The thing is that, for many of us, our anecdotal experiences get too close to that number for comfort. In a group of 6 friends, we've had 7 360 replacements, and not a single one of them was sitting on a close cabinet or lying on the carpet. Those that played more had their 360 fail first, as if our Xenon 360s had an expected shelf life, after which they all failed. A few didn't even last 8 months.
I'd not be able to say that 54% is a realistic number, but it's obvious that, compared to any other major piece of electronics, the return rates were rather obscene.
You could make that point about the original xbox, but we are talking about the 360, which is quite different from a PC, hardware wise. The reason porting to and from PC is relatively painless is that they use very similar software APIs, but what is under the hood is pretty different.
Not quite: The US has the latest and greatest medical procedures. However, the big problem is not that the procedures exist, but when they are used. Often enough, an expensive procedure is chosen when it provides no statistically significant benefits over not intervening at all. Even family doctors order a whole lot more tests than a European equivalent.
The best, greatest procedures, used more often, not always provide better results, and that's where the US fails miserably.
Many times you need those questions, unless you have good references about the company to begin with. Without them, you might find yourself in an unhealthy environment that might even make it hard to find another job without quitting first. I've seen places that went for 70 hour weeks for well over half of any given year. I've seen programmers stuck on ancient tools that would make the job not just an ugly chore for anyone used to semi-recent technology, but would also mean that any time spent there would not be useful experience. I've seen on call procedures where people were on call 80% of the time, and received multiple calls a week between 2 am and 6 am.
Nobody wants to give a two weeks notice on a job to learn, in the second they on the new job, that it's not going to work out. There's things in a work environment nobody should put up with: Shouldn't we do some screening to make sure we don't spend even a minute of our time in such an employer?
Often enough, lower ETOs come from companies that employ a wider variety of workers. Most places have the same package for all non-executives, so 2 weeks off to start with good benefits, which might be standard for a white collar worker, might not be what a company that runs call centers or warehouses will provide.
The higher the average pay level in the company, the more sensible it is to give good benefits.
Those salespeople and managers, who you'd make stop working on new cars, are probably in their mid 40s or 50s, and are relatively unemployable. Retraining somebody leads to huge costs, and even if they find some poor sob that would rather have people in their 50s with no experience instead of someone in their 20s with no experience, they'll still end up working for much lower salaries, which has a negative net effect in the economy for quite a few years. With hiring being down instead of up, major layoffs can even start chain reactions, wrecking havoc in the economy.
Instead, it's far better to waste for a short time if we believe that the vehicle demand would naturally go back up in a couple of years, just like it's better to lose a bit of money on a few quarters rather than fire 25% of all competent staff and having to re-hire replacements a year or two later.
Your plan only makes sense if we expected the jobs to have to be subsidized for at least the next 5 years or so. And if that is the case, America is in for a hellish ride regardless.
You must be a lucky one with admins that actually try.
Around here, sysadmins ask for 3 weeks to make a blank PostgreSQL install, with a tablespace in the default mount point of a regular Linux server. When we show them that there's a major privilege escalation problem in their infrastructure and show them a proof of concept that changes the root password to 'maracas', they shrug. They switch authentication methods on the VPN and don't even send an email to tell everyone that their username and password have been changed. They need four tries before they can create a symbolic link. Yes, all of those are real examples from the last 6 months.
I've had the luck of working with a few amazing sysadmins over the years. I'd love to once again work with some sysadmins that made my Unix and networking knowledge seem minuscule. But the admins many of us have to deal with day in and day out make us programmers, which picked programming because we don't want to have anything to do with keeping systems in good working condition, end up requesting root access to management, because no matter how ineffective we are, we still are more effective at administration than the admins themselves.
Great admins should we cherished and appreciated. It's just that they are a lot rarer than they should be.
Any BluRay drive wouldn't do. The PS3 has a BluRay Drive, but it's transfer speeds are much lower than the 360s DVD player. So if you put the same drive in the 360, a good chunk of the games would have longer load times, and those that hide loading with gameplay could end up looking quite choppy.
