I don't know whether or not violence on TV or in video games has a negative impact on children. We argue about Columbine and why these kids ended up the way they did.
I do know that if a child is exposed to sex, drugs, violence, barney or anything else it can be solely blamed on bad parenting. Parents, forget about planning your next cruise, or meeting that special someone now that your divorce is final. Forget about trying for that new premotion to get your career on track. Your job is to raise your children. It is not the job of daycare or school or Gandma. Raising your children is your job. Nothing else matters.
the watch one show while you record another is a bit deceptive: you can't say, watch something on channel 100 and record something on channel 200 as one might be led to believe.
Man I'd be raising hell with them if I were you. All this digital TV they plug and they can't even duplicate the functions of ananlog TV and a VCR.
Is there any digital server that will alow you to tape a broadcast from one channel while watching a broadcast on another channel?
Move to a gas capable of storing more heat. This one's obvious. Of course we've gone in the opposite direction to get away from Freon. Not really a great solution unless we come up with something new.
I believe the new gases (e.g. Puron) are more efficient at this than Freon. I have a new air conditioner that uses Puron. It runs considerably quieter and uses less electricity.
It's unfortunate that many companies hire using keywords and other BS. I was reading a good article in Men's Health last month. They were interviewing the CEO of a, still successful, dot-com company (can't remember which one). He said not to hire to fill a position. Hire good people (read: experience and good thinkers) and find a job for them.
A one-time effort to add 5% more code to your site in the form of ALT tags and text-based navigation makes a world of difference to the 5% of people who can't use the latest and greatest technologies.
Exaclty. Add 5% more code and companies could, potentially, make those 5% of the people new customers. For many companies, that represents a large, untapped, resourse of new customers.
Re: You should note this
From: Disc.PreSales.Email.Support@seagate.com
To: Neil
Hello Neil,
As noted below in the article from PCWorld, 85% of the hard drives in the world are sold through these three companies. All have dropped down on their warranties. If we want to stay in business, we have had to follow suit. This only affects desktop ATA drives, not the three and five year warranties offered on our SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. If PC makers offered the same warranties as the hard drive makers had for years, and if the prices of drives were not so low, as customers have wanted and repeatedly asked for, maintaining three year warranties on our lowest priced drives would still be feasible.
Hard Drive Vendors Shrink Warranties
Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital cite business realities for dropping consumer drive warranties to one year.
PCWorld.com, September 30, 2002
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105491,0 0.asp
Frank Thorsberg
The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.
Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC.
Nobody is pulling products with three-year warranties off the shelves, but new stock sold after October 1 will have only a 12-month warranty. All existing three-year warranties will be honored through the end of the
policy's period.
And even after the new policies take effect, you may be able to get an extended warranty. Some manufacturers may offer the additional coverage for an added fee or in their premium product lines. More commonly, extra coverage could be available from resellers that provide extended service
contracts for other consumer technology products.
Strictly Business
Analyst John Monroe of Gartner/Dataquest applauds the change and says that the impact on quality-conscious consumers will be minimal.
"No way is this reflective of any degradation in quality of the disk drives themselves," Monroe says. "It's strictly a business move. In fact, drives are a lot more reliable than they were ten years ago when they went to the three-year warranty."
Monroe points to the steady drop in prices for disk drives and the move to standard one-year warranties from all the major PC makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Those were the major factors behind the disk drive manufacturers' decision, he says.
"It is a long-overdue business decision for an industry that has delivered the best and most compelling cost and performance and capacity benefits of the whole IT marketplace," he said.
New Policy Details
Maxtor announced its plans first, saying its Fireball, DiamondMax, and DiamondMax Plus ATA drives will have a one-year warranty. The MaxLine premium drives will retain a three-year warranty.
However, Maxtor will not directly offer warranty extensions, leaving that option to its resellers, who may choose to provide the extra service.
Its two biggest competitors have quickly followed suit with similar announcements. Seagate says the company will back all its consumer ATA drives with a one-year warranty.
Western Digital announced a one-year plan for its Protégé and Caviar Advanced brands. It will retain a three-year warranty on its high-powered Caviar special edition model, commonly used in servers.
