DVDs and CDs are interesting at Best Buy. I worked for them in High School in a pretty busy store in the DFW area (TX). I actually learned that they budgeted in about $2000 in stolen CDs and DVDs a month! Basically they assumed that they would lose at least that much. One of our jobs as employees (I was a sales guy) was to keep an eye out for theft to make sure the store stayed under that $2000 mark. As long as we were under, everyone (management included) was happy. We also learned what to watchout for. Apparently, (this is really easy with CDs, a little harder with DVDs) you can cut a small slice in the shrink wrap with your thumbnail and slip out the disc without opening the case or completely unwrapping it. This would allow the thief to slip the disk in their pocket and place the case back on the shelf, which would appear unopened and less suspicious. It was usually pretty easy to find at least a couple of empty CD and/or DVD cases a day throughout the store. If you go into a store now and look for them, often they still arn't hard to find unless employees have already turned them in. Although the hard drive/tile swap thing is unusual (I never heard of it while I worked), empty CD and DVD cases arn't only common, they are planned on and budgeted!
After RTFA, I think some may be a little confused as to what this means from just the summary. Some seem to be interpreting this as a blow to net neutrality. As I understand it, that is not the case. What this means is that the owners of the physical lines (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) now can make independent deals with ISPs that don't own the lines (Earthlink, Speakeasy, etc.) instead of having to let them all have access.
Where this is bad, as I see it, is that now AT&T can basically tell Earthlink that if they want to use their precious copper to bring the Intertubes to peoples homes, it will cost them eleventy billion dollars. So basically, it means AT&T gets to set the price for DSL to whatever they want, and no one else can really compete on price because AT&T can make the cost of use to the third party provider so high that they cannot compete on price. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting something.
Another blog by Mr. Wil Wheaton (Hi CleverNickname!) points out that he got carded trying to buy Dead Rising. Now, I'd bet his not ever carded going into an R rated movie, or at a bar, or if he was to buy cigarettes...any of these activities arguably being as "dangerous" to kids as anything else, but they card him to buy a video game?
Really? I look young for my age (I'm 25, but don't look it) and I get carded all the time, for alcohol, R rated movies, lotto tickets, and yes once or twice a video game. I actually get carded way more for alcohol than anything else with lotto tickets/gambling coming in second (although I don't gamble that often, so it probably isn't a statistically significant sample). It can be a huge deal for a store to be caught selling alcohol and/or tobacco to minors. In many areas, police specifically get underage people to attempt to buy to make sure that the store isn't selling illegally. They store (and possibly clerk) will get punished, why shouldn't the same be true for video games?
I completely agree that it is a parents responsibility to monitor what their kids do, but they can't be there 24/7. Parents have a tough job, especially with the erosion of the middle class. Now, more often than not, both parents are required to work just to make ends meet. They can try their best to instill good values and their sense of wrong and right in their children, but the children will still have the human curiosity about the forbidden and unknown that is in all of us. I think it is a great idea for stores to implement an age limit/carding policy for mature and AO games. If the parents think it is fine for their kid, then they can buy it for them. If you, as an adult want to play the game, you can with no problem. All it prevents is underage children for accessing materials that could be potentially harmful.
The other thing I am tired of is everyone comparing movies to games. They are not the same. A movie is 2 hours with you just sitting there watching. A game is potentially hundreds of hours of time spend engrossed in another environment. In the case of games like GTA, you actually have a game where you are rewarded for committing violent acts. I am a huge fan of GTA and GTA like games (right now I am playing Godfather:Blackhand on the Wii and love it!), but I am not sure that I would let my kids play (if I had any). At minimum, I would like to decide if they should play or not, just like I would like to decide if they should smoke cigarettes, drink, or watch porn. When I decide that they are at an age where they are responsible enough to make the decisions on their own, I will allow them to. Typically 18 seems to be a good age (although like any other generalization, it that isn't always true, sometimes 18 is too high, sometimes too low). If there is legislation passed that doesn't outlaw "adult" material, but helps regulate it by making it more different for children to have access to it, then I would be all for it.
