Having just done the timing BELT change procedure on my 2000 New Beetle TDi, I will testify that it's not fun. Nor is it cheap.
Timing Belt kit from Dieselgeek $175 Special tools (also DG) $229 VAG-COM software and cable $249
Grand total $ 653 + S&H + some random other tool purchases. Add in the short shifter and a few other things I did, and I'm in it for about a grand + 8 hrs of my time doing the change. Next time will be quicker (half maybe?), since I went slow following the excellent guide from Fred's TDi Club (tdiclub.com).
Average price I read online for this service was about $650. It ranged from $600-1000. I like working on my own vehicles, so went for the DIY option. Fortunately VW has a new timing belt that goes for 80K miles instead of the standard 60K (40K for automatics!)mile belt that came on all TDi's through 2002. Supposedly VW opted for the belt for noise reasons. Personally, I could care less, a chain isn't going to add that much noise. If properly covered, should be negligible difference over the sound of the diesel anyway and be good for 200K+ miles.
I have some tire/alignment problems right now, and am only getting 42-44 mpg. Prior to those problems, I was getting 48.
I'm only running dino diesel right now, but am considering blending with biodiesel. That's the nice thing about diesels that most of the hybrids can't claim, you can use a renewable energy resource. No net carbon added to the atmosphere (running B100).
Re:In my book
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Your book must be really short.
I like 3Com NIC's. Been solid and supported in every OS I've used them in.
Then there's the switching gear. Horrible CLI. Prone to lockups.
I know of a large university that got stranded by 3Com. Their network is ATM backbone, Corebuilder 9000's, etc. Turns out that their particular setup exposes a nasty little bug in the OS, causing the whole core to lock up every 2 or 3 days. Has to be powered cycled to get it going again.
So they call support. Support says "So sorry, we dropped support for our Enterprise equipment last week, the service contract you've been paying isn't worth the paper the purchase order was written on anymore. Thanks for calling, have a nice life".
Last I heard, they had been dealing with this for 3 years due to lack of funding. They did this to a LOT of people. 3Com will not be getting business from me anytime soon.
If Bill Clinton had been doing something on his watch BESIDES getting a blowjob, the war and half trillion dollars would not have been necessary. 9/11 might not have happened.
Instead, he cozied up to our enemies. Let opportunities pass to capture or kill Bin Laden. Dismantled our intelligence infrastructure.
George Bush is one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen (for a President). But at least he's doing something. He's not stupid, much as a lot of you would like to make him out to be. You don't get to be President by being stupid. Clinton isn't stupid either.
I shudder to think how fucked up this world will be in 5 years if Kerry takes over and withdraws from Iraq. That will virutally guarantee that radical fundamentalist Islam does the same thing in Iraq that it did to Iran.
You figure out the consequences to the stability of our world if a major piece of the energy supply is suddenly controlled by a culture who would just as soon (and actively tries to) kill you as look at you.
I don't want to support either side in politics nowadays. These people are ALL - every one of them - fucked up. The idea that I have to choose from the lesser fucked up side kills me. I would vote libertarian or someone independent, but a vote for anyone else is a vote for Kerry, and I can stand that less than I can Bush.
OK
IANIITMP (I Am Not Involved In The Medical Profession) </DISCLAIMER>
Both of your comments make a lot of sense. It seems to me that it could very well be that high cholesterol provides an enviornment friendly to something like nano-bacteria (or whatever). Or that there is some other factor (such as an immune system vulnerability) that manifests as high cholesterol in people with a susceptibility to heart disease.
What I'm trying to say is that one does not necessarily exclude the other. Both could be related. Maybe I'm not expressing this correctly, but then again, I'm in the profession of moving IP packets, not blood cells.
Re:We don't use oil for Electricity
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention the huge amount of radioactive materials released into the atmosphere by burning coal. We'd be better off with nuclear fisson. At least we could control & contain the byproducts.
I think that susceptibility will depend on what source was stolen. Was it the ENTIRE source? Or was it just pieces? They (the cracking types) may discover a hole in something that exists only in the Enterprise feature set, leaving most of the exposed routers on the Internet un-compromiseable (As most companies aren't going to pony up for the most expensive feature set when all they're doing is shuffling IP packets).
