Back in highschool, my girlfriend and I used to have a ball making various crafts out of hard drive platters. I think she still has the large wall art "thing" (not sure what else to call it) we made. If nothing else, they make great objects to throw discus-style at the endless numbers of people trying to hit on your hot geeky girlfriend. (They learn will quick after a platter or two to the forehead.)
If you want to ensure no data will ever come off of the platters, blowtorches work wonders.
[quote]Seriously. 3rd, and then 3.5, and now 4th edition, all within what, six years?? and how long did 2nd last?[/quote]
Six years? Way more than that, buddy. When 4th edition is actually released, it'll have been about decade since 3rd edition first hit store shelves.
3.5 came out four years after 3rd edition. 3rd edition was some 8-10 years after 2nd edition. The game, and yourself I imagine, are a lot older than you realize.:)
A small Mom & Pop shop is not at all worth the effort. Their prices are higher and the service is no better. I walk into a Circuit City, grab what I need, pay, and leave. There isn't any room for a smaller store to improve that process any, unless they offer lower prices or a larger selection, which they don't. In fact, all three of the local computer stores I can think of can fit their entire stock in a single aisle at Best Buy, and most of that stock is either over-priced "gamer" crap (who pays $350 for a PC motherboard, seriously?) or dubious off-brand cheap crap not worth the savings (yay, let's buy a fuzzy, dim, off-brand LCD TV for 1/2 the price of a super crisp and bright Samsung TV, because 1/2 the price for 1/3 the quality makes it a good buy).
The only thing the local computer store closest to me ("Computerz-N-Us") offers that Circuit City doesn't is a couple of overly chatty nerds who don't really know anything more than any big-chain sales people, but they feel like trying to make you think they do by telling you how awesome their self-built home PC is or about the VB programming they used to do in high school, as if you actually give a fuck.
Circuit City, Best Buy, and all the other big electronics stores are three times as long of a drive for me to get to. They're not more convenient in any sense other than that visiting those stores actually results in me finding what I'm looking for.
Nintendo sets the MSRP, but not the Wholesale price. The distributors (the wholesalers) do that. If the distributors are buying them from Nintendo for $200 each and selling them to the small stores for $255, the small stores don't have much choice. Nintendo probably sells units in 1000 lot batches or something similar, and only large retail chains can afford to buy whole lots at a time. So, not only do the large retail stores get more units, they also get higher profits.
This is the way almost all products are handled. The difference here seems to be that the wholesalers small game stores have to go through are being major asshats. Nintendo doesn't get to change that, though. I'd imagine that if Nintendo raised the MSRP, the distributors would just raise their prices, too. For a product in this high demand and low supply, there is no price competition going on at all, not among retailers or wholesalers.
The problem is that most of Nintendo's games aren't really for casual gamers. Fire Emblem is NOT a casual gamer game. It's a hard-core turn-based strategy game. (Granted, the Wii installment is relatively tame on the difficulty-meter compared to some of the earlier ones.) Metroid Prime 3 is awesome beyond all hell... if you're a hardcore gamer. Twilight Princess is a masterpiece... for people looking for 40+ hour action-intense adventure games.
The Wii has a lot of potential for casual gamers, but the casual game library ain't too big yet. (Heck, the Wii game library in general is still pretty small.. but the DS was the same way, it took a year or two before game developers finally figured out how to use the new capabilities in ways that didn't suck.)
AMD admitted there were errors in the early Phenom CPUs back before launch. They even put it in their presentations in the press conferences and such. They also said before launch that they were going to include the proper fix in the revised core used in the higher end Phenom, hence the delay.
Dude, a record 1.8 million units produced each month. You do realize that there is an upper limit on production quantities for items like this, right? The amount of money Nintendo would have to blow to increase production (and the amount of money their suppliers would have to blow) could very easily outstrip their profits, and it won't be a long-term gain since eventually the market will be saturated and production requirements will decrease.