Not $0, $30. I could be completely wrong. I guess no one really knows the true cost of Windows on PCs. I was just trying to point out that the revenue of the adware/trial software that comes preinstalled on a Windows machine could either completely, or partially offset the cost of the Windows license itself. I looked around and I did find a $104 ($89 + tax) number for a refund of Windows XP home to a British customer here. I also found this article which speculates that the cost of XP home is $30.
I also found this story in which a person got a 42 Euro refund for Vista Home Basic. This seems to make the refunds vary wildly, but since you can get XP Home OEM for $89 plus tax here at NewEgg, I kind of doubt that Dell pays what you or I would pay if we were building a computer. My guess is that the guy that got the $89 refund did so because Dell isn't allowed to disclose the price they pay for Windows and the Dell CSR went of a public OEM price from a local vendor. In most of the refund cases I have read about, especially the ones that go to small claims court, seem to usually end with Dell stating that they cannot disclose the price they pay and refunding the cost at a local vendor. Anyway, this seems to point to my price of $30-$40 for XP Home or Vista Basic.
Next, from this article, you get the $60 price of the adware/trial software that comes pre-bundled on Dell machines. Once again, we don't know the exact number, but that link seems to point towards a price in the $60 ballpark.
So to sum up:
* Dell pays Microsoft more that $0, but it is most likely much, much less than you or I would pay if we were building our own computer due to the volume of sales Dell has. I estimate this at around $30-$40.
* Dell makes money from putting trial software on their PCs. This has been estimated at around $60.
* Estimates seem to indicate that base versions of Windows (the kind most home users get) seem to have a negative net cost for Dell (by that I mean to say they make money).
* Ubuntu (hopefully) will not include adware or trial software, so therefore, it costs the same or possibly more than Windows does.
I love Linux. I am typing this from a computer with Edgy installed. I have installed Ubuntu on most of the servers at the company I work for. I love Ubuntu and I hope it continues and is successful. I also still do not see a market for these machines. I fear that Dell will not have many sales, and will discontinue them. I most likely would not buy one because I still need Windows for a few things. Why pay the same or more for a computer with just Ubuntu, when I could get a computer with Ubuntu and Windows myself? Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
So Dell should be making about $100 more on the Ubuntu sales than on the Windows sales
Why? Windows doesn't cost Dell $100 per PC. Although no one has exact numbers, most estimate that Windows costs Dell nothing, they even possible make money. Most seem to estimate that a Windows license costs Dell about $30-$40. Michael Dell has stated before that if a Dell didn't come with all the craplets (free trials, etc) then it would cost about $50-$60 more a PC. $50(craplets profit) - $30(Windows license) = $20(Profit).
Now on the Ubuntu side you have a breakdown of $0(craplets) - $0(Ubuntu "license") = $0. Were you think $100 more for Ubuntu machines because of Windows retail licensing costs or did that number come from somewhere else that I missed? As I see it, since the machines have the same hardware, they only difference is the OS and the craplets. I can't see where else the extra $100 would come from except that possibly the base Ubuntu machines have a slightly nicer configuration than the base Windows machines.
However, in a later episode (The Sting), an Amazonian remarks that Fry "do good snu-snu". Since it didn't kill him, I would conclude that snu-snu is not necessarily fatal.
To continue on with this thought, the Amazonian makes the statement at Fry's funeral and after making her comment, it shows the row behind the Amazonian woman with the other women Fry has slept with in the show (with the exception of his grandmother of course) who give a "meh" he was so-so kind of gesture, which would imply that snu-snu is just a euphemism for sex.
I would agree as well. I registered a domain name through Yahoo when they were doing one of their domain name for $3 promotions. Most of my domains were at GoDaddy. I did not do any hosting at Yahoo, just domain registration and pointed it at my name servers to be hosted elsewhere. After I had the domain through Yahoo for about 8 months, I decided to transfer it go GoDaddy to get all of my domains in one place. GoDaddy would give me the rest of the year I had already paid for plus another year for the normal one year fee, so I figured I wouldn't be losing anything, so there wouldn't be a problem. I transferred the domain to GoDaddy with very little problem. The domain name in question was the only one I had with Yahoo and the 1 year registration for the 1 domain name was the only thing I had ever bought from Yahoo.
