There are no cyber security experts on the panel because nobody owed any favors to any cyber security experts that could have been called in to get an appointment to the board. The skill set of the candidates in question never came into play.
Having just re-read Ready Player One not too long ago, I began to take stock of the things that I could see developing in the not-distant future of the ever-present online society and then comparing them to their OASIS counter-parts. Every now and again you see something as ridiculous as this, and you realize that if the technology was just that little tiny bit better, it wouldn't be science fiction after that.
I think the point here isn't that there's a drive or manufacturer out there that doesn't fail. The point here is that with such a huge sample range, you can make somewhat useful trends and comparisons between failure rates on a macro scale that no standard user would be able to do themselves. If you look at 56,000 disks and see that Seagate accounts for a larger percentage of drives and lower equivalent failure rate among manufacturers, you can *generally* expect that buying a drive of an equivalent model as compared and evaluated here will have *on average* a better reliability rate than a comparative drive shown to have a worse value in this study.
None of this absolves you of responsibility to your data, but it gives you a guideline toward making your data storage medium as reliable as possible.
Oracle already intentionally supports the concept of multiple versions by allowing Static installations; when an installation is flagged as Static, it is installed separately, using the full build version number as the folder name rather than the major version only (i.e. jre_1.7.25 rather than jre7), Doing this allows you to call multiple different versions of Java independently, based on your needs. However, if I just run the installer as-is, it does an in-place swap of the version; if I go from a standard install of Java 1.7.25 (installed to a folder called jre7) to a standard install of 1.7.55, it just empties the jre7 folder and installs Patch 55 in the same place. The existing installer already removes non-Static versions now, so if they're going to start forcing more removals of older versions, I can only assume that means it will remove even Static installations.
This Static removal policy needs to be a command-line toggle that I can prevent. My company utilizes Java as a cross-platform development engine to run one of our major products on. Each version of our software is tied to a specific version of Java, and as such, engineers end up having multiple versions of Java installed to support each version of our software. Because of this, we're always installing newer versions of Java while not wanting to remove the older versions.
The thing is, he really isn't that annoying in the original trilogy. He's hapless and completely pessimistic, but he's not that annoying. In the prequels, however, he's gone to complete bumbling stupidity and slapstick humor at his expense, sometimes to the ridiculously improbable level.
Look at ESB; Luke and Han are missing, and Threepio stupidly tells Leia how long the odds are. Afterward, he realizes what he did, and he super-awkwardly tries to apologize to her to make her feel better. He understands how big a mistake he made, and in a completely droid-like way, tries to fix it.
In AotC, on the other hand, he's literally chopped up in a cartoon-like fashion and reassembled with different body parts and accidentally participates in the battle, all the while telling snarky bad jokes. There's no deeper layer of subtle understanding; he's just gone from the pessimistic character to the comic relief.
"Those people [who post abuse online] think they can sit in the comfort of their homes and do whatever they want on the internet. We don't let that happen. They can't hide from us, we will find them."
So the idea is that you're going to find them, and then post their picture and their message near to them so that they and everyone else can see what a tool that person is. Except you're going to obscure the picture and hide the name so that nobody knows who did it except the original author. Basically, you're just publishing this person's hate mail on the wall like a poster, and letting them see their work writ large.
As long as the Arctic Expedition commander isn't an ancestor of Adelaide Brooke, we should be fine. If that turns out to be the case, better hope the TARDIS shows up.
Either way, just to be safe, nobody drinks the water or runs irrigation with it. K?
Look at today. How many different electronic book formats are there? Ten years from now, how many e-book readers will read these same formats, and how many new ones will there be? A hundred years from now, you'll have even more formats growing at that same progression rate until either a radical shift in information storage occurs, or the system becomes overloaded. Today, many people devote time and energy to maintaining these formats or helping convert them from older to newer, but the center cannot hold; eventually, information will be lost.
Roger MacBride Allen has an interesting time travel series called The Chronicles of Solace that briefly touches on a similar issue to this; archiving historians struggle to contain the ever-growing wealth of data that humanity generates. Specifically, they attempted to copy and duplicate all written and electronic material in a readable format for use in the Grand Library, but constantly struggle with the task that the 'standard' access method changes rapidly every few years. Not only do they have to create a format for storage that can survive ever-growing changes, but it must also contain built-in equipment that can be reverse-engineered and re-used after a potential interplanetary disaster removes all human knowledge of the technology. Their current solution? Printed books. Billions of them.
Or, you know, so that they don't get five thousand uber-gamers all testing with the same general hardware range and then end up discovering at release day that anyone not running an i7 over FIOS is unable to play. You know, the other 90% of their target audience. Please tell me that you're not in any way related to QA in anything that you've ever done in your life.
I'm not really sure to what you're referring on the second half of your post. Mention is made repeatedly of the fact that data bursts take time to execute, and that most of the information being relayed back and forth is small; tactical positions, status updates, small personal messages, etc. All of these could be done with a single Ad-Hoc wifi connection in our day and age, with our tech.
The power requirements for the brain pal were handled internally by the device itself. In other words, it had a battery. Perhaps one that could be charged off the body's own internal energy sources? Remember, these bodies were basically designed to be the ultimate combat chassis, and so the fact that the body's own internal electrical field could be used to do something like that...not a big deal.
Finally, in The Last Colony, a huge deal is made of the fact that the enemy *can* intercept electronic transmissions, to the point that not a single colonist on the planet is allowed to have a BrainPal active, even the military personnel, unless they're in a specially shielded bunker. In fact, nobody is allowed to have any form of electronic technology that could so much as broadcast a byte of data, because it could be picked up *across the solar system* by an enemy ship.