It isn't like you can just produce twice as many units by spending twice as much on production. Don't work that way, buddy. Building more fabs or increasing fab production can require a simply ginarmous amount of money, and that kind of cash is only spent if the company (which would be Nintendo's chip suppliers, not Nintendo itself) expects to be able to continue using the increased production for 10+ years into the future to pay off the expense. Increasing production volumes for a single product that honestly won't be selling that hot in a few years just isn't worth it.
I don't think this is in any way a problem of "sheeple" (god you're a retard) falling for evil Nintendo sales practices: it's just a simple matter of Nintendo not being able to meet an unbelievable and totally unprecedented demand for a videogame console.
It is NOT LEGAL to copy code just because it has no license!
Everything is automatically covered by copyright law, with "all rights reserved," even if no copyright notice or license is provided. This is a core fact of international copyright law. A license does NOT restrict your rights to use a work; the only thing a license is ever able to do is GRANT you rights that you, by default, DO NOT HAVE. "License" literally means "grant permission," you know. By default, you do not have the right to redistribute a work at all without explicit license (that is, permission) from the copyright holder. Again, it does NOT matter whether the original work had any copyright or license at all. If it has none, you are barred from reusing it, period.
(EULAs are tecnically contracts, not licenses, despite the name. Don't confuse them with a normal copyright license.)
Michigan recently passed a law that, among a great many other things, also adds sales/service tax to any kind of out sourced IT work. The law is being reconsidered after the massive outcry from various other industries that also got hit by this nonsense. Michigan is by far the worst state in the union in terms of jobs and economics, and our idiot governor decides to pass legislation that makes businesses even less likely to grow and flourish in Michigan. I mean, who's going to contract to someone who has to add a 6% tax to everything he does? I can't just "eat" the cost, since in the global IT market I'm already working for dirt fucking cheap, so there's no way I can match the rates other contractors offer _and_ pay the 6% tax. Thankfully this will soon (hopefully) be shot down in Michigan again, and hopefully people in Maryland manage to fight the stupidity there, too.
Yeah, I failed to notice you were replying to a post about servers. So, since you asked...
Server heat generation is a HUGE problem in large server farms. Cooling and heat shielding between dense server racks cost a lot of money, and failure to handle the cooling and insulation can cause hardware death on a pretty massive scale. Having just gone through the pain of upgrading a data center that was growing fast and packing more and more hardware into a smaller and smaller amount of space, I can attest to the benefit of using servers that generate way less heat.
Plus, the power consumption reduction is also a big bonus. Sure, the savings on a single machine is small. When you have 15,000 machines, however, the power savings adds up big time.
Having spent several years of my life working in a small office that had a server rack not 15 feet from my desk, I'd also be really, really happy with any technology that reduced the noise level of a server. On hot days it almost required shouting to talk to co-workers closer to my desk than the server rack itself.
All of those advantages are rather moot at this point in time where servers are generally going to need regular hard disks even if they have SSDs, but maybe not for much larger. Most of the servers I've run had 18G or smaller disk drives. Only the SAN servers would need anything bigger than what we can get on an SSD these days. Even the servers that need larger disks might soon be able to switch to SSD, though. A moderate RAID of 64GB SSDs could handle the data sets for most small to medium companies, I'd imagine. I think the government agency I worked for (about 160 employees with about 120 desktops and laptops among them) used barely 2TB between email, documents, and web content, and backups were still on magnetic tape (ick) and secure remote backup services. The county's data set wasn't much larger, despite how much bigger the county is in terms of total employees and total residents.
And really, bringing up the write cycles issue is just silly. It's a non-issue. A cell in an average quality NAND module can sustain over a million writes. Do the math and figure out how many months' worth of constant writing you'd need to reduce the total available usable space on a 32GB flash module in half. You might be surprised to know that hard disks can't sustain infinite writes either, although it can handle way more than a flash module. (Back to non-server land, hard disks can fail pretty quickly due to too many spin-ups/spin-downs, which are quite frequent in laptops and other portables.) Unless you are doing a crapload of constant high-volume disk writing, any hard disk you put in your machine is going to die long before a (non faulty) flash module does. Even if you have some machines that _are_ doing a ton of writing, that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of SSD on all the machines that aren't.