Also could find a problem in basic TCP/IP code, making every Cisco router on the planet a revolving door. I find this scenario highly unlikely, as thier base code is probably a lot more stable and reviewed than the newer, more advanced features.
What it means is that they RAISED thier prices. Simple.
Top that off with raising prices in a recession, it doesn't look like they did poorly at all. Especially considering the dearth of anything new worth listening to in the first place.
The tone of your post is that ex-military people don't deserve the jobs they can get in DC. Probably true in some (or a lot of) cases.
BUT
I used to own a small computer store in a college town. For 8 yrs, my best employees were ROTC(college) or ex-military come back to get a degree. Once I'd gone through a few years, I learned that, as a rule, the military folks were better disciplined, driven, and hard working than the non-military types.
That's not to say that I didn't have great non-military employees. Percentage wise it just was a better bet to hire military types, as I got more work for the dollar, and I needed every dollar I could get just to keep the lights on.
You ought to look sometime at how many marketing/spam/spyware sites are front-ended by a "search" engine. It gets them classified as search engines in web filter databases.
On nice laptops, there's not much of a gap from a vendor with a good product.
Desktops are another matter entirely. There is a minimum 200% price premium for a comparable performance desktop box. The guts aren't all that different. Most of the components are standard, and Apple charges an arm and a leg for them. I've been shopping. I'd love to have one.
At the end of the day, I just can't justify the price premium. Apple can still be the more expensive brand, that doesn't bother me. It's the price gouging that bothers me. Want to get RAM from Apple when you buy a system? You're going to pay 2-3 times what it's worth. Same for hard disks. Same for the "super" drive (which feature-wise, isn't really super anymore).
And, no, I'm not going to Ebay anything. Ebay is the biggest waste of life nowadays. Too much fraud, theft, and general dishonesty.
Seems to me that I could block a large percentage of spam merely by blocking anything with a FROM or REPLY TO of *.biz & *.info. I'm seriously considering it too. More TLD's would just add to the list that needs blocking.
I have yet to use (or find a useful)* website on one of the new(er) TLD's, and they want to add more?
*That's not to say there aren't any, I just don't frequent them.
Of course this is modded as "Insightful". Come on folks. You can come up with examples of "oppression" by ANY country.
The US has problems, sure. Get OVER it. It is also a GREAT country. Anywhere you have millions of people living together, you have problems. That's why we have government. Most/. readers seem to have this extreme left fantasy view of what they want government to be. (I would love to see LESS of it, which neither major party seems interested in) But that's a whole other argument.
And on the Guantanamo subject, lay off. Those people won't be there forever. They are in better condition now than they were in Afghanistan. They are not being abused, just isolated (yes I realize that can be viewed as a form of abuse). Whatever value they might have as sources of information will be gone soon (if not already), and they'll send them home. You DO remember why they're there, right? Taliban? Extreme fundamentalist terrorism? Abuse of women? Al Quaeda?
And the Liberal/Democrats fail to make ANY allowance in their rhetoric for cost of living. In New York, a school teacher may make over $90K/yr. That makes them "RICH", by the Liberal definition. I guarantee they don't feel rich while they're paying out probably $2K+/mo for rent/mortgage on a small living space, and 1/3 of their paycheck is going straight down the tubes of government excess.
I have no problem with there being a flat tax. 15% is not outrageous. The earlier poster who suggested that we should limit the amount of money one should be able to make is obviously clueless. There are plenty of places in the world that do limit your income (one way or another), and I guarantee you wouldn't be happy there.
My wife had a professor in grad school who kept all such religious documentation (Bible, Koran, etc) on the same shelf in the fiction section of his home library (he had a whole room full of books). He referred to it as a merely OK piece of work.
Could be a problem for weeks. The BIG ISP's do not (or didn't a few years ago) honor TTL's. I used to work for a large ISP. We had tons of problems when we changed a customer's addresses. The AOL's and Earthlink/Mindsprings of the world would force a 7-14 day TTL.
We learned that we had to just deal with it for a week or 2.
Last time I checked, Verizon/BellSouth/etc weren't making 3G network cards and access points for deliverable in-building networking. Nor are they making bridges for short building-to-building links.
I have exactly the opposite opinion of the wireless tech that you do. I could give a shit less about 3G. It's useless to me, as I don't travel much, and have no need for it.