The fun started when the 1 year from my original registration date was up. I was looking over my credit card statement and there was a $9.95 charge from Yahoo for domain registration. I checked my Yahoo account and sure enough, they had charged me for the domain that had been at GoDaddy for 4 months. I called them up and after 5 or 6 phone calls speaking with different reps over a couple of days, they finally told me that although they would refund my money, that I should have canceled my account and it was really my fault. I was amazed at the fact that they would charge me even just $9.95 for absolutely nothing and wondered how many times they did it to others and got away with it because they didn't check their credit card statements.
I know they argue that the lack of certain applications and / or drivers is hindering adoption of free software and there is certainly some thruth to it. Well, I don't know. I think as long as I have the choice to exclude the proprietary repositories I'll be fine with it. But I probably wouldn't encourage people to install Ubuntu first, like I did in the past, but instead point them to Fedora.
This is the kind of thing that frustrates me about most Linux users. Ubuntu, or even Freespire/Linspire would be one of the first distros I would suggest. I have been using Gentoo for a while now and just recently switched to Ubuntu. I plugged in my USB thumb drive for the first time yesterday and all of a sudden a dialog box popped up asking what I wanted to do (Open the folder, etc.) and I was AMAZED! I never told it I would have USB thumbdrives. I never put in any obscure automount commands. I didn't have to do a dmesg to see what the device connected as followed by a mount/dev/sdc1/mnt/usb_drive. It just worked. Same with my sound card, video card, network card, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Usually, with most distros I have to spend at least a couple of hours googling and tweaking config files to get at least some of those components working properly. I am all for free software, but I am also for being able to get my work done. The fact of the matter is that some companies either will not or cannot have open drivers. I would much rather have something that worked, and worked without headache that was closed, than nothing at all or a reverse-engineered solution that is flaky at best and never works quite right.
The fact of the matter is this, if anyone wants Linux to have significant desktop market share, then it will have to include proprietary software/drivers. My grandmother, father, sister, or non-computer geek friends with never use a system where they have to edit a configuration file by hand and use google to be able to play their mp3s. They are used to things just working with Windows. Look at the current outrage about Vista. Most problems are because some device or piece of software does not work. Quite often there are workarounds, but people are pissed that they even have to do a workaround. All Linux (without the proprietary drivers/software) is is a bunch of workarounds.
My final thought is this, maybe Linux shouldn't try to for significant desktop market share. I love Linux, I use it on my desktop and on my servers, but it is not for everyone. Maybe Linux should not worry about beating Microsoft for the home user and focus on what it is best for, servers and development.
Depending on the area you live in, there could be a very large number of perfectly good reasons to do so.
Depending on the area you live in, there could be no good reason at all for someone to be standing or stopped for an extended period of time. I live in a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. My street is a court (not a through street). There are only houses on the street and it is not a major crossroads. If someone was stopped in front of my house, it would be clear that they were in front of my house.
If someone was just outside for say 30 min or so, I probably would think nothing of it. If it was late at night or early in the morning, and it lasted for several hours, however, you can bet that I am going to call the cops. No, I don't own the street, but there is no reason for someone to be sitting outside my house like that. I would want someone to check it out. Pretty much every neighborhood in my area is similar.
We had a Raid-5 setup on our major production server with Samba(files, PDC), cups, accounting database, email and today had 2 SCSI hard drive failures at the same time. Before today, we swore that would never happen, but it did. We were very glad to have other backups, including tape.
Slashdot Mirror
DVDs and CDs are interesting at Best Buy. I worked for them in High School in a pretty busy store in the DFW area (TX). I actually learned that they budgeted in about $2000 in stolen CDs and DVDs a month! Basically they assumed that they would lose at least that much. One of our jobs as employees (I was a sales guy) was to keep an eye out for theft to make sure the store stayed under that $2000 mark. As long as we were under, everyone (management included) was happy. We also learned what to watchout for. Apparently, (this is really easy with CDs, a little harder with DVDs) you can cut a small slice in the shrink wrap with your thumbnail and slip out the disc without opening the case or completely unwrapping it. This would allow the thief to slip the disk in their pocket and place the case back on the shelf, which would appear unopened and less suspicious. It was usually pretty easy to find at least a couple of empty CD and/or DVD cases a day throughout the store. If you go into a store now and look for them, often they still arn't hard to find unless employees have already turned them in. Although the hard drive/tile swap thing is unusual (I never heard of it while I worked), empty CD and DVD cases arn't only common, they are planned on and budgeted!