There's a reason that these things are commercialls available only in laptops right now. In a laptop, you boot up a lot (or resume from hibernation a lot, which is equally disk-intensive), so disk seek and read times are incredibly important. Plus, power savings are a huge benefit when you're running a system that has a limited power source. The SSDs generate less heat, which is also hugely important when all your circuitry is compacted into the smallest amount of space possibility, and it allows either for the system to be cooler (hot laptops suck, even typing on them can be uncomfortable) or allow for other components like the CPU and RAM to be sped up since they get a greater share of the system's safe heat generation capacity. The reduced noise is great - try being in a meeting with 20 laptops all with fans whirring away. Finally, the greater lifetime of an SSD (modern hard disks fails way sooner than a modern SSD will, in general) means that the machine doesn't need a new disk with a new OS install and possibly a bunch of lost data on anywhere near as frequent a basis.
Less power and less noise are good for servers and desktops, and the faster seek times can really make a different in performance for many common workloads, but the biggest benefit of SSD is that they make laptops suck way less.
To many people that's all they're looking for. It's like buying an F-350 when the most you use a car for is getting groceries, or getting the biggest house you can possibly afford even though you're a small family of three, and so on.
Remember, it's not just the spammers that profit off of people with small penises. Auto manufacturers, TV manufacturers, home builders, and now Intel all profit off of them too.:)
Years ago, I bought an N64 game from some store (Kmart or something - not Best Buy), and when I got home I found one of the Jell-O jellatin mix tins in place of the cartridge. (They are remarkably similar in dimensions.)
Thankfully the store let me exchange it.
I can see why a store might refuse it. After all, what's to say that I wasn't the one trying to rip off the store by exchanging a tin of jelltin mix for a $65 game?
Many of those "2D" games are probably at least partially 3D. Yeah, there are pure 2D games on DS, but most of them use a lot of 3D background or sprite elements mixed in with all the 2D.
They weren't jailed for spamming. They were jailed for all of the illegal things they did in order to send their spam. Most of it is sent from hacked computers, involves fraud, illegal accounting practices, and various other Real Crimes(tm) that have nothing to do with spam itself. They were jailed for the means they used to send the spam (and collect pay for it), not the sending itself. If they had just mass-mailed a bunch of people non-fraudulent emails from their own machines, it would have been a totally different punishment.
I'll admit, I'm getting a little irritated with my Wii purchase. I've played a handful of games on it, and that's about it - there's nothing else out I want to play. Worse, the only titles coming out in the near future (within the next 6 months) that even sound halfway decent are Nintendo titles.
Where are all the 3rd party developers?
The DS had the same problem. Even now, most of the truly good DS games are Nintendo first-party titles (although I have a number of well-liked third-party titles on my DS). Hopefully the Wii just needs a little more time to build up a library, like the DS did.
This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The jury didn't actually get to make the decision. They're more like a group of consultants for the judge. He has the ability to override them. You can also still appeal a case decided by jury, and appeals courts might even be more interested if they think the jury was fucking around with the law.
What about the inner ear? I'm not sure how all that stuff works (I'm a programmer, not a biologist), but since that handles balance and such, it seems relatively safe to assume that magnetism might also be picked up by the inner ear.
Some humans also have good direction sense. Mine isn't so hot, but when on good days when I can actually navigate off of it, I certainly don't notice anything in my sight. More just that I manage to accurately assess any rotations I make relative to a base heading I managed to remember, which to me again indicates inner ear combined with good judgement and memory, which bird brains might just be better at than human brains.
So it being sight-based doesn't seem so obvious to me.
Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."
Slashdot Mirror
Back in highschool, my girlfriend and I used to have a ball making various crafts out of hard drive platters. I think she still has the large wall art "thing" (not sure what else to call it) we made. If nothing else, they make great objects to throw discus-style at the endless numbers of people trying to hit on your hot geeky girlfriend. (They learn will quick after a platter or two to the forehead.)