3G still does nothing for the stated purpose of this equipment, which seems to be long range high bandwidth wireless links to provide data service where there currently is none. 3G still needs WIRED towers, which have a decidedly limited range and even more limited throughput as distance increases.
Each application has its' place. I see no hook line and sinker, as there have been a plethora of 3G articles here over the years.
Actually, forcing registration protects everyone. Internet fraud goes two ways. The credit card companies don't like to lose. They WILL charge back the vendor on the whim of the card holder (owned a computer store for 8 yrs, been there).
The only way to protect both parties is to force registration. A thief isn't as likely to go to the effort of registering and having a valid email and physical address that match the credit card company data. Even that isn't a sure thing, but at least it means that they are paying attention.
The hard part for me is that they only use FedEx, and require a signature on delivery (can't leave one on file). Since my wife and I both work, I have to have it delivered to my place of employment. I'm always afraid that the receiving dept is gonna lose it.
There are PLENTY of places FAR cheaper to be than anywhere in California. These places include a good pool of potential employees, friendly business enviornments, transportation hubs. Atlanta and Raleigh come to mind.
Hell, California taxes alone would be enough to convince me to change coasts. Atlanta and Raleigh aren't cheap, but pretty much everything looks cheap compared to Silicon Valley (even afer the dot-bomb).
I live a couple hours outside Atlanta. I know plenty of people that would be happy to have better (or any) jobs there.
I fail to understand the HUGE disconnect that people have about starting a business and having to be in California. The state isn't stable. Taxes are outrageous. Cost of living is truly unbelievable (I have an uncle that lives in Palo Alto). I also have a friend that drives over 2 hrs (40+ miles) to work in San Jose because he can't afford to live anywhere near there.
Good point - I did learn a lot and make my contacts that led to future employment from that store. It did lead to my current good fortune.
The point I'm trying to make is that TODAY, there is no longer enough money in this business selling PC's. And that being self-employed is not the Nirvana that a lot of people in college think it is. It's by far more work than working for someone else. Usually for little to no reward.
IF you start a services based business, you can probably get by. That market is also pretty well saturated. The big boys have most of the lucrative service contracts.
I have worked for a Tier 2 ISP (CLEC), city government, Cisco Systems (dot-bomb layoff), and now a non-profit hospital (that actually makes money and profit shares with the employees).
There's a lot of BS in any job. At least you get some level of security and benefits with a "real" job. I'll never go back unless forced to. I have some ex-employees that have pestered me for years to join them in some sort of new enterprise or the other. It wouldn't happen unless I'd run out of options. I have family to consider now too.
Fortunato has hit most of the nails right on the head. There are a few he didn't even swing at.
I started selling computers in college. Opened a storefront. Did it for 8 yrs. Was a success in every way except financial. We kept our heads above water most of the time.
Margins went from passable (1990) to total crap (late 1997). Margins seemed to move in inverse proportion to my sales. It gets to the point where even doing decent volume and being reasonably well connected isn't worth the time.
98% of my customers are what I now refer to as "End Users" (this is NOT a compliment). Clueless losers who wanted everything for free. When they break something, it's my fault.
Most people have no clue when they go into business. There are LEGIONS of government agencies that show up at your doorstep. Every year it seemed that there was a new agency that I needed to pay protection money to. Tax reform is the best thing ever, if only it happened on the state level where it would make more of a difference. I can't imagine how bad it would have been in California or New York instead of Alabama.
People I meet find out that I ran a business, and will usually end up saying something about how that would be so great (it was, for a while). I then spend 30+ minutes educating them on what they're getting themselves into. I change a lot of minds.
I started my business to do something I liked doing: Working on computers. The last 2 years I spent 75% of my time pushing paper. 80 hrs a week because there was too much to do, and I couldn't afford the extra employee to make up the difference.
Things I got by working for someone else (that I didn't have for 8 yrs): Health insurance, life insurance, retirement, vacation (8 yrs is a LONG time not to take more than a 3 day weekend), 40-50 hr work week, respect, 8 x increase in pay...
AND - 99.8% fewer End Users. (I'm a network admin - 2 layers of support to go through to get to me)
One thing that you should be aware of is that you are NOT (usually) getting the same 9800 Pro that you'd get from ATI.