I used to work there. It's a phased withdrawl of rebates, just like Office Depot is probably doing. When they announced the incentive, Gateway instantly hopped onboard and all Gateway mail-in rebates disappeared. This allowed them to claim a "first step" toward the removal of rebates. As time has passed, they have discontinued more and more mailed rebates, but some remain. I suspect you will see the final removal near the end of their target time of 2 years. Rebates themselves are the retail version of sale items, so they will continue on in the instant-savings form, for quite some time.
Ah, marketing at its finest. This isn't even really news. Most major retailers have been very quietly phasing out mail in rebates for months, if not years. It's in the freaking article, if you read it. People are saying " should do this too", and if you look, they probably already have.
As it says, Best Buy did this over a year ago, they just don't have all the manufacturers on board yet. If you look in their computer department, most laptops have discontinued mail in rebates, and are either instant or normal price. Circuit City has the same thing, in almost the same way. Many of their home office electronics manufacturers are instant-rebate only now.
If you read the article, it just states that "Beginning this Weekend" they'll start to phase the rebates out. It doesn't specify when they'll end, or exactly what will be phased out first. Best Buy made this exact same announcement in 2005.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but people should try actually reading what's posted now and then. Then again, this is Slashdot, so what am I thinking?
This article is so blatantly uninformed as to actual information that it's easy to see why the trolls attack Best Buy so badly. You have to realize a few major things here, and doing so will help you understand that things aren't quite as Demon/Angel as the article makes them out to be. First off, this "profiling" BB is being accused of, is crap. They're tailoring stores and associates to the area around them, not to specific customers. In Atlanta, we have a number of stores, one of which is being converted to the 'Barry' type listed in the article. Specifically, it's being converted because the store itself is situated in a high-income area, and the store itself has shown a history of large dollar value transactions. Now, when you come in the door at a BB, you don't go through a profiling process to see whether we should try and sell you products or not. When I work the sales floor, I'm as willing to spend time explaining a technology the customer has no interest in buying that day, as I am spending time selling a product to a customer willing to buy. I'm going to ask you questions, yes, but it's more for me to figure out what you're looking for than it is for me to 'pigeonhole' you so neatly that I can disregard your personality. That's not what we're trained to do by any means. I might use these questions to recommend additional products above and beyond what you expected to look at, but that's part of my job, and you don't have to buy anything you don't want. I've had more than one annoying customer who *refused* to buy a printer cable for their new printer, only to get home and realize it was totally non-functional without that cable. Having asked them ahead of time, I knew they did not have the proper cable to hook the unit up, and did my best to explain this to them.
Now, please understand that BB is a profit-based corporation. We prefer to make money on transactions, and that is one of the major goals of the store in the first place. Show me a major retail store who's primary goal isn't profit, and I'll show you a store going out of business. Having said that, profit is not the ONLY goal to which associates are looking toward. Customer satisfaction plays a (generally) equal role to profit, and it is the employee's job to balance that equation out. Now, when a choice comes forward between two equal options, obviously we're going to recommend the one which produces greater profit for the company, but if they're really equal in the first place, then the choice doesn't matter, does it? I see a lot of posts talking about how employees lie or cheat customers for store profit and advancement. This is NOT an accepted practice, nor is it indicative of BB specifically since all companies can suffer from this issue. At the same time, working in Customer Service and Geek Squad divisions has given me what is probably the best view on Customer Satisfaction issues, which is basically BB taking a loss of profit to solve a problem for a customer. I've authorized a brand new laptop for a customer who had theirs sent off to a vendor who 'lost' it in paperwork for three months (average repair time: 5 weeks), and then taken the heinous margin hit of having to sell a laptop as Used, and Missing Parts. We do what we can for customers, if we can, and if it's not such a horrible loss to the store that it would be an issue to accomplish.
The customer is not always right, better than 75% of the time they're completely wrong or totally uninformed. There are dozens of posts here saying that the user hates employees at retail stores because they don't know enough. I can sympathize, but you have to realize that the average customer knows a tenth of what the employee knows, who might know a tenth of what YOU know. So in reality, the majority of customers will look at an employee as a knowledgable person, because for the customer's needs, they are!
More than half the posts in this thread are rebate-bitching related. Get over it already, folks. Rebates are instituted by the manufacturer more often than anything else,
You guess I'm just one of those managers. I'm just a regular guy working regular hours at a retail store. I guess you're an idiot.
Overtime isn't something you can always prepare for. It can be anticipated SOME or MOST of the time, but not always.
I'm the guy who got stuck at my store unloading a trailer which hadn't been packed properly, and so most of the contents of said trailer were scattered around inside. Could we have had extra people onhand sitting on their asses just in case? Sure. Would it have been a complete waste of hours and money? Yes.
We had a full staff of people ready to unload the truck, enough people to easily do it in the normal time period, but it simply took longer than anticipated because SOMETIMES, things go wrong. Hence, overtime. No time shaving here, no buck stealing. I'm pro-overtime, moron.
Read the damn post before you flame. Your +1 mod shows somebody didn't read context before modding.
Please explain to me where I said it was unreasonable? My statement was specifically PRO-overtime.
I'm pointing out that stacking a schedule to make sure you've always got an extra person or two is useful, but even then, sometimes you still run over and those people then receive overtime, as they should.