Western Digital is directly offering an extended warranty option, charging $20 to lengthen the soon-standard one-year warranty to three years. The extension is not available through Western Digital resellers. The company will not provide a warranty longer than three years for a drive, and owners of existing drives (with current three-year warranties) may not extend their drives' warranty, according to the company.
Quality Counts
Disk Drive quality will be unaffected by the move to a 12-month warranty for consumer equipment, the vendors say.
"I understand people say that [a three-year warranty] is part of the value and provides some peace of mind two and a half years from now," says John Paulsen, Seagate's manager of product communications. "Ultimately, some consumers will feel that way, but [the policy change] doesn't reflect on the quality of the product."
The decision is strictly a business issue, say the trio.
The administrative cost of maintaining a standard three-year warranty program is immense and no longer makes good business sense for drive manufacturers, says Rich Rutledge, Western Digital's vice president of marketing.
"When we moved to a three-year warranty, the expense of doing that was phone calls, repair rates, return rates, refurbishments. None of that has really changed," Rutledge says. "What has changed is the average selling price. Back then, the average price was $175. Today, our average selling price is $65 to $75."
All three companies will maintain longer warranties on their enterprise-level drives.
Here is another article from CNET News you may be interested in:
Hard-drive makers weaken warranties
CNET News.com, September 27, 2002
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html
By Richard Shim
Three of the major hard-drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business. Read more about hard-drive makers
PC makers have been pulling back the warranties on their computers in an effort to reduce costs, and hard-drive makers Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are about to follow suit. The three drive companies, which combined have about 85 percent of the drive market, will alter their warranties from three years to one year. The changes will only be for drives sold for desktop PCs and some consumer-electronics products, which traditionally have one-year warranties or less, according to representatives from all three companies.
"We're following the trend in desktop PCs, where they've all switched to one-year warranties," said Stephen DiFranco, vice president of marketing at Maxtor. "This should have no effect on consumers because we hardly ever get returns in the second or third year and it frees up cash that we have to reserve to cover the warranties."
The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.
The move should have little effect on consumers, according to Dave Reinsel, an analyst with research firm IDC. However, the move emphasizes how hard drives are becoming more and more of a commodity as margins become smaller and smaller.
"Back when ASPs (average selling prices) were around $175 and margins were around 15 (percent) to 20 percent, those warranties were justified," said Richard Rutledge, vice president of marketing at Western Digital. "But now, with ASPs around $65 to $75 and margins around 12 (percent) to 15 percent, we're no longer able to afford to provide that as a standard feature."
It may not even matter to consumers that warranties are shorter; it would simply make more of component warranties on par with one another, Reinsel said.
"More than 50 percent of failures occur in the first 90 days of a product's use and even then that rate is less than 0.8 percent," Reinsel said. "This move is yet another lever (for manufacturers) to improve their bottom line...there is no degradation in quality; if anything, reliability keeps going up as the manufacturing process matures."
The only consumers who may be affected are those who buy drives in retail or after they buy a PC. Those consumers will have a shorter warranty period, but Reinsel estimates that market is comparatively small to drives sold with PCs.
More than 37.5 million desktop drives were sold in the second quarter and about 1 million were in the retail category.
The warranty changes come as hard drives are finding their way into a broader range of devices, such as digital video recorders and game consoles. However, consumer-electronics devices are expected to account for less than 10 percent of worldwide hard drive shipments in 2002, according to market researcher IDC.
Changing the warranty was something all the manufacturers wanted to do, but no one wanted to be first, Rutledge said.
"We were all basically playing chicken to see who went first," Rutledge said. "Maxtor took a leadership position...and we're supporting it."
The desktop hard-drive business is one where profits are lean, if present at all, and some, such as Fujitsu, have jumped out of the space opting to concentrate on server or notebook hard drives, where margins are better. Seagate went back to being a private company after it was bought by Veritas Software and an investment group for a $20 billion deal in 2000.
At the time, slim margins and intense competition had decimated profits for Seagate. The highly competitive desktop hard drive industry has not changed much.
"Prices continue to go down and this change in warranties is a response to the competitive nature of the market," Maxtor's DiFranco said.
"We were giving customers something we couldn't afford," Rutledge said.