Dell has the power to bulk order graphics cards to thier own specifications. They can say "leave off this IC" or "use this cheaper (ie slower) memory". It is standard practice to do this. They may actually just license the design and have them built by their own fabrication contractors using their modifications to cut costs.
Either way, it is RARELY the same card. You are frequently limited to using Dell drivers, not ATI drivers, as they've modified the firmware somehow.
I would be very wary of doing this as a method to acquire a cheaper card. I have found that the old adage "You get what you pay for" is almost always true in the computer world.
It occurred to me while reading this article that this isn't all that different (conceptually) from the RIAA stink over streaming media on the internet.
The medium is different, but the content is the same. Why should a radio station pay AGAIN and MORE to retransmit the same content on a different media? Why should the rates be higher over the wire vs. over the air? Conceptually, you could intercept the stream and record it straight to disk. So what? I did that as a kid with my portable stereo in my bedroom.
IANAL, but it looks like the exact same concept. I am inclined to agree with the ruling. BUT - as an earlier poster mentioned, the courts do seem to have a nasty habit of siding with the corporations on these issues.
Your math is somewhat flawed. Tivo ($149) + lifetime ($299) = $448 + TAX. That's only if you get the 40 GB version, add $100 for the 80 GB.
You're better off spending that $100 on a larger hard disk (bout 100GB for $100), and hacking it in.
You negelect to tell people one thing: Standard warranty on any Tivo/DirecTivo is 90 DAYS. Tivo lifetime subscription is linked to the box. Day 91, if your box burns up, you're out the whole bill. The only way you can transfer your subscription is if the box dies and is REPLACED BY THE MANUFACTURER UNDER WARRANTY. Many, many people have been burned by this.
I am a Tivo (series 1) owner. I'm going to build a MythTV box because I can't bring myself to blow another $500 on a single use box that I can't even web browse or play DVD's on. If the experiment fails, I have a PC for my daughter. If it works, I still have a PC for my daughter that also happens to record TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just done the timing BELT change procedure on my 2000 New Beetle TDi, I will testify that it's not fun. Nor is it cheap.
Timing Belt kit from Dieselgeek $175
Special tools (also DG) $229
VAG-COM software and cable $249
Grand total $ 653 + S&H + some random other tool purchases. Add in the short shifter and a few other things I did, and I'm in it for about a grand + 8 hrs of my time doing the change. Next time will be quicker (half maybe?), since I went slow following the excellent guide from Fred's TDi Club (tdiclub.com).
Average price I read online for this service was about $650. It ranged from $600-1000. I like working on my own vehicles, so went for the DIY option. Fortunately VW has a new timing belt that goes for 80K miles instead of the standard 60K (40K for automatics!)mile belt that came on all TDi's through 2002. Supposedly VW opted for the belt for noise reasons. Personally, I could care less, a chain isn't going to add that much noise. If properly covered, should be negligible difference over the sound of the diesel anyway and be good for 200K+ miles.
I have some tire/alignment problems right now, and am only getting 42-44 mpg. Prior to those problems, I was getting 48.
I'm only running dino diesel right now, but am considering blending with biodiesel. That's the nice thing about diesels that most of the hybrids can't claim, you can use a renewable energy resource. No net carbon added to the atmosphere (running B100).
Your book must be really short.
I like 3Com NIC's. Been solid and supported in every OS I've used them in.
Then there's the switching gear. Horrible CLI. Prone to lockups.
I know of a large university that got stranded by 3Com. Their network is ATM backbone, Corebuilder 9000's, etc. Turns out that their particular setup exposes a nasty little bug in the OS, causing the whole core to lock up every 2 or 3 days. Has to be powered cycled to get it going again.
So they call support. Support says "So sorry, we dropped support for our Enterprise equipment last week, the service contract you've been paying isn't worth the paper the purchase order was written on anymore. Thanks for calling, have a nice life".
Last I heard, they had been dealing with this for 3 years due to lack of funding. They did this to a LOT of people. 3Com will not be getting business from me anytime soon.
Same deal here. All my dental work for free.
Of course the other side of that deal is that I married his daughter. I think he got the cheaper end of the deal...
