't live with the return rate. The defect rate that I've experienced with Fry's is about 8 in 10 items. I've had to return numerous products numerous times just to get everything I purchased to work. And the returns are always preceded by the clerk looking up my history in the computer and noting, "You sure have returned a lot of products..." We then engage in 30 minutes of protestation, where I finally convince the clerk to look at my purchase history and correlate them to the return history, and the items returned always match with the original item or the purchase of a better product after 3 or 4 returns.
Then there's the product defect screening they institute. As an example, I purchased some SDRAM a few years back, brought it home and installed into my machine. The power supply wouldn't turn on, so I took the RAM stick out and everything worked fine. Upon further examination of the RAM, the center alignment slot seemed a bit rough an chunky, with a cut copper pad at the top of the notch. Some investigation turned up that the RAM was Macintosh RAM missold to a person who must have notched the RAM to make it fit. When I returned it, the sales clerk nodded, smiled, and immediately took the defective item back to the cage and reinserted it into the RAM bin. An item must be returned 3 times before it's pulled from inventory, it was explained.
I haven't been to Fry's in well over a year now, and I don't think I ever plan on going back. It costs me way too much money in lost time dealing with their idocy.
This idea sounds a lot like A Land Far Away for Neverwinter Nights. Except for the pay-for-play, of course.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to take something like DAoC or EQ, license the engine and server platforms, and set up something similar to this.
I recently moved to Gentoo and did the full recompile of KDE 3.2 when I did it. I had moved from Fedora.
Imagine my surprise when the TwinView stuff suddenly quit working and all of my windows suddenly wanted to maximize across all of the monitors.
Has anybody had any luck with 3.3 and the TwinView extensions? It looks from the nVidia docs like TwinView responds to the Xinerama queries, but KDE didn't seem to respond to them correctly. It did work under Fedora, and Gnome has no problems with Xinerama at all.
The company I work for is currently looking into selling console games to the masses and we've been in contact with various distribution channels recently. From what I'm hearing from the distributors, the above statement isn't true.
The weird thing is, no matter who we talk to, the best price we can get for something like, say, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is $1.00 below the suggested retail price. I've been told by our contacts that everybody gets roughly the same price breaks and that the best we'll ever be able to do is two or three dollars below MSRP.
I have no idea where Best Buy, CompUSA, Walmart and all the others who sell games are getting their product. I've been told in various contacts that there is no dealing with publishers unless you're a game distributor, so it appears that a direct deal between Best Buy and, say, Activision isn't what's at play here.
If the large-chain retailers can get price breaks of only $3.00 per copy from these guys, I have to wonder if they're keeping games as a loss leader.
Of course, I've got to wonder if somebody's blowing smoke up my ass regarding the whole supply chain for video games.
The math is mostly sound, but you're a little low in estimation of the production cost. You have to figure overhead into the cost of goods sold. Office rent, utilities, hardware costs, Worker's Comp insurance, company-paid portions of Social Security and other stuff like that inflates your cost to a company a bit. Based on my department, a $70,000 per year employee without health benefits costs the company an additional $20,000 in overhead expenses.
You also need to factor in things like lawyers and licensing. Neither is cheap, and licensing hits in funky places. Look at video formats, for example. You're going to need a lawyer just to work out the contract details for including BIK video codec stuff. BIK wants prominent placement in your product, via a splash video, and the laywers have to argue about the order in the start up animations, if it uses sound, whether or not the user can click through it, etc.
It's clear from the price that somebody's making a killing off of video games, but I'm not really sure where it's going.
Would you sell a product to a customer who came to you and said: "Hey, I like your products. Especially that OSPF thing. I think I'll let my network respond to OSPF packets from anywhere instead of just internal, well-trusted sources"?
As has been pointed out numerous times in the discussion here, if you haven't got OSPF filtered out right after the telco line, you've got bigger issues than a Cisco bug.
Ahhh, Ok...
My mind thought "cryptographic hash" and immediately assigned the same types of cryptographic problems to them.
You can see my mind was more on the beer than the actual topic, as I used PHP in place of PGP, and didn't stop to think about the nicety of MD5 being, effectively, a one way methodology for password encryption.
Beer was good, my lack of extrapolation bad. Thanks for the correction.
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a cryptographer and I've got about 30 seconds until a beer meeting, so I don't have time to do a Google for it.
In a word, no.
When PHP was brand new, I remember reading an article talking about using multiple crypto systems on the same data. Depending on the systems used, it could actually make the encrypted file much less secure.
It's not a definite bad thing to do, but from what I remember, cryptographers generally avoid it because computing which systems are safe with each other is a pain.
The argument, itself, is inconsistent. Apples to apples, please.
There are laws governing what may be done with people convicted of a crime, and what may be done with people suspected of committing a crime. These are two entirely different situations.
Those who are suspected are just that, suspected. If you have not been proven guilty, you have no conviction. Punnishments for those who have been convicted cannot apply to those who are just suspected. This is the reason why various law enforcement agencies cannot go up to a suspected murderer and just shoot him.