To put it into perspective, if car makers had followed suit with Disc Drive makers, cars would now get 1,000 miles per gallon and cost 10% as much as they did 10 years ago.
We are not saying we don't understand your feelings, as we do. We wish we could afford to offer the same warranties as we have for years, but with prices what they are, we simply would not be in business any longer. We appreciate your past business and interest in our products, and don't want to lose a valued customer, but we have to do what is necessary to stay in business in this depressed economy. Thank you, Neil!
Thad S.
Disc Presales
Thank you for your interest in Seagate products. If we can be of further assistance please don't hesitate to ask.
Seagate Disc Presales now has a web presence. Please see the webpage below:
http://www.seagate.com/contact/sales/presales/inde x.html
I think the industry has to stop being blinded by clock speed. Before you can improve the speed of the chip there are still bottle necks on the motherboards (e.g. PCI bus, Disk controllers). Also, there is the problem of power consumption and heat.
I think a better approach for the future are smaller less power hungry modular CPUs. We've all seen the evidence of the clusters that makeup super computers. What if all standard computers came with 4 CPUs that used the same power as the P4 today? What if, instead of buying a newer faster computer, you could add CPUs like expansion cards but, at a reasonable price?
Are you 100% garanteed to detect and destroy a submarine? Can you destroy any missiles fired at it?
I would love to see the elevator built but he's right. How could it be defended from someone who doesn't care whether he lives or dies as long as the target is destroyed?
Wouldn't it be better if the Department of Energy had spent the money for this project on utilizing renewable resources instead?
While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
I'm no expert on cryptography. What if you had a smart card. You program that smart card generating an expirable key pair. You get the private key (burned onto the card) and the government gets the public key. Your private key has a "passphrase": your retina print (which never needs to be stored).
Now, to prove you are who you say you are you swipe the card. You private key is compaired to your public key and verified.
Every six months, your key pair becomes invalid and you generate a new pair.
Wah! wah! wah! call it by my name or I'm taking my toys and going home.
No one is denying the great tools that GNU provides. I always install various GNU tools on the Sun boxes I work on to keep me from going crazy. Stop acting so childish. It's this kind of behavior that can give Open Source a reputation of being a bunch of "childish geeks."
Slashdot Mirror
No Netrek? Come on, get a clue :)
The do have one. It's called Konstuct.
No, I don't have my own kids. However, as a foster parent, I often see the results of bad parenting. Not the least of which is bad language.
I do know that if a child is exposed to sex, drugs, violence, barney or anything else it can be solely blamed on bad parenting. Parents, forget about planning your next cruise, or meeting that special someone now that your divorce is final. Forget about trying for that new premotion to get your career on track. Your job is to raise your children. It is not the job of daycare or school or Gandma. Raising your children is your job. Nothing else matters.
This set is sci-fi, fantasy and horror all rolled into one. A very entertaining read.
Bellville is two hours east of Toronto.
Exactly. When will I be able to dictate my notes to my PDA?
the watch one show while you record another is a bit deceptive: you can't say, watch something on channel 100 and record something on channel 200 as one might be led to believe.
Man I'd be raising hell with them if I were you. All this digital TV they plug and they can't even duplicate the functions of ananlog TV and a VCR.
Is there any digital server that will alow you to tape a broadcast from one channel while watching a broadcast on another channel?
I believe the new gases (e.g. Puron) are more efficient at this than Freon. I have a new air conditioner that uses Puron. It runs considerably quieter and uses less electricity.
Good Admins: Priceless.
You will always, need administrators to watch over the network as it changes and grows.
I'm sure the same can be said for programmers.
It's unfortunate that many companies hire using keywords and other BS. I was reading a good article in Men's Health last month. They were interviewing the CEO of a, still successful, dot-com company (can't remember which one). He said not to hire to fill a position. Hire good people (read: experience and good thinkers) and find a job for them.
China is a nuclear power and has been for many years. Their weapons technology is quite high AFAIK.
As I sit here and look at my compter:
I'm not up on my telephony definition but VoiceGenie runs on Linux
Exaclty. Add 5% more code and companies could, potentially, make those 5% of the people new customers. For many companies, that represents a large, untapped, resourse of new customers.