I agree with you 100%. Nuf said.
If Bill Clinton had been doing something on his watch BESIDES getting a blowjob, the war and half trillion dollars would not have been necessary. 9/11 might not have happened. Instead, he cozied up to our enemies. Let opportunities pass to capture or kill Bin Laden. Dismantled our intelligence infrastructure. George Bush is one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen (for a President). But at least he's doing something. He's not stupid, much as a lot of you would like to make him out to be. You don't get to be President by being stupid. Clinton isn't stupid either. I shudder to think how fucked up this world will be in 5 years if Kerry takes over and withdraws from Iraq. That will virutally guarantee that radical fundamentalist Islam does the same thing in Iraq that it did to Iran. You figure out the consequences to the stability of our world if a major piece of the energy supply is suddenly controlled by a culture who would just as soon (and actively tries to) kill you as look at you. I don't want to support either side in politics nowadays. These people are ALL - every one of them - fucked up. The idea that I have to choose from the lesser fucked up side kills me. I would vote libertarian or someone independent, but a vote for anyone else is a vote for Kerry, and I can stand that less than I can Bush. OK
IANIITMP (I Am Not Involved In The Medical Profession)
</DISCLAIMER>
Both of your comments make a lot of sense. It seems to me that it could very well be that high cholesterol provides an enviornment friendly to something like nano-bacteria (or whatever). Or that there is some other factor (such as an immune system vulnerability) that manifests as high cholesterol in people with a susceptibility to heart disease.
What I'm trying to say is that one does not necessarily exclude the other. Both could be related. Maybe I'm not expressing this correctly, but then again, I'm in the profession of moving IP packets, not blood cells.
Not to mention the huge amount of radioactive materials released into the atmosphere by burning coal. We'd be better off with nuclear fisson. At least we could control & contain the byproducts.
I think that susceptibility will depend on what source was stolen. Was it the ENTIRE source? Or was it just pieces? They (the cracking types) may discover a hole in something that exists only in the Enterprise feature set, leaving most of the exposed routers on the Internet un-compromiseable (As most companies aren't going to pony up for the most expensive feature set when all they're doing is shuffling IP packets).
Also could find a problem in basic TCP/IP code, making every Cisco router on the planet a revolving door. I find this scenario highly unlikely, as thier base code is probably a lot more stable and reviewed than the newer, more advanced features.
What it means is that they RAISED thier prices. Simple.
Top that off with raising prices in a recession, it doesn't look like they did poorly at all. Especially considering the dearth of anything new worth listening to in the first place.
The tone of your post is that ex-military people don't deserve the jobs they can get in DC. Probably true in some (or a lot of) cases.
BUT
I used to own a small computer store in a college town. For 8 yrs, my best employees were ROTC(college) or ex-military come back to get a degree. Once I'd gone through a few years, I learned that, as a rule, the military folks were better disciplined, driven, and hard working than the non-military types.
That's not to say that I didn't have great non-military employees. Percentage wise it just was a better bet to hire military types, as I got more work for the dollar, and I needed every dollar I could get just to keep the lights on.
You ought to look sometime at how many marketing/spam/spyware sites are front-ended by a "search" engine. It gets them classified as search engines in web filter databases.
On nice laptops, there's not much of a gap from a vendor with a good product.
Desktops are another matter entirely. There is a minimum 200% price premium for a comparable performance desktop box. The guts aren't all that different. Most of the components are standard, and Apple charges an arm and a leg for them. I've been shopping. I'd love to have one.
At the end of the day, I just can't justify the price premium. Apple can still be the more expensive brand, that doesn't bother me. It's the price gouging that bothers me. Want to get RAM from Apple when you buy a system? You're going to pay 2-3 times what it's worth. Same for hard disks. Same for the "super" drive (which feature-wise, isn't really super anymore).
And, no, I'm not going to Ebay anything. Ebay is the biggest waste of life nowadays. Too much fraud, theft, and general dishonesty.
Seems to me that I could block a large percentage of spam merely by blocking anything with a FROM or REPLY TO of *.biz & *.info. I'm seriously considering it too. More TLD's would just add to the list that needs blocking.
I have yet to use (or find a useful)* website on one of the new(er) TLD's, and they want to add more?
*That's not to say there aren't any, I just don't frequent them.