After RTFA, I think some may be a little confused as to what this means from just the summary. Some seem to be interpreting this as a blow to net neutrality. As I understand it, that is not the case. What this means is that the owners of the physical lines (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) now can make independent deals with ISPs that don't own the lines (Earthlink, Speakeasy, etc.) instead of having to let them all have access.
Where this is bad, as I see it, is that now AT&T can basically tell Earthlink that if they want to use their precious copper to bring the Intertubes to peoples homes, it will cost them eleventy billion dollars. So basically, it means AT&T gets to set the price for DSL to whatever they want, and no one else can really compete on price because AT&T can make the cost of use to the third party provider so high that they cannot compete on price. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting something.
Really? I look young for my age (I'm 25, but don't look it) and I get carded all the time, for alcohol, R rated movies, lotto tickets, and yes once or twice a video game. I actually get carded way more for alcohol than anything else with lotto tickets/gambling coming in second (although I don't gamble that often, so it probably isn't a statistically significant sample). It can be a huge deal for a store to be caught selling alcohol and/or tobacco to minors. In many areas, police specifically get underage people to attempt to buy to make sure that the store isn't selling illegally. They store (and possibly clerk) will get punished, why shouldn't the same be true for video games?
I completely agree that it is a parents responsibility to monitor what their kids do, but they can't be there 24/7. Parents have a tough job, especially with the erosion of the middle class. Now, more often than not, both parents are required to work just to make ends meet. They can try their best to instill good values and their sense of wrong and right in their children, but the children will still have the human curiosity about the forbidden and unknown that is in all of us. I think it is a great idea for stores to implement an age limit/carding policy for mature and AO games. If the parents think it is fine for their kid, then they can buy it for them. If you, as an adult want to play the game, you can with no problem. All it prevents is underage children for accessing materials that could be potentially harmful.
The other thing I am tired of is everyone comparing movies to games. They are not the same. A movie is 2 hours with you just sitting there watching. A game is potentially hundreds of hours of time spend engrossed in another environment. In the case of games like GTA, you actually have a game where you are rewarded for committing violent acts. I am a huge fan of GTA and GTA like games (right now I am playing Godfather:Blackhand on the Wii and love it!), but I am not sure that I would let my kids play (if I had any). At minimum, I would like to decide if they should play or not, just like I would like to decide if they should smoke cigarettes, drink, or watch porn. When I decide that they are at an age where they are responsible enough to make the decisions on their own, I will allow them to. Typically 18 seems to be a good age (although like any other generalization, it that isn't always true, sometimes 18 is too high, sometimes too low). If there is legislation passed that doesn't outlaw "adult" material, but helps regulate it by making it more different for children to have access to it, then I would be all for it.
Actually, I don't have bones. I am supported by a system of fluid-filled bladders...
Not $0, $30. I could be completely wrong. I guess no one really knows the true cost of Windows on PCs. I was just trying to point out that the revenue of the adware/trial software that comes preinstalled on a Windows machine could either completely, or partially offset the cost of the Windows license itself. I looked around and I did find a $104 ($89 + tax) number for a refund of Windows XP home to a British customer here. I also found this article which speculates that the cost of XP home is $30.
I also found this story in which a person got a 42 Euro refund for Vista Home Basic. This seems to make the refunds vary wildly, but since you can get XP Home OEM for $89 plus tax here at NewEgg, I kind of doubt that Dell pays what you or I would pay if we were building a computer. My guess is that the guy that got the $89 refund did so because Dell isn't allowed to disclose the price they pay for Windows and the Dell CSR went of a public OEM price from a local vendor. In most of the refund cases I have read about, especially the ones that go to small claims court, seem to usually end with Dell stating that they cannot disclose the price they pay and refunding the cost at a local vendor. Anyway, this seems to point to my price of $30-$40 for XP Home or Vista Basic.