Please read the statement as it's written in context, not just a single sentence and take it as you feel.
Spoken like someone without a grasp of what can sometimes cause overtime to occur in a retail environment.
Overtime isn't always something you plan out and have happen. Sometimes things go wrong, or emergencies occur and people stay late. Are you suggesting all stores should hire 6-12+ people and simply keep them on retainer on the off chance that they're needed for those 2-4 hours a week most overtimes accrue to?
I work at my local Best Buy very near the display which holds the Pre-Order for Doom 3. I looked in our system, and the date listed for Customer Fufillment (ordering out of stock or not released productsS) doesn't even match the 4/1/04 date. Everyone knows they just make up a date and use it for awhile, but 4/1/04 isn't even the first date set for Doom 3. It's changed at least twice since it sat on that shelf.
Funny enough, sitting right next to it is Counter Strike: Condition Zero. It's release date has changed twice as well. I see people go by all the time and go "It's OUT! YES!" and then bitch and swear when they see pre-order.
Well actually, they DON'T need any beta testing, heh. The NPC economy system itself is nothing more than market orders and job offers automatically generated by the computer.
If you've played Freelancer or any game like it, random jobs are always available that follow the same old scheme of "transport this here" or "kill this guy here". In Eve, if you want to hire on under an NPC organization to do transporting, you simply take a job listed on the market coming from that NPC organization, and do it. It will be slightly different in appearance, obviously, but the market system itself is already intact and functional.
The reason mining is the only way that it works for new players is simply because there isn't a massive player base to sustain the economy yet. Just like early testing of AC2 (which is a player based economy) there was no reliable method for weapons and equipment, simply because the infrastructure hadn't been created yet. Note that by creation I mean PLAYER creation, not game creation.
The entire superstructure required for the Eve game to run as predicted is more or less there. However, things like player wipes push them back and away from testing it.
You've obviously not played the game, which makes it harder to grasp what I'm saying. However, unlike your harsh picture of Eve, CCP *did* try to get around the issue by offering "Free Money" days. You could mine some cheap ore, and at certain stations around the galaxy, it would provide 10,000% profit for ONE DAY. Just another way to boost players high up in the economy to test stuff, basically.
There is a third option to your choices. You release with a complete set of optional tools, most of which are functional if not elegant, and the rest of the core features tested thoroughly and available.
My photography studio recently made the switch to Electronic Imaging (the new term for high end digital photography). We use the Kodak DCS760, the little brother to the 14n, and we love it.
Most of the flame responses in here point out the fact that film cameras are remarkably cheap compared to digital, which is of course, understandable considering the newer field of DP.
Both sides have benefits and drawbacks, but I would say for the overall _professional studio photographer_ (NOTE the professional studio photographer), a correctly managed digital imaging system is by far superior to film. Film is great for certain projects, and digital is great for others. One thing most people don't understand is that while film quality may have many benefits over raw digital photography, every one of those benefits can be negated in some fashion by software/hardware for digital printing (by this I mean the extreme CCD sharpness, T-bluring, color quality, etc).
I've read some people saying that digital photography lacks the color quality of film photography? Lies. CONSUMER digital photography might, perhaps. However, you can't make that comparison. Sure, you shot your film yourself, but some expensive high quality lab printer actually printed it for you. We own a Gretag Netprinter 812, a very beautiful printer. This isn't your favorite Canon or Epson inkjet. This is a lab quality printer, designed for hard workloads of high quality digital prints. We spent two months refining our local lab's print quality, making them get closer and better at matching color we wanted. When we finally got our printer up and running, we've been beating our labs (film AND digital) at every turn. There is no such thing as better color than your own, and digital is just as good as film. For those of you that don't know, this printer is a hefty beast, weighing in at our purchase around $70K.
Some of you might argue that you don't have $70 to spend on a digital printer. That's nice. You didn't spend $70K on the local Wolf Camera's lab printer either. And just like them, we can (and do, occasionally) print consumer prints for comparable to film costs.
Not mentioned in the executive summary of the article is that these large files (the 32mb raw files) are simply master files. You create any other file format from these files that you choose. So you don't wanna buy a new hard drive for every image? Fine. Make them 8mb JPG files instead. Make them 4mb if you want. Use the built in cropping software and reduce the quality to make them 1mb if you so please.
The sheer flexibility of DP is it's chief benefit. An average film photography session at our studio will go like this...
Client comes in, photographs are taken. We send the negatigves off to the lab for previews a day or so later. A week or so goes by, they come back. We process them for a day or so, and deliver them. They take them home, look at them, come back and order. We send back off to the lab, they send them back a few weeks later. We process and deliver them a week or so more. Figure about 25 days total, at the low end.
For digital photography, you have many many more options. Our current system works like this:
Client comes in, shots are taken. Client goes to the waiting room, and 5 minutes later they're shown a small slide-show of their shots on our wall projector, allowed to view each image individually, and then select their favorites. We print them off a quick set of 4x5 previews, they take them home. They bring them back with their order. We process the order in-house with our lovely Gretag Netprinter, spit out anything up to an 11x14 within 3 days, deliver in 2 weeks, tops.
Not only that, but business clients needing immediate prints can pay extra to have instant-prints delivered, and if they wish it, can pay a smaller extra fee for quick retouching, which they can watch us do in our demonstration lab. People love this feature. We do school sports teams, events(prom,etc), and senior portraits. We offer a Dynamic Senior package, which allows them to select different poses to create custom template pictures and wallets to order from. Extra package features might include color replacement, where we can mix and match colors (hair, skin, clothing) to whatever they may choose. This same ability might be present to a small extent in film photography, but there is NO viable option like Digital for the same effects.