Of course this is modded as "Insightful". Come on folks. You can come up with examples of "oppression" by ANY country.
/. readers seem to have this extreme left fantasy view of what they want government to be. (I would love to see LESS of it, which neither major party seems interested in) But that's a whole other argument.
The US has problems, sure. Get OVER it. It is also a GREAT country. Anywhere you have millions of people living together, you have problems. That's why we have government. Most
And on the Guantanamo subject, lay off. Those people won't be there forever. They are in better condition now than they were in Afghanistan. They are not being abused, just isolated (yes I realize that can be viewed as a form of abuse). Whatever value they might have as sources of information will be gone soon (if not already), and they'll send them home. You DO remember why they're there, right? Taliban? Extreme fundamentalist terrorism? Abuse of women? Al Quaeda?
And the Liberal/Democrats fail to make ANY allowance in their rhetoric for cost of living. In New York, a school teacher may make over $90K/yr. That makes them "RICH", by the Liberal definition. I guarantee they don't feel rich while they're paying out probably $2K+/mo for rent/mortgage on a small living space, and 1/3 of their paycheck is going straight down the tubes of government excess.
I have no problem with there being a flat tax. 15% is not outrageous. The earlier poster who suggested that we should limit the amount of money one should be able to make is obviously clueless. There are plenty of places in the world that do limit your income (one way or another), and I guarantee you wouldn't be happy there.
My wife had a professor in grad school who kept all such religious documentation (Bible, Koran, etc) on the same shelf in the fiction section of his home library (he had a whole room full of books). He referred to it as a merely OK piece of work.
Could be a problem for weeks. The BIG ISP's do not (or didn't a few years ago) honor TTL's. I used to work for a large ISP. We had tons of problems when we changed a customer's addresses. The AOL's and Earthlink/Mindsprings of the world would force a 7-14 day TTL.
We learned that we had to just deal with it for a week or 2.
Last time I checked, Verizon/BellSouth/etc weren't making 3G network cards and access points for deliverable in-building networking. Nor are they making bridges for short building-to-building links.
I have exactly the opposite opinion of the wireless tech that you do. I could give a shit less about 3G. It's useless to me, as I don't travel much, and have no need for it.
3G still does nothing for the stated purpose of this equipment, which seems to be long range high bandwidth wireless links to provide data service where there currently is none. 3G still needs WIRED towers, which have a decidedly limited range and even more limited throughput as distance increases.
Each application has its' place. I see no hook line and sinker, as there have been a plethora of 3G articles here over the years.
Actually, forcing registration protects everyone. Internet fraud goes two ways. The credit card companies don't like to lose. They WILL charge back the vendor on the whim of the card holder (owned a computer store for 8 yrs, been there).
The only way to protect both parties is to force registration. A thief isn't as likely to go to the effort of registering and having a valid email and physical address that match the credit card company data. Even that isn't a sure thing, but at least it means that they are paying attention.
The hard part for me is that they only use FedEx, and require a signature on delivery (can't leave one on file). Since my wife and I both work, I have to have it delivered to my place of employment. I'm always afraid that the receiving dept is gonna lose it.
There are PLENTY of places FAR cheaper to be than anywhere in California. These places include a good pool of potential employees, friendly business enviornments, transportation hubs. Atlanta and Raleigh come to mind.
Hell, California taxes alone would be enough to convince me to change coasts. Atlanta and Raleigh aren't cheap, but pretty much everything looks cheap compared to Silicon Valley (even afer the dot-bomb).
I live a couple hours outside Atlanta. I know plenty of people that would be happy to have better (or any) jobs there.
I fail to understand the HUGE disconnect that people have about starting a business and having to be in California. The state isn't stable. Taxes are outrageous. Cost of living is truly unbelievable (I have an uncle that lives in Palo Alto). I also have a friend that drives over 2 hrs (40+ miles) to work in San Jose because he can't afford to live anywhere near there.
Good point - I did learn a lot and make my contacts that led to future employment from that store. It did lead to my current good fortune.
The point I'm trying to make is that TODAY, there is no longer enough money in this business selling PC's. And that being self-employed is not the Nirvana that a lot of people in college think it is. It's by far more work than working for someone else. Usually for little to no reward.