There's a reason some PS3 games make large installs in the hard drive to run: Without the installs, the games would be unplayable.
The PS2 might have been fast... theoretically. Peak fill rates of untextured pixels and similar benchmarks that are meaningless in the real world.
When it came down to the graphics that the console could create, the poor Gamecube looked a lot better. Less theoretical fill rates, but instead faster memory and faster buses.
You can't really claim that the real in-game performance of PS2 hardware was any better than that of the Gamecube. And the Gamecube was weaker in almost every respect to the XBox
Re:Still useful after all these years...
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 2, Informative
The syntax highlighting is good because it understands all kinds of different content types in different languages.
If your only problem is the default colors, that's a very easy fix: Every color in every highlighting scheme is editable. If you don't like the default, switch the scheme to zenburn or something
And that's just looking at black lung, not the not so immediately deadly, yet quite crippling, diseases that come from mining. For example, Silicosis. it doesn't typically kill miners today, but it'll shorten their lifespan, and lower their quality of life.
Bandwidth costs, at the ISP level, half every 9 months. Even in places with bandwidth caps, in 5 years from now the cost per gigabyte will be so low that game streaming will be a blip.
Besides, Video On Demand is going to be the big bandwidth eater soon, and that's through 100% legal enterprises. There will be pressure on ISPs to provide caps that allow such bandwidth intensive operations, even on the least competitive markets.
Government intervention only speeds up the move towards a monopoly, but it'd be reached regardless. At one point, economic power becomes political power, no matter how you slice it. Think of the old mining towns, where the owner of the mine was the owner of the general store and the saloon: The workers put their salaries right back into their employer's pockets.
Power tends to concentrate, and even if you abolish government, you can't abolish power.
It always amuses me to see how, on every single ad, they end up buying a 14+ pound laptop with a 17 inch monitor, and brag about getting so much more for their buck.
If they care so much about price and power, and a small size is seen as a negative... why in the world are they buying a laptop in the first place?
But something that resembles mercantilism ends up being the equilibrium point in most real markets: As companies get bigger, they seek competitive advantages politically, either by making a government larger and using their influence over it to gain an advantage, or by just trampling over a small government, making themselves a de facto government.
The powerful will always trample over everyone else, whether they are called a corporation or a government.
While Genoa is Columbus' most likely birthplace, we are not certain of it. You are as wrong affirming that he came from Italy as the grandparent was by saying that he wasn't.
I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.
The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".
It doesn't have to be free: Xbox Live is choke full of imbeciles, and people pay for the privilege of having to play with them.
With only one language, chances are that that most graduates' knowledge of basic concepts will be too biased by the lens of their single language. How easy is it to think of functions as parameters coming from a language without closures? If everything you do is compiled, how can design by capability ever make sense? Not to say about how little one can teach about maintainability and readability if one is stuck in one language.
While it's silly to force students to use a different language in every single course, making sure that every student has tried to use at least a few different languages: An assembly, a C descendent and a dynamically typed language. Competence in 3 languages is probably not too much to ask from graduates, and still provides more perspective than a single language education
Racing bikes can handle well enough:Let's look at a track with a decent turn/straight mix, like Laguna Seca. A motogp bike can do 1'23 around the track. That's a bit faster than what a Porche 911 GT3 does on the same track. The bikes take the corners a bit slower, but they are comparable over a race distance.
The MX-5 might be as cheap as roadsters get, but it's no slouch on a curvy road. Plenty of cars with a lot more power will do worse on a track with only very short straights. You have to spend a lot more dough to find a car that is much better than it is for Autocross.
Slashdot Mirror
woosh
The thing is that, for many of us, our anecdotal experiences get too close to that number for comfort. In a group of 6 friends, we've had 7 360 replacements, and not a single one of them was sitting on a close cabinet or lying on the carpet. Those that played more had their 360 fail first, as if our Xenon 360s had an expected shelf life, after which they all failed. A few didn't even last 8 months.
