Whatever happened to doing things for the pleasure of doing them?
I agree that is a fine reason for doing something. I was responding to it as a practical alternative to the Walmart thing, not as a fun project. Don't we all have an electricity-gobbling server in the basement?:)
There are things worth more than making money.....but as long as you make your bill rate high enough, all things even out.
Careful with that, if you go too high they'll give it to some other guy! He'll screw it up and then you'll get the work anyway, but in the meantime you don't get as many hours:)
Anyone who is going to sue you is not going to suddenly go back to blend in with the flock. They are a "bad" customer, requiring more resources than the rest of them.
The truth is that you don't have a magic money making machine that takes in time and spits out gold.
No, but I do have a spreadsheet where I keep track of hours worked and then bill for those hours. I'm allowed to work on weekends. I'm allowed to work at 3AM. So literally every moment that I am not working, there is lost potential income. That said, I don't actually put in many hours because I value my time with my kids.
As far as "paying someone else" goes: there is no equivalent service. Even this thing at Walmart is rediculously incomplete.
Don't get me wrong, I know what you are doing isn't the same thing as what Walmart is offering. It's just that to a common person the end result is quite similar, but with much less legwork. I have a kooky project involving a FreeBSD server in the basement with zfs on it, and I can in no way justify it for cost reasons, but it does exactly what I like and it was fun to learn as I set it up. But I would never recommend it as a solution to anyone when there are prepackaged backup and media server solutions, both for on-premises and over your internet connection.
The common man is probably far better off investigating iTunes.
Yeah you are right. Or giving up on their DVD collection and throwing it in a box and just paying for a streaming service. Or buying from Amazon. Not many DVDs are worth the re-watch anyway, older movies are available for streaming, and new hits are on "OnDemand", iTunes or even RedBox.
So draft the contract such that the government (or some agent of the government... another bidder?) gets to report bugs and the service is not complete until the bugs are gone. Sure the bids will cost more, but it seems like an easy way to solve this particular problem.
It probably was when you started, but hard drives are not cheap right now. When I put together my current zfs box, all 4 2TB drives were less than $300 combined. I wouldn't do the project right now because it would cost more like $500.
But yeah, in a month or so, I can't see any reason to re-compress.
While it takes 7 hours to do this, I'm sure you can do other things while this goes on.
Now THIS I can get behind... when I was working from home I would rip my CD collection in. Very little productivity loss just feeding the machine disks while I was working on it anyway. It took months, but no "real" time.
However, are you able to work and get paid during those hours?
I'm lucky enough to, yes. Or sometimes I'll use the waiting room time for a side project. However, I still have to consider the time it takes to drive to the dealer. I only do 2 services a year, and one of those is doubled up with state inspection, which I'm not allowed to do myself anyway. Mostly I use the dealer for regular service because I bought the extended warranty and want to have records of everything through them so that they can't cheat me on some technicality.
I can totally get behind the hobbyist aspect. I set up a FreeBSD zfs server in the basement, mostly because I thought it was an interesting project... there is no way I made out financially when they sell devices on Newegg for about what I spent that sip power more efficiently... but then, I didn't come to Slashdot and claim that every geek should build a server like I did instead of paying for a pre-built!:)
But hey, it's easier to insult than to think clearly, so continue on. I must be new here.
Woah, hey, where did I insult? My apologies if I did - I was definitely not trying to flame.
And it shouldn't be, because that puts a huge fucking hurdle in a consumer's ability to get justice for you fucking them over.
I don't think that's true at all. There are 3 other major postpaid cell providers in the US, plus about a dozen national pre-pay. This guy won an $8000 judgement, which would pay for about 8 years of unlimited service on Sprint. I fail to see any "huge hurdle".
Yes, seriously. Why would I be interested in servicing a customer that just cost me $8000 plus ongoing court costs? Just like bad relationships, you need to know when to fire a bad customer.
That said, I don't like AT&T and am not taking their side - I'm just not at all surprised that they are dumping this customer. My OP was more of a critique of the headline on this story than anything else.
Server hardware? Who needs "server hardware"? Just put drives into any PC that you happen to have lying around. You're intentionally trying to make this harder and more expensive than it needs to be just to prove a point.
LOL, sorry didn't mean for it to read that way - by server hardware I indeed meant a regular PC that would now become your basement server. I have the same thing in my basement: an old HP workstation (for the ECC RAM) loaded with four drives.
If you really are an "hourly guy" then you are in no position to throw money around.
Nonsense - I make good money as a consultant, and I could make even more if I worked weekends. While I don't "throw money around", I'm not so poor either. Time is indeed money for me, as I can trade one for the other freely.