IF you start a services based business, you can probably get by. That market is also pretty well saturated. The big boys have most of the lucrative service contracts.
I have worked for a Tier 2 ISP (CLEC), city government, Cisco Systems (dot-bomb layoff), and now a non-profit hospital (that actually makes money and profit shares with the employees).
There's a lot of BS in any job. At least you get some level of security and benefits with a "real" job. I'll never go back unless forced to. I have some ex-employees that have pestered me for years to join them in some sort of new enterprise or the other. It wouldn't happen unless I'd run out of options. I have family to consider now too.
Just my $0.02 worth. The grass is not greener.
Fortunato has hit most of the nails right on the head. There are a few he didn't even swing at.
I started selling computers in college. Opened a storefront. Did it for 8 yrs. Was a success in every way except financial. We kept our heads above water most of the time.
Margins went from passable (1990) to total crap (late 1997). Margins seemed to move in inverse proportion to my sales. It gets to the point where even doing decent volume and being reasonably well connected isn't worth the time.
98% of my customers are what I now refer to as "End Users" (this is NOT a compliment). Clueless losers who wanted everything for free. When they break something, it's my fault.
Most people have no clue when they go into business. There are LEGIONS of government agencies that show up at your doorstep. Every year it seemed that there was a new agency that I needed to pay protection money to. Tax reform is the best thing ever, if only it happened on the state level where it would make more of a difference. I can't imagine how bad it would have been in California or New York instead of Alabama.
People I meet find out that I ran a business, and will usually end up saying something about how that would be so great (it was, for a while). I then spend 30+ minutes educating them on what they're getting themselves into. I change a lot of minds.
I started my business to do something I liked doing: Working on computers. The last 2 years I spent 75% of my time pushing paper. 80 hrs a week because there was too much to do, and I couldn't afford the extra employee to make up the difference.
Things I got by working for someone else (that I didn't have for 8 yrs):
Health insurance, life insurance, retirement, vacation (8 yrs is a LONG time not to take more than a 3 day weekend), 40-50 hr work week, respect, 8 x increase in pay...
AND - 99.8% fewer End Users. (I'm a network admin - 2 layers of support to go through to get to me)
One thing that you should be aware of is that you are NOT (usually) getting the same 9800 Pro that you'd get from ATI.
Dell has the power to bulk order graphics cards to thier own specifications. They can say "leave off this IC" or "use this cheaper (ie slower) memory". It is standard practice to do this. They may actually just license the design and have them built by their own fabrication contractors using their modifications to cut costs.
Either way, it is RARELY the same card. You are frequently limited to using Dell drivers, not ATI drivers, as they've modified the firmware somehow.
I would be very wary of doing this as a method to acquire a cheaper card. I have found that the old adage "You get what you pay for" is almost always true in the computer world.
It occurred to me while reading this article that this isn't all that different (conceptually) from the RIAA stink over streaming media on the internet.
The medium is different, but the content is the same. Why should a radio station pay AGAIN and MORE to retransmit the same content on a different media? Why should the rates be higher over the wire vs. over the air? Conceptually, you could intercept the stream and record it straight to disk. So what? I did that as a kid with my portable stereo in my bedroom.
IANAL, but it looks like the exact same concept. I am inclined to agree with the ruling. BUT - as an earlier poster mentioned, the courts do seem to have a nasty habit of siding with the corporations on these issues.
Your math is somewhat flawed. Tivo ($149) + lifetime ($299) = $448 + TAX. That's only if you get the 40 GB version, add $100 for the 80 GB.
You're better off spending that $100 on a larger hard disk (bout 100GB for $100), and hacking it in.
You negelect to tell people one thing: Standard warranty on any Tivo/DirecTivo is 90 DAYS. Tivo lifetime subscription is linked to the box. Day 91, if your box burns up, you're out the whole bill. The only way you can transfer your subscription is if the box dies and is REPLACED BY THE MANUFACTURER UNDER WARRANTY. Many, many people have been burned by this.
I am a Tivo (series 1) owner. I'm going to build a MythTV box because I can't bring myself to blow another $500 on a single use box that I can't even web browse or play DVD's on. If the experiment fails, I have a PC for my daughter. If it works, I still have a PC for my daughter that also happens to record TV.