If you want to ensure no data will ever come off of the platters, blowtorches work wonders.
[quote]Seriously. 3rd, and then 3.5, and now 4th edition, all within what, six years?? and how long did 2nd last?[/quote]
:)
Six years? Way more than that, buddy. When 4th edition is actually released, it'll have been about decade since 3rd edition first hit store shelves.
3.5 came out four years after 3rd edition. 3rd edition was some 8-10 years after 2nd edition. The game, and yourself I imagine, are a lot older than you realize.
A small Mom & Pop shop is not at all worth the effort. Their prices are higher and the service is no better. I walk into a Circuit City, grab what I need, pay, and leave. There isn't any room for a smaller store to improve that process any, unless they offer lower prices or a larger selection, which they don't. In fact, all three of the local computer stores I can think of can fit their entire stock in a single aisle at Best Buy, and most of that stock is either over-priced "gamer" crap (who pays $350 for a PC motherboard, seriously?) or dubious off-brand cheap crap not worth the savings (yay, let's buy a fuzzy, dim, off-brand LCD TV for 1/2 the price of a super crisp and bright Samsung TV, because 1/2 the price for 1/3 the quality makes it a good buy).
The only thing the local computer store closest to me ("Computerz-N-Us") offers that Circuit City doesn't is a couple of overly chatty nerds who don't really know anything more than any big-chain sales people, but they feel like trying to make you think they do by telling you how awesome their self-built home PC is or about the VB programming they used to do in high school, as if you actually give a fuck.
Circuit City, Best Buy, and all the other big electronics stores are three times as long of a drive for me to get to. They're not more convenient in any sense other than that visiting those stores actually results in me finding what I'm looking for.
Nintendo sets the MSRP, but not the Wholesale price. The distributors (the wholesalers) do that. If the distributors are buying them from Nintendo for $200 each and selling them to the small stores for $255, the small stores don't have much choice. Nintendo probably sells units in 1000 lot batches or something similar, and only large retail chains can afford to buy whole lots at a time. So, not only do the large retail stores get more units, they also get higher profits.
This is the way almost all products are handled. The difference here seems to be that the wholesalers small game stores have to go through are being major asshats. Nintendo doesn't get to change that, though. I'd imagine that if Nintendo raised the MSRP, the distributors would just raise their prices, too. For a product in this high demand and low supply, there is no price competition going on at all, not among retailers or wholesalers.
You can be the Number 4 Inspector, just so long as I don't have to be the Number 2 Inspector. Because, well.. ew.
The problem is that most of Nintendo's games aren't really for casual gamers. Fire Emblem is NOT a casual gamer game. It's a hard-core turn-based strategy game. (Granted, the Wii installment is relatively tame on the difficulty-meter compared to some of the earlier ones.) Metroid Prime 3 is awesome beyond all hell... if you're a hardcore gamer. Twilight Princess is a masterpiece... for people looking for 40+ hour action-intense adventure games.
The Wii has a lot of potential for casual gamers, but the casual game library ain't too big yet. (Heck, the Wii game library in general is still pretty small.. but the DS was the same way, it took a year or two before game developers finally figured out how to use the new capabilities in ways that didn't suck.)
AMD admitted there were errors in the early Phenom CPUs back before launch. They even put it in their presentations in the press conferences and such. They also said before launch that they were going to include the proper fix in the revised core used in the higher end Phenom, hence the delay.
Dude, a record 1.8 million units produced each month. You do realize that there is an upper limit on production quantities for items like this, right? The amount of money Nintendo would have to blow to increase production (and the amount of money their suppliers would have to blow) could very easily outstrip their profits, and it won't be a long-term gain since eventually the market will be saturated and production requirements will decrease.
It isn't like you can just produce twice as many units by spending twice as much on production. Don't work that way, buddy. Building more fabs or increasing fab production can require a simply ginarmous amount of money, and that kind of cash is only spent if the company (which would be Nintendo's chip suppliers, not Nintendo itself) expects to be able to continue using the increased production for 10+ years into the future to pay off the expense. Increasing production volumes for a single product that honestly won't be selling that hot in a few years just isn't worth it.