Compressed, that amount of DVDs will fit in your pocket on a single 2.5 inch bus powered USB hard drive. A large Archos will be able to store half of them.
Minimum size for a compressed DVD to xvid is about 700MB, so you are about right. I'd go for 1.5GB each to account for action scenes and codec weirdness - but that would still fit on a single 1TB drive. Of course you'll want to buy two of them so that all your hard work doesn't go "poof" with a drive failure. My basement runs zfs (thus the ECC RAM), but that's to catch bitrot and random corruption - not things you'd be worried about with a media server... who cares if you get some corruption in one of these movies since you have the originals and you probably wouldn't notice it anyhow. Still, you are dropping a couple of hundred bucks on hard drives, even if the server is "free" - though I'd argue that even a free server isn't free since it has value that you could trade towards the cost of paying someone else for the conversion.
Goodness... I don't know how many Saturdays that is, but your whole collection of 580 movies would be done for $1160 (if they were really all worth scanning). At $25/hr you'd make that in 46 hours of work. That's under 7 of your 7-hour Saturdays.
And of course, now you need to buy server hardware, drives, and pay for electricity to keep the movies. And of course you have to back all of that up or lose all your time when the drive or server crashes.
I guess us hourly guys just think about our time differently!
As an aside, it is too bad that hard drive prices went up. Pre-Thai-flood, you could have had the 8TB array needed to redundantly hold the original DVDs at full-res (assuming a mix of single and double sided/layer disks) for under $300.
People would be right to recoil in horror. How can you justify wasting good food when there are millions starving in other countries?
I disagree. First, it is not wasting - it is producing excess in the case of emergency. Pretend the whole world is fed for a moment - you would have to destroy the food, simply because you can't stockpile it forever (nor economically).
Second, you can't use the food anywhere where it would impact food prices - that would defeat the purpose.
Third, you don't want to make a poor country dependent on your emergency food - what happens when you have your emergency and need the food?
Fourth, if you give food to a poor country, what do you think happens to the prices that the local farmers can get for their goods? This only deepens the cycle of subsistence and poverty.
So while I have no problem at all with storing some of the excess in case of emergency - even using it for emergencies in other countries... like famine relief or refugee relief - the sad fact is that most of it would have to get plowed under.
Be careful what you wish for....look what that type of thing has done for the US.
The corn industry alone with its subsidies....and encouragement to grow as much as possible...had led to the obesity and general downfall of decent nutrition in the US, which is consequently spreading to other parts of the world now.
All better than starving.
I'm not saying that the way the US government does it is right, and yes I realize that any government interference is subject to corruption and inefficiency. That said, I still want some kind of subsidy, and even the US version is better than none.
My favored subsidy is to pay farmers to plow excess under. Waste the extra food. People recoil in horror but I think it is the most direct and effective way to overproduce without changing market prices too much. Of course, you have to police the farmers somehow to make sure that they actually dispose of the food, which is where the corruption part comes in...
To be fair, there can be things that a society feels are more important than low prices. For instance, perhaps a subsidy is needed to provide incentive for the small Swiss market, which doesn't even have a common language. If the Swiss people thought that they needed more literature than the free market could support, then it is reasonable to subsidize it. As another example, I happen to support some kind of incentive for over-production of food, because I'd much rather over-pay than run out.
Or is there some special reason why they are allowed have nukes?
The most "special" reason I can think of is that they never signed the non-proliferation treaty, just like India and Pakistan. In 3 months, Iran could legitimately have them, too, by formally withdrawing from the treaty.
Insightful? Platitudes are insightful now? I got a million of 'em: Good things come to those who wait It was meant to be Time heals all wounds Nothing is impossible Perception is reality
In all seriousness, the last decade of Iran policy has been giving peace a chance. Eventually, they will ride the peace train long enough to arrive at Nuclearville. I still don't think that means war (in fact historically it makes it less likely), but peace has definitely been given a chance. Of course, Iran could just pull out of the nonproliferation treaty and then there would be no basis for sanctions... the treaty only requires 3 months notice, and North Korea has established precedence.
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Whatever happened to doing things for the pleasure of doing them?
I agree that is a fine reason for doing something. I was responding to it as a practical alternative to the Walmart thing, not as a fun project. Don't we all have an electricity-gobbling server in the basement? :)
There are things worth more than making money.....but as long as you make your bill rate high enough, all things even out.
Careful with that, if you go too high they'll give it to some other guy! He'll screw it up and then you'll get the work anyway, but in the meantime you don't get as many hours :)
Anyone who is going to sue you is not going to suddenly go back to blend in with the flock. They are a "bad" customer, requiring more resources than the rest of them.
The truth is that you don't have a magic money making machine that takes in time and spits out gold.