From: Disc.PreSales.Email.Support@seagate.com
To: Neil
Hello Neil,
As noted below in the article from PCWorld, 85% of the hard drives in the world are sold through these three companies. All have dropped down on their warranties. If we want to stay in business, we have had to follow suit. This only affects desktop ATA drives, not the three and five year warranties offered on our SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. If PC makers offered the same warranties as the hard drive makers had for years, and if the prices of drives were not so low, as customers have wanted and repeatedly asked for, maintaining three year warranties on our lowest priced drives would still be feasible.
Hard Drive Vendors Shrink Warranties
Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital cite business realities for dropping consumer drive warranties to one year.
PCWorld.com, September 30, 2002http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105491,
Frank Thorsberg
The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.
Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC.
Nobody is pulling products with three-year warranties off the shelves, but new stock sold after October 1 will have only a 12-month warranty. All existing three-year warranties will be honored through the end of the
policy's period. And even after the new policies take effect, you may be able to get an extended warranty. Some manufacturers may offer the additional coverage for an added fee or in their premium product lines. More commonly, extra coverage could be available from resellers that provide extended servicecontracts for other consumer technology products.
Strictly BusinessAnalyst John Monroe of Gartner/Dataquest applauds the change and says that the impact on quality-conscious consumers will be minimal.
"No way is this reflective of any degradation in quality of the disk drives themselves," Monroe says. "It's strictly a business move. In fact, drives are a lot more reliable than they were ten years ago when they went to the three-year warranty."
Monroe points to the steady drop in prices for disk drives and the move to standard one-year warranties from all the major PC makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Those were the major factors behind the disk drive manufacturers' decision, he says.
"It is a long-overdue business decision for an industry that has delivered the best and most compelling cost and performance and capacity benefits of the whole IT marketplace," he said.
New Policy DetailsMaxtor announced its plans first, saying its Fireball, DiamondMax, and DiamondMax Plus ATA drives will have a one-year warranty. The MaxLine premium drives will retain a three-year warranty.
However, Maxtor will not directly offer warranty extensions, leaving that option to its resellers, who may choose to provide the extra service.
Its two biggest competitors have quickly followed suit with similar announcements. Seagate says the company will back all its consumer ATA drives with a one-year warranty.
Western Digital announced a one-year plan for its Protégé and Caviar Advanced brands. It will retain a three-year warranty on its high-powered Caviar special edition model, commonly used in servers.
Western Digital is directly offering an extended warranty option, charging $20 to lengthen the soon-standard one-year warranty to three years. The extension is not available through Western Digital resellers. The company will not provide a warranty longer than three years for a drive, and owners of existing drives (with current three-year warranties) may not extend their drives' warranty, according to the company.
Quality CountsDisk Drive quality will be unaffected by the move to a 12-month warranty for consumer equipment, the vendors say.
"I understand people say that [a three-year warranty] is part of the value and provides some peace of mind two and a half years from now," says John Paulsen, Seagate's manager of product communications. "Ultimately, some consumers will feel that way, but [the policy change] doesn't reflect on the quality of the product."
The decision is strictly a business issue, say the trio.
The administrative cost of maintaining a standard three-year warranty program is immense and no longer makes good business sense for drive manufacturers, says Rich Rutledge, Western Digital's vice president of marketing.
"When we moved to a three-year warranty, the expense of doing that was phone calls, repair rates, return rates, refurbishments. None of that has really changed," Rutledge says. "What has changed is the average selling price. Back then, the average price was $175. Today, our average selling price is $65 to $75."
All three companies will maintain longer warranties on their enterprise-level drives.
Here is another article from CNET News you may be interested in:
Hard-drive makers weaken warranties
CNET News.com, September 27, 2002
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html
By Richard Shim
Three of the major hard-drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business. Read more about hard-drive makers
PC makers have been pulling back the warranties on their computers in an effort to reduce costs, and hard-drive makers Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are about to follow suit. The three drive companies, which combined have about 85 percent of the drive market, will alter their warranties from three years to one year. The changes will only be for drives sold for desktop PCs and some consumer-electronics products, which traditionally have one-year warranties or less, according to representatives from all three companies.