Any photography studio lab person can attest to the fact that retouching an image at the studio(post-lab) end is an absolute beast, and Photoshop is a gift from the camera gods for this matter. The "fun" old fashioned way of doing dyes and markers is just useless now.
Camera delay is another issue lots of people gripe about. It's all dependant on your storage media, guys. The 760 has an internal memory cache which allows us to just fire off frames as we please, up to (I believe, I don't recall offhand) 30 shots before a two second delay is required to process them. Are you using a floppy disk to store images on? It's just as slow as writing to it from a computer, what else would you expect?
I see qurob complaining about shiny spots in the image. Just to let you know, qurob, there's no such thing as "bright shiny objects" in digital photography that don't exist in film, unless YOU mess the lighting up to create them. An overexposed area is just as good or bad in film as digital.
Copying from 'ergo98' I have this:
"Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity."
It does indeed. Because some poor guy stuck in a very dark room somewhere in a building, or some automatically tuned lab system in your local Wolf Camera is SET THAT WAY. You obviously either don't feel like mentioning ICC profiling to show the counter-arguement, or don't know of it. Just like a lab printer requires for film, there is a system for making color ring true for digital. it's just different, and you as a home consumer are uninitiated in the methods of doing such a thing. Also, again you're comparing apples and oranges. Unless you actually own a fifty thousand dollar lab printer to make your own home prints from film, a PROFESSIONAL LAB is doing it for you. Your Epson Photo printer is NOT a lab printer.
To Frothy Walrus, who's considering film and digital futures. Digital, my friend. Are you a certified professional photographer? Talk to some folks at PMA or some of the other major conventions, they basically recommend digital now if you wanna avoid lab costs. Find yourself a nice, small digital printing lab if you can't afford a printing solution yourself. To bitrate, who seems to be expecting a horrific flame for an idiotic comment. You're 100% right, my friend. It's all a simple matter of timing of the industry right now. Time passes, prices change. To avandesande, who can't find a memory card printer. Wolf Camera. Go. To xyloplax, who needs to see things his way or the highway. The 14n has a 35mm CCD. For the price, you shall wait. Just like any other person.
To all of those who noted the misinformation comparing digital scans to digital cameras, and then made the judgement that film exceeded digital, please note the difference between consumer and professional digital cameras.
Just my, uh, well, 400 sets of 2 cents, combined with experience.
It's not necessarily a big money loss. When NASA first threw everything they had at going into space, the creativity boom was something we've benefitted from for years. Ever use velcro? It came about because of NASA.
Rockets became highly feasable because they HAD to. NASA had to be able to do something quickly and easily (in terms of their own abilities) because it was necessary at the time. Who knows what kind of advancements will come from this?
Maybe NASA will develop a more efficient fuel-cell based power system because it's obviously just not sound to power everything by solar cells.
Friendly competition as you put it, not only fuels action, it also fuels the imagination. Look at JunkYard Wars for example. These people aren't highly trained to do exactly what they're doing for the most part, yet they manage it nine times out of ten. Imagine what will happen if several professional agencies sit down and start working together on something as important as this.
I never managed to see any of the original films when they were in theatre, I was too young. I remember finding them in my video cabinet one day accidentally and just watching them...and re-watching them. Seeing all of the things as new, accepting them all as normal. Now I've seen Episode's 1 and 2 and I realized only partway through Episode 2 that I was dealing with things a little too harshly. As another member posted, had I seen these new movies as the first in the series I would have probably had a fairly similar reaction to them as I did the first trilogy.
As one member pointed out, Artoo uses little thrusters during the movie. I recalled thinking "Since when did Artoo get thrusters?" and a few minutes later I realized that when I saw Artoo going to town in ANH, ESB, and ROTJ, I never once questioned the fact that he just started whipping out all kinds of tools at any given point. My perceptions of what should be allowed to happen in the movie are fairly warped because of what I felt was right and wrong with allowing. If you've ever read any of the Zahn books or any large number of backstory novels, you know that Lucas just shattered pretty much everything about the past from them. I realized that they had to be slightly annoyed by the things that he did with the film before I also realized that he's allowed to do it in the first place. He let people write what they want how they want, but it's still HIS story. If Artoo gets thrusters, by god Artoo has thrusters.
Honestly, I still prefer 4-6 over 2. The acting has pretty much been consistantly bad throughout most of the movies in the first place. Some actors shine over others, but that remains true throughout. The biggest difference to me between one and two in terms of fan enjoyment came from my theatre audience:
When the Lucasfilm logo came up in Episode 1 everyone burst into cheers and yells. When the credits came up...there was some mild clapping and everybody just filed out.
When the Lucasfilm logo came up in Episode 2 everyone burst into cheers and yells. When the credits came up we were yelling and cheering all over the theatre. The general consensus was pretty much an unrestricted Hell Yes. NOWHERE in Episode One was there rampant cheering and celebrating during the movie like in Episode 2.
Was it perfect Star Wars? Nope. Never will be. Impossible to satisfy all of the millions of hopelessly cynical fans. Was it Star Wars? Oh yes. I felt like I'd just discovered A New Hope again by accident, and I'm sure as hell ready for Episode 3.
For those of you who've seen it, you'll understand this: Yoda. Damn.
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There are no cyber security experts on the panel because nobody owed any favors to any cyber security experts that could have been called in to get an appointment to the board. The skill set of the candidates in question never came into play.