No, but I do have a spreadsheet where I keep track of hours worked and then bill for those hours. I'm allowed to work on weekends. I'm allowed to work at 3AM. So literally every moment that I am not working, there is lost potential income. That said, I don't actually put in many hours because I value my time with my kids.
As far as "paying someone else" goes: there is no equivalent service. Even this thing at Walmart is rediculously incomplete.
Don't get me wrong, I know what you are doing isn't the same thing as what Walmart is offering. It's just that to a common person the end result is quite similar, but with much less legwork. I have a kooky project involving a FreeBSD server in the basement with zfs on it, and I can in no way justify it for cost reasons, but it does exactly what I like and it was fun to learn as I set it up. But I would never recommend it as a solution to anyone when there are prepackaged backup and media server solutions, both for on-premises and over your internet connection.
The common man is probably far better off investigating iTunes.
Yeah you are right. Or giving up on their DVD collection and throwing it in a box and just paying for a streaming service. Or buying from Amazon. Not many DVDs are worth the re-watch anyway, older movies are available for streaming, and new hits are on "OnDemand", iTunes or even RedBox.
What are you, an IP lawyer??? :)
You completely misunderstand. They would certainly not get paid to fix bugs, and in fact the full payout would be withheld until they were fixed.
Do we really need to define bugs in a Slashdot forum? I suspect it would take pages of legalese and probably involve an arbitration mechanism.
So draft the contract such that the government (or some agent of the government... another bidder?) gets to report bugs and the service is not complete until the bugs are gone. Sure the bids will cost more, but it seems like an easy way to solve this particular problem.
Storage is pretty cheap
It probably was when you started, but hard drives are not cheap right now. When I put together my current zfs box, all 4 2TB drives were less than $300 combined. I wouldn't do the project right now because it would cost more like $500.
But yeah, in a month or so, I can't see any reason to re-compress.
You again? :)
Yup, sorry. Reading back over TFA, I think my brain confused him and the Prius owner mentioned in the article.
Once again, though - doesn't really change my argument - he can still buy almost 11 months of unlimited on Sprint.
Whoops, sorry - I had read the story earlier in the day and I guess had a brain fart. Doesn't really change my argument, though.
While it takes 7 hours to do this, I'm sure you can do other things while this goes on.
Now THIS I can get behind... when I was working from home I would rip my CD collection in. Very little productivity loss just feeding the machine disks while I was working on it anyway. It took months, but no "real" time.
However, are you able to work and get paid during those hours?
I'm lucky enough to, yes. Or sometimes I'll use the waiting room time for a side project. However, I still have to consider the time it takes to drive to the dealer. I only do 2 services a year, and one of those is doubled up with state inspection, which I'm not allowed to do myself anyway. Mostly I use the dealer for regular service because I bought the extended warranty and want to have records of everything through them so that they can't cheat me on some technicality.
I can totally get behind the hobbyist aspect. I set up a FreeBSD zfs server in the basement, mostly because I thought it was an interesting project... there is no way I made out financially when they sell devices on Newegg for about what I spent that sip power more efficiently... but then, I didn't come to Slashdot and claim that every geek should build a server like I did instead of paying for a pre-built! :)
But hey, it's easier to insult than to think clearly, so continue on. I must be new here.
Woah, hey, where did I insult? My apologies if I did - I was definitely not trying to flame.
And it shouldn't be, because that puts a huge fucking hurdle in a consumer's ability to get justice for you fucking them over.
I don't think that's true at all. There are 3 other major postpaid cell providers in the US, plus about a dozen national pre-pay. This guy won an $8000 judgement, which would pay for about 8 years of unlimited service on Sprint. I fail to see any "huge hurdle".
Seriously?
Yes, seriously. Why would I be interested in servicing a customer that just cost me $8000 plus ongoing court costs? Just like bad relationships, you need to know when to fire a bad customer.
That said, I don't like AT&T and am not taking their side - I'm just not at all surprised that they are dumping this customer. My OP was more of a critique of the headline on this story than anything else.
I just did this - I feel like a sucker for paying T-Mobile 40 extra dollars every month for so long.
Huh? What companies? I'm pretty sure you aren't one of my customers.
Server hardware? Who needs "server hardware"? Just put drives into any PC that you happen to have lying around. You're intentionally trying to make this harder and more expensive than it needs to be just to prove a point.
LOL, sorry didn't mean for it to read that way - by server hardware I indeed meant a regular PC that would now become your basement server. I have the same thing in my basement: an old HP workstation (for the ECC RAM) loaded with four drives.
If you really are an "hourly guy" then you are in no position to throw money around.