"We're following the trend in desktop PCs, where they've all switched to one-year warranties," said Stephen DiFranco, vice president of marketing at Maxtor. "This should have no effect on consumers because we hardly ever get returns in the second or third year and it frees up cash that we have to reserve to cover the warranties."
The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.
The move should have little effect on consumers, according to Dave Reinsel, an analyst with research firm IDC. However, the move emphasizes how hard drives are becoming more and more of a commodity as margins become smaller and smaller.
"Back when ASPs (average selling prices) were around $175 and margins were around 15 (percent) to 20 percent, those warranties were justified," said Richard Rutledge, vice president of marketing at Western Digital. "But now, with ASPs around $65 to $75 and margins around 12 (percent) to 15 percent, we're no longer able to afford to provide that as a standard feature."
It may not even matter to consumers that warranties are shorter; it would simply make more of component warranties on par with one another, Reinsel said.
"More than 50 percent of failures occur in the first 90 days of a product's use and even then that rate is less than 0.8 percent," Reinsel said. "This move is yet another lever (for manufacturers) to improve their bottom line...there is no degradation in quality; if anything, reliability keeps going up as the manufacturing process matures."
The only consumers who may be affected are those who buy drives in retail or after they buy a PC. Those consumers will have a shorter warranty period, but Reinsel estimates that market is comparatively small to drives sold with PCs.
More than 37.5 million desktop drives were sold in the second quarter and about 1 million were in the retail category.
The warranty changes come as hard drives are finding their way into a broader range of devices, such as digital video recorders and game consoles. However, consumer-electronics devices are expected to account for less than 10 percent of worldwide hard drive shipments in 2002, according to market researcher IDC.
Changing the warranty was something all the manufacturers wanted to do, but no one wanted to be first, Rutledge said.
"We were all basically playing chicken to see who went first," Rutledge said. "Maxtor took a leadership position...and we're supporting it."
The desktop hard-drive business is one where profits are lean, if present at all, and some, such as Fujitsu, have jumped out of the space opting to concentrate on server or notebook hard drives, where margins are better. Seagate went back to being a private company after it was bought by Veritas Software and an investment group for a $20 billion deal in 2000.
At the time, slim margins and intense competition had decimated profits for Seagate. The highly competitive desktop hard drive industry has not changed much.
"Prices continue to go down and this change in warranties is a response to the competitive nature of the market," Maxtor's DiFranco said.
"We were giving customers something we couldn't afford," Rutledge said.
To put it into perspective, if car makers had followed suit with Disc Drive makers, cars would now get 1,000 miles per gallon and cost 10% as much as they did 10 years ago.
We are not saying we don't understand your feelings, as we do. We wish we could afford to offer the same warranties as we have for years, but with prices what they are, we simply would not be in business any longer. We appreciate your past business and interest in our products, and don't want to lose a valued customer, but we have to do what is necessary to stay in business in this depressed economy. Thank you, Neil!
Thad S.Disc Presales
Thank you for your interest in Seagate products. If we can be of further assistance please don't hesitate to ask.
Seagate Disc Presales now has a web presence. Please see the webpage below:
http://www.seagate.com/contact/sales/presales/ind
Fuels cells to be allowed on planes
Seagate
Western Digital
Maxtor
Quantum
I think a better approach for the future are smaller less power hungry modular CPUs. We've all seen the evidence of the clusters that makeup super computers. What if all standard computers came with 4 CPUs that used the same power as the P4 today? What if, instead of buying a newer faster computer, you could add CPUs like expansion cards but, at a reasonable price?
I would love to see the elevator built but he's right. How could it be defended from someone who doesn't care whether he lives or dies as long as the target is destroyed?
While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
If quantum computers can crunch huge numbers can't they generate huge random keys aswell?
Now, to prove you are who you say you are you swipe the card. You private key is compaired to your public key and verified.
Every six months, your key pair becomes invalid and you generate a new pair.
No one is denying the great tools that GNU provides. I always install various GNU tools on the Sun boxes I work on to keep me from going crazy. Stop acting so childish. It's this kind of behavior that can give Open Source a reputation of being a bunch of "childish geeks."
I'd prefer a keyboard, mouse and/or man sized joy stick to those little controller pads any day.