Ehmm... You know, it is not just one page per letter - not hard to notice since the list is alphabetic... There is a "next" button you have to press. So, God of War 1 & 2, Shadow of the Colosus and Psychonauts are all listed with 3 squares. Of course it is not entirely your fault. The site is lousy (they are trying hard to make it impossible to direct link), as is the backward compatibility of the PS3 compared to non-castrated US version.
Unfortunately, it is the EU consumers who will have to live with it... And the sad thing is that by now they are used to being something like "third world consumers" getting all the delays, high prices etc, that they won't even realize what is going on!
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Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy should be mandatory reading material. If you think it is not entirely scientifically accurate, it is only because of the improbability drive after-effects. They should fade away as bistro-math is becoming mainstream...
Strange, I read about this a few hours ago and checked this guy's wikipedia entry, which for some reason got deleted a couple of hours ago.
According to the deleted article Spore will be this guy's first game to be released. Apparently he is known in the dev circles, but he has never released any game he has worked on, and he is probably part of a large team developing Spore.
And I would not be nitpicking here if his arguments made a lot of sense. No fanboy of any kind here, just someone who does not really like lazy or incompetent devs bashing things for the wrong reasons.
What an amazingly subtle sociological experiment! I for one bow to our mouse overlords and their complex socioanalytical probing! How brilliant! How subtle!
For many years I have used domaininvestigator.com and 1and1.com for several domains (the ones on 1and1 are also hosted by them). Never a problem so far, and I haven't heard about them doing anything immoral or "shady" like godaddy, network solutions etc.
Does anyone know the details of this? I mean I always thought Fraunhofer would hold the mp3 patents, and it seems that MS had licensed them, as I guess many others. Does Lucent/AT&T really own mp3 and can go after everybody?
I am saying exactly the same thing. Competition is what brought prices to an all time low (remember how much Intel used to price their non-celeron CPU's?), that is why it is unfortunate when AMD falls behind.
Exactly. Very few hardware journalists can set up tests that are useful for people who don't just load Win XP to play the latest FPS. My office, just like my university lab before, is fully 64-bit linux running custom programs. Anyway, some people (including myself) posted some sample benchmarks here recently (http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2216 76&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=17960 946), but I would like to see some serious benchmarking from hardware sites. Anandtech has done some good benchmarking in the past...
What if the cashier knows you so he has your number, and he calls you before you consume the product and tells you about his mistake and apologises. Then he proposes that you return the product next time you go to shop (pays shipping in the case of Amazon), or he can charge you for it. Again, I am not touching the legal issue (IANAL), but this is the more precise analogy.
PS. And typically slashdot, this is made news over a month and a half after Amazon's letter and over half a month after the deadline Amazon gave for returns.
You can't ask for our sympathy when you are twisting facts.
Amazon's letter was sent before people could receive the shipment. Well except maybe 1-day shipping but you are not talking to a noob - I know that people who choose 1-day shipping for a price mistake to get through are not the "occasional buyers" you describe in your post. In fact, if it was not for greedy individuals ordering dozens of Box Sets (look at the threads) this whole thing would have been milder by a factor of 10 and Amazon would have just ate it.
Now, returning an unopened DVD to Amazon is very easy. I don't see them doing anything differently to what you propose. You object to the wording of the letter?
Amazon is the one big corporation I have found that cares about its customers. Many times they have swallowed return shipping for heavy items way after their 30 day limit (just by asking them politely), and they routinely adjust your charge if they lower their prices (send email) etc.
So, let's get back to the issue. People saw on various threads on the net "Amazon Price Mistake!" logged on to Amazon and started ordering away, hoping their orders will get through. Probably the ebayers were the fist to take advantage of this. Now it was obvious to them that it was an error in the final cost calculation, as the promo rules were clear. There were even threads about the ethics of this on the various fora such as DVD Talk.
Amazon does send many of these orders (my guess is many thousands) and when they realize it they apologise and they ask to pay return shipping to get them back or to charge the right amount. Then people start acusing Amazon.
Wow. Just wow. I think because the general rule is to hate big corporations, we applaud people who try to steal from them? Yes, I would consider it stealing if you try to take advantage of a price mistake (especially if you do it to make money off ebay) AND you complain when the merchant wants to correct it. Yes, if the big corporation does not loose a lot of money, they will not bother you about it (consider it something like advertisment costs) and you would be fine with your conscience. But the fact that Amazon (with the amazing IMHO CS record) asks this, it meens that way too many people took advantage of this (I would bet most not for personal use) that they have to cut back their losses.
Now, IANAL, but I have read many times on slashdot about cases such as the one with the animal (I forgot, was it cow or horse or sth?) that was cheap for meat but was not sterile after all so the court annuled the low price contract. In the animal case the buyer did not even know more than the seller - it was just luck - while with the Amazon situation the buyers were aware of the mistake on the seller part, something which makes the case simpler to me.