Nonsense - I make good money as a consultant, and I could make even more if I worked weekends. While I don't "throw money around", I'm not so poor either. Time is indeed money for me, as I can trade one for the other freely.
Compressed, that amount of DVDs will fit in your pocket on a single 2.5 inch bus powered USB hard drive. A large Archos will be able to store half of them.
Minimum size for a compressed DVD to xvid is about 700MB, so you are about right. I'd go for 1.5GB each to account for action scenes and codec weirdness - but that would still fit on a single 1TB drive. Of course you'll want to buy two of them so that all your hard work doesn't go "poof" with a drive failure. My basement runs zfs (thus the ECC RAM), but that's to catch bitrot and random corruption - not things you'd be worried about with a media server... who cares if you get some corruption in one of these movies since you have the originals and you probably wouldn't notice it anyhow. Still, you are dropping a couple of hundred bucks on hard drives, even if the server is "free" - though I'd argue that even a free server isn't free since it has value that you could trade towards the cost of paying someone else for the conversion.
(About 7 hours total for the day)
Goodness... I don't know how many Saturdays that is, but your whole collection of 580 movies would be done for $1160 (if they were really all worth scanning). At $25/hr you'd make that in 46 hours of work. That's under 7 of your 7-hour Saturdays.
And of course, now you need to buy server hardware, drives, and pay for electricity to keep the movies. And of course you have to back all of that up or lose all your time when the drive or server crashes.
I guess us hourly guys just think about our time differently!
As an aside, it is too bad that hard drive prices went up. Pre-Thai-flood, you could have had the 8TB array needed to redundantly hold the original DVDs at full-res (assuming a mix of single and double sided/layer disks) for under $300.
I have no love for AT&T and I'm glad the guy won, but if one of my customers sued me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat!
People would be right to recoil in horror. How can you justify wasting good food when there are millions starving in other countries?
I disagree. First, it is not wasting - it is producing excess in the case of emergency. Pretend the whole world is fed for a moment - you would have to destroy the food, simply because you can't stockpile it forever (nor economically).
Second, you can't use the food anywhere where it would impact food prices - that would defeat the purpose.
Third, you don't want to make a poor country dependent on your emergency food - what happens when you have your emergency and need the food?
Fourth, if you give food to a poor country, what do you think happens to the prices that the local farmers can get for their goods? This only deepens the cycle of subsistence and poverty.
So while I have no problem at all with storing some of the excess in case of emergency - even using it for emergencies in other countries... like famine relief or refugee relief - the sad fact is that most of it would have to get plowed under.
Be careful what you wish for....look what that type of thing has done for the US.
The corn industry alone with its subsidies....and encouragement to grow as much as possible...had led to the obesity and general downfall of decent nutrition in the US, which is consequently spreading to other parts of the world now.
All better than starving.
I'm not saying that the way the US government does it is right, and yes I realize that any government interference is subject to corruption and inefficiency. That said, I still want some kind of subsidy, and even the US version is better than none.
My favored subsidy is to pay farmers to plow excess under. Waste the extra food. People recoil in horror but I think it is the most direct and effective way to overproduce without changing market prices too much. Of course, you have to police the farmers somehow to make sure that they actually dispose of the food, which is where the corruption part comes in...
To be fair, there can be things that a society feels are more important than low prices. For instance, perhaps a subsidy is needed to provide incentive for the small Swiss market, which doesn't even have a common language. If the Swiss people thought that they needed more literature than the free market could support, then it is reasonable to subsidize it. As another example, I happen to support some kind of incentive for over-production of food, because I'd much rather over-pay than run out.
Or is there some special reason why they are allowed have nukes?
The most "special" reason I can think of is that they never signed the non-proliferation treaty, just like India and Pakistan. In 3 months, Iran could legitimately have them, too, by formally withdrawing from the treaty.
Insightful? Platitudes are insightful now? I got a million of 'em:
Good things come to those who wait
It was meant to be
Time heals all wounds
Nothing is impossible
Perception is reality
In all seriousness, the last decade of Iran policy has been giving peace a chance. Eventually, they will ride the peace train long enough to arrive at Nuclearville. I still don't think that means war (in fact historically it makes it less likely), but peace has definitely been given a chance. Of course, Iran could just pull out of the nonproliferation treaty and then there would be no basis for sanctions... the treaty only requires 3 months notice, and North Korea has established precedence.
Ed Hocken, Police Squad:
"Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50/50 chance of living, though there's only a 10 percent chance of that. "
Wait wait, don't tell me--I think I can figure out on which side of the "Can Video Games Be Art?" debate you fall.
Well, it's not really germane, but I happen to think they should be regarded as artistic works - at least as much as a Hollywood film, for instance.