I don't think this is in any way a problem of "sheeple" (god you're a retard) falling for evil Nintendo sales practices: it's just a simple matter of Nintendo not being able to meet an unbelievable and totally unprecedented demand for a videogame console.
It is NOT LEGAL to copy code just because it has no license!
Everything is automatically covered by copyright law, with "all rights reserved," even if no copyright notice or license is provided. This is a core fact of international copyright law. A license does NOT restrict your rights to use a work; the only thing a license is ever able to do is GRANT you rights that you, by default, DO NOT HAVE. "License" literally means "grant permission," you know. By default, you do not have the right to redistribute a work at all without explicit license (that is, permission) from the copyright holder. Again, it does NOT matter whether the original work had any copyright or license at all. If it has none, you are barred from reusing it, period.
(EULAs are tecnically contracts, not licenses, despite the name. Don't confuse them with a normal copyright license.)
Michigan recently passed a law that, among a great many other things, also adds sales/service tax to any kind of out sourced IT work. The law is being reconsidered after the massive outcry from various other industries that also got hit by this nonsense. Michigan is by far the worst state in the union in terms of jobs and economics, and our idiot governor decides to pass legislation that makes businesses even less likely to grow and flourish in Michigan. I mean, who's going to contract to someone who has to add a 6% tax to everything he does? I can't just "eat" the cost, since in the global IT market I'm already working for dirt fucking cheap, so there's no way I can match the rates other contractors offer _and_ pay the 6% tax. Thankfully this will soon (hopefully) be shot down in Michigan again, and hopefully people in Maryland manage to fight the stupidity there, too.
Yeah, I failed to notice you were replying to a post about servers. So, since you asked...
Server heat generation is a HUGE problem in large server farms. Cooling and heat shielding between dense server racks cost a lot of money, and failure to handle the cooling and insulation can cause hardware death on a pretty massive scale. Having just gone through the pain of upgrading a data center that was growing fast and packing more and more hardware into a smaller and smaller amount of space, I can attest to the benefit of using servers that generate way less heat.
Plus, the power consumption reduction is also a big bonus. Sure, the savings on a single machine is small. When you have 15,000 machines, however, the power savings adds up big time.
Having spent several years of my life working in a small office that had a server rack not 15 feet from my desk, I'd also be really, really happy with any technology that reduced the noise level of a server. On hot days it almost required shouting to talk to co-workers closer to my desk than the server rack itself.
All of those advantages are rather moot at this point in time where servers are generally going to need regular hard disks even if they have SSDs, but maybe not for much larger. Most of the servers I've run had 18G or smaller disk drives. Only the SAN servers would need anything bigger than what we can get on an SSD these days. Even the servers that need larger disks might soon be able to switch to SSD, though. A moderate RAID of 64GB SSDs could handle the data sets for most small to medium companies, I'd imagine. I think the government agency I worked for (about 160 employees with about 120 desktops and laptops among them) used barely 2TB between email, documents, and web content, and backups were still on magnetic tape (ick) and secure remote backup services. The county's data set wasn't much larger, despite how much bigger the county is in terms of total employees and total residents.
And really, bringing up the write cycles issue is just silly. It's a non-issue. A cell in an average quality NAND module can sustain over a million writes. Do the math and figure out how many months' worth of constant writing you'd need to reduce the total available usable space on a 32GB flash module in half. You might be surprised to know that hard disks can't sustain infinite writes either, although it can handle way more than a flash module. (Back to non-server land, hard disks can fail pretty quickly due to too many spin-ups/spin-downs, which are quite frequent in laptops and other portables.) Unless you are doing a crapload of constant high-volume disk writing, any hard disk you put in your machine is going to die long before a (non faulty) flash module does. Even if you have some machines that _are_ doing a ton of writing, that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of SSD on all the machines that aren't.
Yeah, the containers would be designed to not leak in an explosion... just like the Challenger was designed not to explode and kill its crew.