About two years ago, my professor asked me to run benchmarks using our lab's codebase to decide what kind of cluster server we were going to buy. I run two kinds of benchmarks, bioinformatics programs in C and text processing programs in Perl. It was clear that the Athlon/Opteron 64bit architecture was the way to go with 80% performance over intel's offering at the time. Then Dell sliced their already much lower prices (compared to AMD-based HP and Sun) to less than half of their first offer and my comments that the Opteron platform would be upgreadable and easier to feed with power were disregarded by the purchasing department. Obviously I was right and the 3.4 Xeons required new air-conditioning and power installations, thus laid disconnected for months. It is not that they used more power and produced more heat per CPU, but they came in twice the numbers since they were slower and cheaper.
Anyway, after that anecdote I just run one of the bioinformatics benchmarks on some of my office's machines. It is a single-threaded edit distance implementation that I cannot post the code to. But it is simple floating point with -O3 the only flag used. The results are:
Note the first two are running beyond spec (OC'd) and are running on SUSE 64bit (and compiling @ 64bit). The other two were not 64bit capable CPU's. This is supportive to the parent's results, more obviously if we calculate the inverse of time per clock cycle and normalize, i.e. we calculate theoretical performance if they all ran at the same clock speed and give speed index 1 to the slowest of the bunch. We have:
There you go. Now I could start playing with flags, but this is enough proof that for some things (especially in 64bit I guess) the Athlon 64 still leads Intel. However, the Core 2 Duo is a much better overclocker which does defeat any AMD advantage as seen in the non-normalized results. Also, I tried the text processing benchmark in which AMD had huge performance advantage as well, but the Core 2 Duo was about 30% faster on the same clock speed.
I really hope AMD comes up with an ace. Firstly because I don't really like Intel (like most almost monopolistic companies their behavior is neither pro-consumer nor pro-market). Secondly because competition is great! Do you guys remember the era before the Athlon, how much a non-celeron Intel CPU cost? Compare that to the great-at-last Core 2 Duo! (If they only had a better sounding name).
I am not sure if you can hire an H1-B when there is a local candidate explaining "the foreigner is better". I know for a fact that there is no way to sponsor someone for a Green Card using that reasoning (you are supposed to hire the local with similar qualifications even if he does look really bad in your job interview with him). I think the H1-B is similar and, yes, your point that "job stealing" comments are irrelevant, but the situation is even simpler than having lower quality "locals". In most cases there are simply no "locals", not even bad ones. We have such low unemployment rates that US citizens don't bother to relocate to get a job, they can easily get one that pleases them right where they want to stay.
H1-B workers are usually foreigners who have just graduated from a US university. They are already willing to work in the US rather than their country, so it doesn't really matter to them where in the US exactly.
Now, if unemployment was bad, US Citizens would be willing to take a job anywhere and it would be a different matter to discuss.
No, that is not how H1-B works. You can't pay an H1-B less than you would pay a US citizen. The process of getting an H1-B even requires advertizing the position in case a US citizen is interested. However, there seems to be a shortage of "highly skilled" US citizens in several areas of the country. I remember my graduate department in CS (Top-30 US university) had about 200 students of whom less than 10 where Americans. Most of the CS undergrads where Americans, but very few of them continued on for various reasons.
Maybe you are an old school gamer like me? Over a decade ago, PC's were no gaming machines and a new console would provide the best gaming experience for a usually long time after its release. However, at some point the PC's started getting expensive components dedicated for games (e.g. Voodoo was not office-PC material) and also PC's started having enough power to render graphics at much higher than TV resolution. From then on, a console will always trail a contemporary high end PC. I think the Xbox360 was the closest to high-end PC performance upon release (remember over a year ago, and it had a GPU based on technology ATI will use in the yet unreleased R600).
Anyway, you are right about the topic being silly. And you need no logarithmic scale - remember the PS3 does not come with a monitor and you don't need the most expensive graphics card, or many GB's of RAM to beat it. Oh, and if you go with the usual hardware deals (e.g. look at fatwallet.com), you can get something better for less than $600 proving once more that the Blue Ray drive is where all the money is going.
Slashdot Mirror
Ehmm... You know, it is not just one page per letter - not hard to notice since the list is alphabetic... There is a "next" button you have to press.
So, God of War 1 & 2, Shadow of the Colosus and Psychonauts are all listed with 3 squares.
Of course it is not entirely your fault. The site is lousy (they are trying hard to make it impossible to direct link), as is the backward compatibility of the PS3 compared to non-castrated US version.
Unfortunately, it is the EU consumers who will have to live with it... And the sad thing is that by now they are used to being something like "third world consumers" getting all the delays, high prices etc, that they won't even realize what is going on!