I'd not be able to say that 54% is a realistic number, but it's obvious that, compared to any other major piece of electronics, the return rates were rather obscene.
You could make that point about the original xbox, but we are talking about the 360, which is quite different from a PC, hardware wise. The reason porting to and from PC is relatively painless is that they use very similar software APIs, but what is under the hood is pretty different.
Well fed != get a lot of calories.
I could propose a diet to you that would give you 2500 calories a day, and also kill you. Does that mean I'd be feeding you well?
The people who don't reach 1000 calories a day are just as deserving of our pity as those that get 2000, but are missing all kinds of nutrients.
Not quite: The US has the latest and greatest medical procedures. However, the big problem is not that the procedures exist, but when they are used. Often enough, an expensive procedure is chosen when it provides no statistically significant benefits over not intervening at all. Even family doctors order a whole lot more tests than a European equivalent.
The best, greatest procedures, used more often, not always provide better results, and that's where the US fails miserably.
I get it, they are making a sanitized version of Second Life! Brilliant!
Many times you need those questions, unless you have good references about the company to begin with. Without them, you might find yourself in an unhealthy environment that might even make it hard to find another job without quitting first. I've seen places that went for 70 hour weeks for well over half of any given year. I've seen programmers stuck on ancient tools that would make the job not just an ugly chore for anyone used to semi-recent technology, but would also mean that any time spent there would not be useful experience. I've seen on call procedures where people were on call 80% of the time, and received multiple calls a week between 2 am and 6 am.
Nobody wants to give a two weeks notice on a job to learn, in the second they on the new job, that it's not going to work out. There's things in a work environment nobody should put up with: Shouldn't we do some screening to make sure we don't spend even a minute of our time in such an employer?
Often enough, lower ETOs come from companies that employ a wider variety of workers. Most places have the same package for all non-executives, so 2 weeks off to start with good benefits, which might be standard for a white collar worker, might not be what a company that runs call centers or warehouses will provide.
The higher the average pay level in the company, the more sensible it is to give good benefits.
It's not so clear cut.
Those salespeople and managers, who you'd make stop working on new cars, are probably in their mid 40s or 50s, and are relatively unemployable. Retraining somebody leads to huge costs, and even if they find some poor sob that would rather have people in their 50s with no experience instead of someone in their 20s with no experience, they'll still end up working for much lower salaries, which has a negative net effect in the economy for quite a few years. With hiring being down instead of up, major layoffs can even start chain reactions, wrecking havoc in the economy.
Instead, it's far better to waste for a short time if we believe that the vehicle demand would naturally go back up in a couple of years, just like it's better to lose a bit of money on a few quarters rather than fire 25% of all competent staff and having to re-hire replacements a year or two later.
Your plan only makes sense if we expected the jobs to have to be subsidized for at least the next 5 years or so. And if that is the case, America is in for a hellish ride regardless.
There's no 'could'. There's already some pictures out there. It's coming out this year.
You must be a lucky one with admins that actually try.
Around here, sysadmins ask for 3 weeks to make a blank PostgreSQL install, with a tablespace in the default mount point of a regular Linux server. When we show them that there's a major privilege escalation problem in their infrastructure and show them a proof of concept that changes the root password to 'maracas', they shrug. They switch authentication methods on the VPN and don't even send an email to tell everyone that their username and password have been changed. They need four tries before they can create a symbolic link. Yes, all of those are real examples from the last 6 months.
I've had the luck of working with a few amazing sysadmins over the years. I'd love to once again work with some sysadmins that made my Unix and networking knowledge seem minuscule. But the admins many of us have to deal with day in and day out make us programmers, which picked programming because we don't want to have anything to do with keeping systems in good working condition, end up requesting root access to management, because no matter how ineffective we are, we still are more effective at administration than the admins themselves.
Great admins should we cherished and appreciated. It's just that they are a lot rarer than they should be.