In dealing with those convicted, you have sentences ranging from fines to death, depending upon the perceived severity of the crime an individual was convicted of. The operative word being convicted.
If I remember correctly, the restriction of the cameras is a civil matter, while the execution of convicts is a criminal or Federal civil rights matter.
When comparing laws and complaining about "inconsistent" actions between them, please deal with the same system. I would never want a system of civil justice to be consistent with criminal justice. For example, I should not go to jail for having an auto accident as long as I broke no criminal laws in having the accident. A good comparison of like laws might be life sentences for some drug dealers as opposed to 4-9 years for manslaughter.
Good to know. That's the way I normally work with books in a loose series about the central character.
I find it kind of annoying to read a book and miss all of the references to similar situations in prior books.
Thanks for the info; I'm hitting Borders tonight to pick them up!
I've read this one almost as many times as Ender's Game. :)
I think I drew the correlation to Hyperion because I finished reading the series a couple of days ago. It's been at least a month since I've read the Reality Dysfunction series.
Man, this thread went wild! I was hoping for some more reading material, but the responses have supplied far more than I ever though I'd get.
I didn't mean to imply a "rip". More like a story with some similar themes.
From what everybody's saying, the only similarity is humans who can "live" a really long time; one via actual resurrection, the other via memory download.
It seems like most people liked the book, so I'll have to go and pick up a copy.
Cool. That's one of the things I liked most about the Hyperion series. Although, having to read through the second book to appreciate the first was a bit of a drag.
Good to know. I tend to like stories that get into a bit of religion, pointing out the discrepancies between theological and actual actions.
Thanks for the info.
After reading Hyperion, I had a similar impression. I liked the writing, but felt that the ending was a bit rushed for my taste. It was good reading, but nothing spectacular, I thought. I had bought all four books (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endimion, and Rise of Endimion), so I decided to continue and read the rest of the series.
I'm glad I did.
Hyperion, to me, seems to be more along the lines of The Real Story by Stephen R. Donaldson; it's kind of a set up for the entire cycle of books, rather than a stand-alone novel. While it does stand on its own, it does so more as a collection of similarly themed stories like I Robot.
The Fall of Hyperion finishes up the entire Hyperion tale and begins to explain a little of the Shrike mythology. As much as it wraps the Hyperion story up, it leaves tons of questions about what, exactly, is going on. Not so much that you're dissatisfied as a reader, but enough to make you wanting just a bit more.
Enter Endimion and Rise of Endimion, set 247 years after The Fall of Hyperion. These stories, in concert, wrap up every single loose end left over from Hyperion and leaves only one unanswered question in the last paragraph.
Of all the Sci-Fi I've read, I've never read a story that used time travel so effectively.
The whole "cortical stack" thing sounds like the Endimion portion of Dan Simmons' "Hyperion/Endimion" cycle of books. Although, from the sounds of it, this doesn't go off on the same religious bent.
Does anybody who's read Simmons' stuff and the reviews book care to comment? If you liked Hyperion and liked the reviewed books as well, was it because of similarities?
Whoa... You got somebody in Berkeley to change their views from an alarmist, "they're out to get us" view to something that actually matches the facts? And you did this by factual means?
Maybe there's hope after all...
;)
Allow me to clarify, I guess...
What the hell happened to caring that actions performed might have an impact on somebody else? I mean, this wasn't exactly and unforseen conflict. The only thought process I can imagine from KT is this: "Well, I don't own the domain name, but once the book is released and becomes popular, the owner will either be so inconvenienced by the attention or we'll take her to court and force the name to be turned over."
That's what I don't understand, I guess. That mindset is just so foreign to me, I just can't comprehend how people can think that way. Does anybody approach any subject an more without the "I want it, fuck everybody else" attitude?
The author of the book has her own "vanity" domain name, katieT.com. Why the hell wouldn't you just use this for the title instead of dragging somebody else through all of this crap.
I don't think anybody would be impressed by a "butload" of emails. Common usage suggests that a buttload is in between 3 and a dozen.
Clearly, impressive levels would be more in the "metric fuck ton" range.
God, I need sleep.
Two trademark violations in one name!
That's gotta be a record!
I was just hoping some of the users of sites like, say, Slashdot would put their money where their mouth is.
I guess I enough righteous indignation around here to hope for a little follow-thorugh.
Sorry if my fucking ideas fucking pissed you off.
Almost. I think there are still uses for patents, however I believe that the patenting of software, algorythms in particular, is rediculous.
I was hoping for something that would watch for a more narrowly focused group, but this one will do.
Thanks for the link. My check will be in the mail tomorrow.
While reading the article, two phrases struck me: a research group is prepared to list 283 patents violated by Linux; and half of all patents are defeated in courts. (I believe the latter is half of all challenged patents.)
Would it be difficult for an organization, say the EFF or the GNU foundation, to set up a specific fund for collecting donations to be used only to defend patent law suits?
Imagine the war chest available if half of the Linux users donated $10 to this fund... And it'd be tax deductable in the States, too!
Perhaps a replacement keyboard to take care of that little R problem in lieu of nutsack-ink-art?