Having just re-read Ready Player One not too long ago, I began to take stock of the things that I could see developing in the not-distant future of the ever-present online society and then comparing them to their OASIS counter-parts. Every now and again you see something as ridiculous as this, and you realize that if the technology was just that little tiny bit better, it wouldn't be science fiction after that.
I think the point here isn't that there's a drive or manufacturer out there that doesn't fail. The point here is that with such a huge sample range, you can make somewhat useful trends and comparisons between failure rates on a macro scale that no standard user would be able to do themselves. If you look at 56,000 disks and see that Seagate accounts for a larger percentage of drives and lower equivalent failure rate among manufacturers, you can *generally* expect that buying a drive of an equivalent model as compared and evaluated here will have *on average* a better reliability rate than a comparative drive shown to have a worse value in this study. None of this absolves you of responsibility to your data, but it gives you a guideline toward making your data storage medium as reliable as possible.
Exactly. This KickStarter is brought to you by LG, Sony, Samsung, etc.
Oracle already intentionally supports the concept of multiple versions by allowing Static installations; when an installation is flagged as Static, it is installed separately, using the full build version number as the folder name rather than the major version only (i.e. jre_1.7.25 rather than jre7), Doing this allows you to call multiple different versions of Java independently, based on your needs. However, if I just run the installer as-is, it does an in-place swap of the version; if I go from a standard install of Java 1.7.25 (installed to a folder called jre7) to a standard install of 1.7.55, it just empties the jre7 folder and installs Patch 55 in the same place. The existing installer already removes non-Static versions now, so if they're going to start forcing more removals of older versions, I can only assume that means it will remove even Static installations. This Static removal policy needs to be a command-line toggle that I can prevent. My company utilizes Java as a cross-platform development engine to run one of our major products on. Each version of our software is tied to a specific version of Java, and as such, engineers end up having multiple versions of Java installed to support each version of our software. Because of this, we're always installing newer versions of Java while not wanting to remove the older versions.
The thing is, he really isn't that annoying in the original trilogy. He's hapless and completely pessimistic, but he's not that annoying. In the prequels, however, he's gone to complete bumbling stupidity and slapstick humor at his expense, sometimes to the ridiculously improbable level. Look at ESB; Luke and Han are missing, and Threepio stupidly tells Leia how long the odds are. Afterward, he realizes what he did, and he super-awkwardly tries to apologize to her to make her feel better. He understands how big a mistake he made, and in a completely droid-like way, tries to fix it. In AotC, on the other hand, he's literally chopped up in a cartoon-like fashion and reassembled with different body parts and accidentally participates in the battle, all the while telling snarky bad jokes. There's no deeper layer of subtle understanding; he's just gone from the pessimistic character to the comic relief.
"Those people [who post abuse online] think they can sit in the comfort of their homes and do whatever they want on the internet. We don't let that happen. They can't hide from us, we will find them."
So the idea is that you're going to find them, and then post their picture and their message near to them so that they and everyone else can see what a tool that person is. Except you're going to obscure the picture and hide the name so that nobody knows who did it except the original author. Basically, you're just publishing this person's hate mail on the wall like a poster, and letting them see their work writ large.
Anyone remember this? http://youtu.be/U2AkkuIVV-I
As long as the Arctic Expedition commander isn't an ancestor of Adelaide Brooke, we should be fine. If that turns out to be the case, better hope the TARDIS shows up. Either way, just to be safe, nobody drinks the water or runs irrigation with it. K?
Look at today. How many different electronic book formats are there? Ten years from now, how many e-book readers will read these same formats, and how many new ones will there be? A hundred years from now, you'll have even more formats growing at that same progression rate until either a radical shift in information storage occurs, or the system becomes overloaded. Today, many people devote time and energy to maintaining these formats or helping convert them from older to newer, but the center cannot hold; eventually, information will be lost.
Roger MacBride Allen has an interesting time travel series called The Chronicles of Solace that briefly touches on a similar issue to this; archiving historians struggle to contain the ever-growing wealth of data that humanity generates. Specifically, they attempted to copy and duplicate all written and electronic material in a readable format for use in the Grand Library, but constantly struggle with the task that the 'standard' access method changes rapidly every few years. Not only do they have to create a format for storage that can survive ever-growing changes, but it must also contain built-in equipment that can be reverse-engineered and re-used after a potential interplanetary disaster removes all human knowledge of the technology. Their current solution? Printed books. Billions of them.
Or, you know, so that they don't get five thousand uber-gamers all testing with the same general hardware range and then end up discovering at release day that anyone not running an i7 over FIOS is unable to play. You know, the other 90% of their target audience. Please tell me that you're not in any way related to QA in anything that you've ever done in your life.
I'm not really sure to what you're referring on the second half of your post. Mention is made repeatedly of the fact that data bursts take time to execute, and that most of the information being relayed back and forth is small; tactical positions, status updates, small personal messages, etc. All of these could be done with a single Ad-Hoc wifi connection in our day and age, with our tech.
The power requirements for the brain pal were handled internally by the device itself. In other words, it had a battery. Perhaps one that could be charged off the body's own internal energy sources? Remember, these bodies were basically designed to be the ultimate combat chassis, and so the fact that the body's own internal electrical field could be used to do something like that...not a big deal.