The French "correction" was done very hastily:
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Go PLAYSTATION ZERO!
Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy should be mandatory reading material.
If you think it is not entirely scientifically accurate, it is only because of the improbability drive after-effects. They should fade away as bistro-math is becoming mainstream...
Strange, I read about this a few hours ago and checked this guy's wikipedia entry, which for some reason got deleted a couple of hours ago.
According to the deleted article Spore will be this guy's first game to be released. Apparently he is known in the dev circles, but he has never released any game he has worked on, and he is probably part of a large team developing Spore.
And I would not be nitpicking here if his arguments made a lot of sense. No fanboy of any kind here, just someone who does not really like lazy or incompetent devs bashing things for the wrong reasons.
If none of the 14 yo slashdotters have mod points today, you are out of luck my friend.
640k is enough for everyone...
What an amazingly subtle sociological experiment! I for one bow to our mouse overlords and their complex socioanalytical probing! How brilliant! How subtle!
For many years I have used domaininvestigator.com and 1and1.com for several domains (the ones on 1and1 are also hosted by them). Never a problem so far, and I haven't heard about them doing anything immoral or "shady" like godaddy, network solutions etc.
Does anyone know the details of this? I mean I always thought Fraunhofer would hold the mp3 patents, and it seems that MS had licensed them, as I guess many others. Does Lucent/AT&T really own mp3 and can go after everybody?
The URL got corrupted, so I was referring to this and this.
I am saying exactly the same thing. Competition is what brought prices to an all time low (remember how much Intel used to price their non-celeron CPU's?), that is why it is unfortunate when AMD falls behind.
I sure have high hopes for Barcelona though.
Exactly.6 76&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=17960 946), but I would like to see some serious benchmarking from hardware sites. Anandtech has done some good benchmarking in the past...
Very few hardware journalists can set up tests that are useful for people who don't just load Win XP to play the latest
FPS.
My office, just like my university lab before, is fully 64-bit linux running custom programs. Anyway, some people (including myself) posted some sample benchmarks here recently (http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=221
The article is aimed at consumers. And this is unfortunate for consumers, as competition drives prices down.
What if the cashier knows you so he has your number, and he calls you before you consume the product and tells you about his mistake and apologises. Then he proposes that you return the product next time you go to shop (pays shipping in the case of Amazon), or he can charge you for it. Again, I am not touching the legal issue (IANAL), but this is the more precise analogy.
PS. And typically slashdot, this is made news over a month and a half after Amazon's letter and over half a month after the deadline Amazon gave for returns.
You can't ask for our sympathy when you are twisting facts.
Amazon's letter was sent before people could receive the shipment. Well except maybe 1-day shipping but you are not talking to a noob - I know that people who choose 1-day shipping for a price mistake to get through are not the "occasional buyers" you describe in your post. In fact, if it was not for greedy individuals ordering dozens of Box Sets (look at the threads) this whole thing would have been milder by a factor of 10 and Amazon would have just ate it.
Now, returning an unopened DVD to Amazon is very easy. I don't see them doing anything differently to what you propose. You object to the wording of the letter?
Yes, if you read the email it is on Amazon's dime. As I said, they have been extremely reasonable with me in numerous occasions.
Amazon is the one big corporation I have found that cares about its customers. Many times they have swallowed return shipping for heavy items way after their 30 day limit (just by asking them politely), and they routinely adjust your charge if they lower their prices (send email) etc.
So, let's get back to the issue. People saw on various threads on the net "Amazon Price Mistake!" logged on to Amazon and started ordering away, hoping their orders will get through. Probably the ebayers were the fist to take advantage of this. Now it was obvious to them that it was an error in the final cost calculation, as the promo rules were clear. There were even threads about the ethics of this on the various fora such as DVD Talk.
Amazon does send many of these orders (my guess is many thousands) and when they realize it they apologise and they ask to pay return shipping to get them back or to charge the right amount. Then people start acusing Amazon.
Wow. Just wow. I think because the general rule is to hate big corporations, we applaud people who try to steal from them? Yes, I would consider it stealing if you try to take advantage of a price mistake (especially if you do it to make money off ebay) AND you complain when the merchant wants to correct it. Yes, if the big corporation does not loose a lot of money, they will not bother you about it (consider it something like advertisment costs) and you would be fine with your conscience. But the fact that Amazon (with the amazing IMHO CS record) asks this, it meens that way too many people took advantage of this (I would bet most not for personal use) that they have to cut back their losses.
Now, IANAL, but I have read many times on slashdot about cases such as the one with the animal (I forgot, was it cow or horse or sth?) that was cheap for meat but was not sterile after all so the court annuled the low price contract. In the animal case the buyer did not even know more than the seller - it was just luck - while with the Amazon situation the buyers were aware of the mistake on the seller part, something which makes the case simpler to me.