Any BluRay drive wouldn't do. The PS3 has a BluRay Drive, but it's transfer speeds are much lower than the 360s DVD player. So if you put the same drive in the 360, a good chunk of the games would have longer load times, and those that hide loading with gameplay could end up looking quite choppy.
There's a reason some PS3 games make large installs in the hard drive to run: Without the installs, the games would be unplayable.
The PS2 might have been fast... theoretically. Peak fill rates of untextured pixels and similar benchmarks that are meaningless in the real world.
When it came down to the graphics that the console could create, the poor Gamecube looked a lot better. Less theoretical fill rates, but instead faster memory and faster buses.
You can't really claim that the real in-game performance of PS2 hardware was any better than that of the Gamecube. And the Gamecube was weaker in almost every respect to the XBox
The syntax highlighting is good because it understands all kinds of different content types in different languages.
If your only problem is the default colors, that's a very easy fix: Every color in every highlighting scheme is editable. If you don't like the default, switch the scheme to zenburn or something
And that's just looking at black lung, not the not so immediately deadly, yet quite crippling, diseases that come from mining. For example, Silicosis. it doesn't typically kill miners today, but it'll shorten their lifespan, and lower their quality of life.
Bandwidth costs, at the ISP level, half every 9 months. Even in places with bandwidth caps, in 5 years from now the cost per gigabyte will be so low that game streaming will be a blip.
Besides, Video On Demand is going to be the big bandwidth eater soon, and that's through 100% legal enterprises. There will be pressure on ISPs to provide caps that allow such bandwidth intensive operations, even on the least competitive markets.
Government intervention only speeds up the move towards a monopoly, but it'd be reached regardless. At one point, economic power becomes political power, no matter how you slice it. Think of the old mining towns, where the owner of the mine was the owner of the general store and the saloon: The workers put their salaries right back into their employer's pockets.
Power tends to concentrate, and even if you abolish government, you can't abolish power.
They turn their biggest weakness into a strength: The ad affirms that having no body is a good quality in beer!
It always amuses me to see how, on every single ad, they end up buying a 14+ pound laptop with a 17 inch monitor, and brag about getting so much more for their buck.
If they care so much about price and power, and a small size is seen as a negative... why in the world are they buying a laptop in the first place?
But something that resembles mercantilism ends up being the equilibrium point in most real markets: As companies get bigger, they seek competitive advantages politically, either by making a government larger and using their influence over it to gain an advantage, or by just trampling over a small government, making themselves a de facto government.
The powerful will always trample over everyone else, whether they are called a corporation or a government.
While Genoa is Columbus' most likely birthplace, we are not certain of it. You are as wrong affirming that he came from Italy as the grandparent was by saying that he wasn't.
I completely agree.
I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.
The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".
It doesn't have to be free: Xbox Live is choke full of imbeciles, and people pay for the privilege of having to play with them.
With only one language, chances are that that most graduates' knowledge of basic concepts will be too biased by the lens of their single language. How easy is it to think of functions as parameters coming from a language without closures? If everything you do is compiled, how can design by capability ever make sense? Not to say about how little one can teach about maintainability and readability if one is stuck in one language.
While it's silly to force students to use a different language in every single course, making sure that every student has tried to use at least a few different languages: An assembly, a C descendent and a dynamically typed language. Competence in 3 languages is probably not too much to ask from graduates, and still provides more perspective than a single language education
Notes is heaven compared to the 'powers' of Groupwise.
Racing bikes can handle well enough:Let's look at a track with a decent turn/straight mix, like Laguna Seca. A motogp bike can do 1'23 around the track. That's a bit faster than what a Porche 911 GT3 does on the same track. The bikes take the corners a bit slower, but they are comparable over a race distance.
The MX-5 might be as cheap as roadsters get, but it's no slouch on a curvy road. Plenty of cars with a lot more power will do worse on a track with only very short straights. You have to spend a lot more dough to find a car that is much better than it is for Autocross.