There's a reason that these things are commercialls available only in laptops right now. In a laptop, you boot up a lot (or resume from hibernation a lot, which is equally disk-intensive), so disk seek and read times are incredibly important. Plus, power savings are a huge benefit when you're running a system that has a limited power source. The SSDs generate less heat, which is also hugely important when all your circuitry is compacted into the smallest amount of space possibility, and it allows either for the system to be cooler (hot laptops suck, even typing on them can be uncomfortable) or allow for other components like the CPU and RAM to be sped up since they get a greater share of the system's safe heat generation capacity. The reduced noise is great - try being in a meeting with 20 laptops all with fans whirring away. Finally, the greater lifetime of an SSD (modern hard disks fails way sooner than a modern SSD will, in general) means that the machine doesn't need a new disk with a new OS install and possibly a bunch of lost data on anywhere near as frequent a basis.
Less power and less noise are good for servers and desktops, and the faster seek times can really make a different in performance for many common workloads, but the biggest benefit of SSD is that they make laptops suck way less.
RTFAS - Read the Fucking Article Summary
It wouldn't be YOUR car. It'd be a city-owned car rented at kiosks.
Personally, my fear would be more on the safety implications of a car designed to fold in on itself in the event of a collision.
Apparently you didn't pay much attention to the plot while reviewing, eh?
To many people that's all they're looking for. It's like buying an F-350 when the most you use a car for is getting groceries, or getting the biggest house you can possibly afford even though you're a small family of three, and so on.
:)
Remember, it's not just the spammers that profit off of people with small penises. Auto manufacturers, TV manufacturers, home builders, and now Intel all profit off of them too.
Years ago, I bought an N64 game from some store (Kmart or something - not Best Buy), and when I got home I found one of the Jell-O jellatin mix tins in place of the cartridge. (They are remarkably similar in dimensions.)
Thankfully the store let me exchange it.
I can see why a store might refuse it. After all, what's to say that I wasn't the one trying to rip off the store by exchanging a tin of jelltin mix for a $65 game?
Many of those "2D" games are probably at least partially 3D. Yeah, there are pure 2D games on DS, but most of them use a lot of 3D background or sprite elements mixed in with all the 2D.
They weren't jailed for spamming. They were jailed for all of the illegal things they did in order to send their spam. Most of it is sent from hacked computers, involves fraud, illegal accounting practices, and various other Real Crimes(tm) that have nothing to do with spam itself. They were jailed for the means they used to send the spam (and collect pay for it), not the sending itself. If they had just mass-mailed a bunch of people non-fraudulent emails from their own machines, it would have been a totally different punishment.
I'll admit, I'm getting a little irritated with my Wii purchase. I've played a handful of games on it, and that's about it - there's nothing else out I want to play. Worse, the only titles coming out in the near future (within the next 6 months) that even sound halfway decent are Nintendo titles.
Where are all the 3rd party developers?
The DS had the same problem. Even now, most of the truly good DS games are Nintendo first-party titles (although I have a number of well-liked third-party titles on my DS). Hopefully the Wii just needs a little more time to build up a library, like the DS did.
This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The jury didn't actually get to make the decision. They're more like a group of consultants for the judge. He has the ability to override them. You can also still appeal a case decided by jury, and appeals courts might even be more interested if they think the jury was fucking around with the law.
:)
IANAL too, though.
What about the inner ear? I'm not sure how all that stuff works (I'm a programmer, not a biologist), but since that handles balance and such, it seems relatively safe to assume that magnetism might also be picked up by the inner ear.
Some humans also have good direction sense. Mine isn't so hot, but when on good days when I can actually navigate off of it, I certainly don't notice anything in my sight. More just that I manage to accurately assess any rotations I make relative to a base heading I managed to remember, which to me again indicates inner ear combined with good judgement and memory, which bird brains might just be better at than human brains.
So it being sight-based doesn't seem so obvious to me.
Beatles? Fail.
Led Zeppelin? Fail.
Wait, iTunes doesn't have those either, even under DRM. Hmm...
Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."