Yes, we can understand how it makes you feel better about paying premium prices when you can get a replacement for a failing battery.
Oh boy, I'm switching NOW!
About two years ago, my professor asked me to run benchmarks using our lab's codebase to decide what kind of cluster server we were going to buy. I run two kinds of benchmarks, bioinformatics programs in C and text processing programs in Perl. It was clear that the Athlon/Opteron 64bit architecture was the way to go with 80% performance over intel's offering at the time. Then Dell sliced their already much lower prices (compared to AMD-based HP and Sun) to less than half of their first offer and my comments that the Opteron platform would be upgreadable and easier to feed with power were disregarded by the purchasing department. Obviously I was right and the 3.4 Xeons required new air-conditioning and power installations, thus laid disconnected for months. It is not that they used more power and produced more heat per CPU, but they came in twice the numbers since they were slower and cheaper.
Anyway, after that anecdote I just run one of the bioinformatics benchmarks on some of my office's machines. It is a single-threaded edit distance implementation that I cannot post the code to. But it is simple floating point with -O3 the only flag used. The results are:
Core 2 Duo 6400 @ 3.2GHz 3.308s
Athlon 64 512KB 3500+ @ 2.31 GHz 4.236s
P4 Northwood 512KB @ 3.2GHz 6.54s
Xeon 2MB Gallatin @ 3.4GHz 9.222s
Note the first two are running beyond spec (OC'd) and are running on SUSE 64bit (and compiling @ 64bit). The other two were not 64bit capable CPU's. This is supportive to the parent's results, more obviously if we calculate the inverse of time per clock cycle and normalize, i.e. we calculate theoretical performance if they all ran at the same clock speed and give speed index 1 to the slowest of the bunch. We have:
Athlon 64 3.20
Core 2 Duo 2.96
P4 Northwood 1.50
Xeon Gallatin 1
There you go. Now I could start playing with flags, but this is enough proof that for some things (especially in 64bit I guess) the Athlon 64 still leads Intel. However, the Core 2 Duo is a much better overclocker which does defeat any AMD advantage as seen in the non-normalized results. Also, I tried the text processing benchmark in which AMD had huge performance advantage as well, but the Core 2 Duo was about 30% faster on the same clock speed.
I really hope AMD comes up with an ace. Firstly because I don't really like Intel (like most almost monopolistic companies their behavior is neither pro-consumer nor pro-market). Secondly because competition is great! Do you guys remember the era before the Athlon, how much a non-celeron Intel CPU cost? Compare that to the great-at-last Core 2 Duo! (If they only had a better sounding name).
I am not sure if you can hire an H1-B when there is a local candidate explaining "the foreigner is better". I know for a fact that there is no way to sponsor someone for a Green Card using that reasoning (you are supposed to hire the local with similar qualifications even if he does look really bad in your job interview with him). I think the H1-B is similar and, yes, your point that "job stealing" comments are irrelevant, but the situation is even simpler than having lower quality "locals". In most cases there are simply no "locals", not even bad ones. We have such low unemployment rates that US citizens don't bother to relocate to get a job, they can easily get one that pleases them right where they want to stay.
H1-B workers are usually foreigners who have just graduated from a US university. They are already willing to work in the US rather than their country, so it doesn't really matter to them where in the US exactly.
Now, if unemployment was bad, US Citizens would be willing to take a job anywhere and it would be a different matter to discuss.
No, that is not how H1-B works. You can't pay an H1-B less than you would pay a US citizen. The process of getting an H1-B even requires advertizing the position in case a US citizen is interested. However, there seems to be a shortage of "highly skilled" US citizens in several areas of the country.
I remember my graduate department in CS (Top-30 US university) had about 200 students of whom less than 10 where Americans. Most of the CS undergrads where Americans, but very few of them continued on for various reasons.
Maybe you are an old school gamer like me? Over a decade ago, PC's were no gaming machines and a new console would provide the best gaming experience for a usually long time after its release. However, at some point the PC's started getting expensive components dedicated for games (e.g. Voodoo was not office-PC material) and also PC's started having enough power to render graphics at much higher than TV resolution. From then on, a console will always trail a contemporary high end PC. I think the Xbox360 was the closest to high-end PC performance upon release (remember over a year ago, and it had a GPU based on technology ATI will use in the yet unreleased R600).
Anyway, you are right about the topic being silly. And you need no logarithmic scale - remember the PS3 does not come with a monitor and you don't need the most expensive graphics card, or many GB's of RAM to beat it. Oh, and if you go with the usual hardware deals (e.g. look at fatwallet.com), you can get something better for less than $600 proving once more that the Blue Ray drive is where all the money is going.
Yeah, now let's try the one labeled "Omega 13".