Finally, in The Last Colony, a huge deal is made of the fact that the enemy *can* intercept electronic transmissions, to the point that not a single colonist on the planet is allowed to have a BrainPal active, even the military personnel, unless they're in a specially shielded bunker. In fact, nobody is allowed to have any form of electronic technology that could so much as broadcast a byte of data, because it could be picked up *across the solar system* by an enemy ship.
OfficeMax, not Office Depot. Whoops.
I used to work there. It's a phased withdrawl of rebates, just like Office Depot is probably doing. When they announced the incentive, Gateway instantly hopped onboard and all Gateway mail-in rebates disappeared. This allowed them to claim a "first step" toward the removal of rebates. As time has passed, they have discontinued more and more mailed rebates, but some remain. I suspect you will see the final removal near the end of their target time of 2 years. Rebates themselves are the retail version of sale items, so they will continue on in the instant-savings form, for quite some time.
Ah, marketing at its finest. This isn't even really news. Most major retailers have been very quietly phasing out mail in rebates for months, if not years. It's in the freaking article, if you read it. People are saying " should do this too", and if you look, they probably already have.
As it says, Best Buy did this over a year ago, they just don't have all the manufacturers on board yet. If you look in their computer department, most laptops have discontinued mail in rebates, and are either instant or normal price. Circuit City has the same thing, in almost the same way. Many of their home office electronics manufacturers are instant-rebate only now.
If you read the article, it just states that "Beginning this Weekend" they'll start to phase the rebates out. It doesn't specify when they'll end, or exactly what will be phased out first. Best Buy made this exact same announcement in 2005.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but people should try actually reading what's posted now and then. Then again, this is Slashdot, so what am I thinking?
This article is so blatantly uninformed as to actual information that it's easy to see why the trolls attack Best Buy so badly. You have to realize a few major things here, and doing so will help you understand that things aren't quite as Demon/Angel as the article makes them out to be. First off, this "profiling" BB is being accused of, is crap. They're tailoring stores and associates to the area around them, not to specific customers. In Atlanta, we have a number of stores, one of which is being converted to the 'Barry' type listed in the article. Specifically, it's being converted because the store itself is situated in a high-income area, and the store itself has shown a history of large dollar value transactions. Now, when you come in the door at a BB, you don't go through a profiling process to see whether we should try and sell you products or not. When I work the sales floor, I'm as willing to spend time explaining a technology the customer has no interest in buying that day, as I am spending time selling a product to a customer willing to buy. I'm going to ask you questions, yes, but it's more for me to figure out what you're looking for than it is for me to 'pigeonhole' you so neatly that I can disregard your personality. That's not what we're trained to do by any means. I might use these questions to recommend additional products above and beyond what you expected to look at, but that's part of my job, and you don't have to buy anything you don't want. I've had more than one annoying customer who *refused* to buy a printer cable for their new printer, only to get home and realize it was totally non-functional without that cable. Having asked them ahead of time, I knew they did not have the proper cable to hook the unit up, and did my best to explain this to them.
Now, please understand that BB is a profit-based corporation. We prefer to make money on transactions, and that is one of the major goals of the store in the first place. Show me a major retail store who's primary goal isn't profit, and I'll show you a store going out of business. Having said that, profit is not the ONLY goal to which associates are looking toward. Customer satisfaction plays a (generally) equal role to profit, and it is the employee's job to balance that equation out. Now, when a choice comes forward between two equal options, obviously we're going to recommend the one which produces greater profit for the company, but if they're really equal in the first place, then the choice doesn't matter, does it? I see a lot of posts talking about how employees lie or cheat customers for store profit and advancement. This is NOT an accepted practice, nor is it indicative of BB specifically since all companies can suffer from this issue. At the same time, working in Customer Service and Geek Squad divisions has given me what is probably the best view on Customer Satisfaction issues, which is basically BB taking a loss of profit to solve a problem for a customer. I've authorized a brand new laptop for a customer who had theirs sent off to a vendor who 'lost' it in paperwork for three months (average repair time: 5 weeks), and then taken the heinous margin hit of having to sell a laptop as Used, and Missing Parts. We do what we can for customers, if we can, and if it's not such a horrible loss to the store that it would be an issue to accomplish.
The customer is not always right, better than 75% of the time they're completely wrong or totally uninformed. There are dozens of posts here saying that the user hates employees at retail stores because they don't know enough. I can sympathize, but you have to realize that the average customer knows a tenth of what the employee knows, who might know a tenth of what YOU know. So in reality, the majority of customers will look at an employee as a knowledgable person, because for the customer's needs, they are!
More than half the posts in this thread are rebate-bitching related. Get over it already, folks. Rebates are instituted by the manufacturer more often than anything else,
You guess I'm just one of those managers. I'm just a regular guy working regular hours at a retail store. I guess you're an idiot. Overtime isn't something you can always prepare for. It can be anticipated SOME or MOST of the time, but not always. I'm the guy who got stuck at my store unloading a trailer which hadn't been packed properly, and so most of the contents of said trailer were scattered around inside. Could we have had extra people onhand sitting on their asses just in case? Sure. Would it have been a complete waste of hours and money? Yes. We had a full staff of people ready to unload the truck, enough people to easily do it in the normal time period, but it simply took longer than anticipated because SOMETIMES, things go wrong. Hence, overtime. No time shaving here, no buck stealing. I'm pro-overtime, moron. Read the damn post before you flame. Your +1 mod shows somebody didn't read context before modding.
Please explain to me where I said it was unreasonable? My statement was specifically PRO-overtime. I'm pointing out that stacking a schedule to make sure you've always got an extra person or two is useful, but even then, sometimes you still run over and those people then receive overtime, as they should. Please read the statement as it's written in context, not just a single sentence and take it as you feel.
Spoken like someone without a grasp of what can sometimes cause overtime to occur in a retail environment.
Overtime isn't always something you plan out and have happen. Sometimes things go wrong, or emergencies occur and people stay late. Are you suggesting all stores should hire 6-12+ people and simply keep them on retainer on the off chance that they're needed for those 2-4 hours a week most overtimes accrue to?
I work at my local Best Buy very near the display which holds the Pre-Order for Doom 3. I looked in our system, and the date listed for Customer Fufillment (ordering out of stock or not released productsS) doesn't even match the 4/1/04 date. Everyone knows they just make up a date and use it for awhile, but 4/1/04 isn't even the first date set for Doom 3. It's changed at least twice since it sat on that shelf.
Funny enough, sitting right next to it is Counter Strike: Condition Zero. It's release date has changed twice as well. I see people go by all the time and go "It's OUT! YES!" and then bitch and swear when they see pre-order.
Well actually, they DON'T need any beta testing, heh. The NPC economy system itself is nothing more than market orders and job offers automatically generated by the computer. If you've played Freelancer or any game like it, random jobs are always available that follow the same old scheme of "transport this here" or "kill this guy here". In Eve, if you want to hire on under an NPC organization to do transporting, you simply take a job listed on the market coming from that NPC organization, and do it. It will be slightly different in appearance, obviously, but the market system itself is already intact and functional. The reason mining is the only way that it works for new players is simply because there isn't a massive player base to sustain the economy yet. Just like early testing of AC2 (which is a player based economy) there was no reliable method for weapons and equipment, simply because the infrastructure hadn't been created yet. Note that by creation I mean PLAYER creation, not game creation. The entire superstructure required for the Eve game to run as predicted is more or less there. However, things like player wipes push them back and away from testing it. You've obviously not played the game, which makes it harder to grasp what I'm saying. However, unlike your harsh picture of Eve, CCP *did* try to get around the issue by offering "Free Money" days. You could mine some cheap ore, and at certain stations around the galaxy, it would provide 10,000% profit for ONE DAY. Just another way to boost players high up in the economy to test stuff, basically. There is a third option to your choices. You release with a complete set of optional tools, most of which are functional if not elegant, and the rest of the core features tested thoroughly and available.
My photography studio recently made the switch to Electronic Imaging (the new term for high end digital photography). We use the Kodak DCS760, the little brother to the 14n, and we love it.
Most of the flame responses in here point out the fact that film cameras are remarkably cheap compared to digital, which is of course, understandable considering the newer field of DP.
Both sides have benefits and drawbacks, but I would say for the overall _professional studio photographer_ (NOTE the professional studio photographer), a correctly managed digital imaging system is by far superior to film. Film is great for certain projects, and digital is great for others. One thing most people don't understand is that while film quality may have many benefits over raw digital photography, every one of those benefits can be negated in some fashion by software/hardware for digital printing (by this I mean the extreme CCD sharpness, T-bluring, color quality, etc).
I've read some people saying that digital photography lacks the color quality of film photography? Lies. CONSUMER digital photography might, perhaps. However, you can't make that comparison. Sure, you shot your film yourself, but some expensive high quality lab printer actually printed it for you. We own a Gretag Netprinter 812, a very beautiful printer. This isn't your favorite Canon or Epson inkjet. This is a lab quality printer, designed for hard workloads of high quality digital prints. We spent two months refining our local lab's print quality, making them get closer and better at matching color we wanted. When we finally got our printer up and running, we've been beating our labs (film AND digital) at every turn. There is no such thing as better color than your own, and digital is just as good as film. For those of you that don't know, this printer is a hefty beast, weighing in at our purchase around $70K.
Some of you might argue that you don't have $70 to spend on a digital printer. That's nice. You didn't spend $70K on the local Wolf Camera's lab printer either. And just like them, we can (and do, occasionally) print consumer prints for comparable to film costs.
Not mentioned in the executive summary of the article is that these large files (the 32mb raw files) are simply master files. You create any other file format from these files that you choose. So you don't wanna buy a new hard drive for every image? Fine. Make them 8mb JPG files instead. Make them 4mb if you want. Use the built in cropping software and reduce the quality to make them 1mb if you so please.
The sheer flexibility of DP is it's chief benefit. An average film photography session at our studio will go like this...
Client comes in, photographs are taken. We send the negatigves off to the lab for previews a day or so later. A week or so goes by, they come back. We process them for a day or so, and deliver them. They take them home, look at them, come back and order. We send back off to the lab, they send them back a few weeks later. We process and deliver them a week or so more. Figure about 25 days total, at the low end.
For digital photography, you have many many more options. Our current system works like this:
Client comes in, shots are taken. Client goes to the waiting room, and 5 minutes later they're shown a small slide-show of their shots on our wall projector, allowed to view each image individually, and then select their favorites. We print them off a quick set of 4x5 previews, they take them home. They bring them back with their order. We process the order in-house with our lovely Gretag Netprinter, spit out anything up to an 11x14 within 3 days, deliver in 2 weeks, tops.
Not only that, but business clients needing immediate prints can pay extra to have instant-prints delivered, and if they wish it, can pay a smaller extra fee for quick retouching, which they can watch us do in our demonstration lab. People love this feature. We do school sports teams, events(prom,etc), and senior portraits. We offer a Dynamic Senior package, which allows them to select different poses to create custom template pictures and wallets to order from. Extra package features might include color replacement, where we can mix and match colors (hair, skin, clothing) to whatever they may choose. This same ability might be present to a small extent in film photography, but there is NO viable option like Digital for the same effects.
Any photography studio lab person can attest to the fact that retouching an image at the studio(post-lab) end is an absolute beast, and Photoshop is a gift from the camera gods for this matter. The "fun" old fashioned way of doing dyes and markers is just useless now.
Camera delay is another issue lots of people gripe about. It's all dependant on your storage media, guys. The 760 has an internal memory cache which allows us to just fire off frames as we please, up to (I believe, I don't recall offhand) 30 shots before a two second delay is required to process them. Are you using a floppy disk to store images on? It's just as slow as writing to it from a computer, what else would you expect?
I see qurob complaining about shiny spots in the image. Just to let you know, qurob, there's no such thing as "bright shiny objects" in digital photography that don't exist in film, unless YOU mess the lighting up to create them. An overexposed area is just as good or bad in film as digital.
Copying from 'ergo98' I have this:
"Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity."
It does indeed. Because some poor guy stuck in a very dark room somewhere in a building, or some automatically tuned lab system in your local Wolf Camera is SET THAT WAY. You obviously either don't feel like mentioning ICC profiling to show the counter-arguement, or don't know of it. Just like a lab printer requires for film, there is a system for making color ring true for digital. it's just different, and you as a home consumer are uninitiated in the methods of doing such a thing. Also, again you're comparing apples and oranges. Unless you actually own a fifty thousand dollar lab printer to make your own home prints from film, a PROFESSIONAL LAB is doing it for you. Your Epson Photo printer is NOT a lab printer.
To Frothy Walrus, who's considering film and digital futures. Digital, my friend. Are you a certified professional photographer? Talk to some folks at PMA or some of the other major conventions, they basically recommend digital now if you wanna avoid lab costs. Find yourself a nice, small digital printing lab if you can't afford a printing solution yourself.
To bitrate, who seems to be expecting a horrific flame for an idiotic comment. You're 100% right, my friend. It's all a simple matter of timing of the industry right now. Time passes, prices change.
To avandesande, who can't find a memory card printer. Wolf Camera. Go.
To xyloplax, who needs to see things his way or the highway. The 14n has a 35mm CCD. For the price, you shall wait. Just like any other person.
To all of those who noted the misinformation comparing digital scans to digital cameras, and then made the judgement that film exceeded digital, please note the difference between consumer and professional digital cameras.
Just my, uh, well, 400 sets of 2 cents, combined with experience.
Keiran.
It's not necessarily a big money loss. When NASA first threw everything they had at going into space, the creativity boom was something we've benefitted from for years. Ever use velcro? It came about because of NASA.
Rockets became highly feasable because they HAD to. NASA had to be able to do something quickly and easily (in terms of their own abilities) because it was necessary at the time. Who knows what kind of advancements will come from this?
Maybe NASA will develop a more efficient fuel-cell based power system because it's obviously just not sound to power everything by solar cells.
Friendly competition as you put it, not only fuels action, it also fuels the imagination. Look at JunkYard Wars for example. These people aren't highly trained to do exactly what they're doing for the most part, yet they manage it nine times out of ten. Imagine what will happen if several professional agencies sit down and start working together on something as important as this.
I never managed to see any of the original films when they were in theatre, I was too young. I remember finding them in my video cabinet one day accidentally and just watching them...and re-watching them. Seeing all of the things as new, accepting them all as normal. Now I've seen Episode's 1 and 2 and I realized only partway through Episode 2 that I was dealing with things a little too harshly. As another member posted, had I seen these new movies as the first in the series I would have probably had a fairly similar reaction to them as I did the first trilogy.
As one member pointed out, Artoo uses little thrusters during the movie. I recalled thinking "Since when did Artoo get thrusters?" and a few minutes later I realized that when I saw Artoo going to town in ANH, ESB, and ROTJ, I never once questioned the fact that he just started whipping out all kinds of tools at any given point. My perceptions of what should be allowed to happen in the movie are fairly warped because of what I felt was right and wrong with allowing. If you've ever read any of the Zahn books or any large number of backstory novels, you know that Lucas just shattered pretty much everything about the past from them. I realized that they had to be slightly annoyed by the things that he did with the film before I also realized that he's allowed to do it in the first place. He let people write what they want how they want, but it's still HIS story. If Artoo gets thrusters, by god Artoo has thrusters.
Honestly, I still prefer 4-6 over 2. The acting has pretty much been consistantly bad throughout most of the movies in the first place. Some actors shine over others, but that remains true throughout. The biggest difference to me between one and two in terms of fan enjoyment came from my theatre audience:
When the Lucasfilm logo came up in Episode 1 everyone burst into cheers and yells. When the credits came up...there was some mild clapping and everybody just filed out.
When the Lucasfilm logo came up in Episode 2 everyone burst into cheers and yells. When the credits came up we were yelling and cheering all over the theatre. The general consensus was pretty much an unrestricted Hell Yes. NOWHERE in Episode One was there rampant cheering and celebrating during the movie like in Episode 2.
Was it perfect Star Wars? Nope. Never will be. Impossible to satisfy all of the millions of hopelessly cynical fans. Was it Star Wars? Oh yes. I felt like I'd just discovered A New Hope again by accident, and I'm sure as hell ready for Episode 3.
For those of you who've seen it, you'll understand this: Yoda. Damn.
Keiran
Yeah...they called that NAPSTER.