Next, from this article, you get the $60 price of the adware/trial software that comes pre-bundled on Dell machines. Once again, we don't know the exact number, but that link seems to point towards a price in the $60 ballpark.
So to sum up:
* Dell pays Microsoft more that $0, but it is most likely much, much less than you or I would pay if we were building our own computer due to the volume of sales Dell has. I estimate this at around $30-$40.
* Dell makes money from putting trial software on their PCs. This has been estimated at around $60.
* Estimates seem to indicate that base versions of Windows (the kind most home users get) seem to have a negative net cost for Dell (by that I mean to say they make money).
* Ubuntu (hopefully) will not include adware or trial software, so therefore, it costs the same or possibly more than Windows does.
I love Linux. I am typing this from a computer with Edgy installed. I have installed Ubuntu on most of the servers at the company I work for. I love Ubuntu and I hope it continues and is successful. I also still do not see a market for these machines. I fear that Dell will not have many sales, and will discontinue them. I most likely would not buy one because I still need Windows for a few things. Why pay the same or more for a computer with just Ubuntu, when I could get a computer with Ubuntu and Windows myself? Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Why? Windows doesn't cost Dell $100 per PC. Although no one has exact numbers, most estimate that Windows costs Dell nothing, they even possible make money. Most seem to estimate that a Windows license costs Dell about $30-$40. Michael Dell has stated before that if a Dell didn't come with all the craplets (free trials, etc) then it would cost about $50-$60 more a PC. $50(craplets profit) - $30(Windows license) = $20(Profit).
Now on the Ubuntu side you have a breakdown of $0(craplets) - $0(Ubuntu "license") = $0. Were you think $100 more for Ubuntu machines because of Windows retail licensing costs or did that number come from somewhere else that I missed? As I see it, since the machines have the same hardware, they only difference is the OS and the craplets. I can't see where else the extra $100 would come from except that possibly the base Ubuntu machines have a slightly nicer configuration than the base Windows machines.
Haven't you heard? We are in Web 2.0!
To continue on with this thought, the Amazonian makes the statement at Fry's funeral and after making her comment, it shows the row behind the Amazonian woman with the other women Fry has slept with in the show (with the exception of his grandmother of course) who give a "meh" he was so-so kind of gesture, which would imply that snu-snu is just a euphemism for sex.
I would agree as well. I registered a domain name through Yahoo when they were doing one of their domain name for $3 promotions. Most of my domains were at GoDaddy. I did not do any hosting at Yahoo, just domain registration and pointed it at my name servers to be hosted elsewhere. After I had the domain through Yahoo for about 8 months, I decided to transfer it go GoDaddy to get all of my domains in one place. GoDaddy would give me the rest of the year I had already paid for plus another year for the normal one year fee, so I figured I wouldn't be losing anything, so there wouldn't be a problem. I transferred the domain to GoDaddy with very little problem. The domain name in question was the only one I had with Yahoo and the 1 year registration for the 1 domain name was the only thing I had ever bought from Yahoo.
The fun started when the 1 year from my original registration date was up. I was looking over my credit card statement and there was a $9.95 charge from Yahoo for domain registration. I checked my Yahoo account and sure enough, they had charged me for the domain that had been at GoDaddy for 4 months. I called them up and after 5 or 6 phone calls speaking with different reps over a couple of days, they finally told me that although they would refund my money, that I should have canceled my account and it was really my fault. I was amazed at the fact that they would charge me even just $9.95 for absolutely nothing and wondered how many times they did it to others and got away with it because they didn't check their credit card statements.
This is the kind of thing that frustrates me about most Linux users. Ubuntu, or even Freespire/Linspire would be one of the first distros I would suggest. I have been using Gentoo for a while now and just recently switched to Ubuntu. I plugged in my USB thumb drive for the first time yesterday and all of a sudden a dialog box popped up asking what I wanted to do (Open the folder, etc.) and I was AMAZED! I never told it I would have USB thumbdrives. I never put in any obscure automount commands. I didn't have to do a dmesg to see what the device connected as followed by a mount
The fact of the matter is this, if anyone wants Linux to have significant desktop market share, then it will have to include proprietary software/drivers. My grandmother, father, sister, or non-computer geek friends with never use a system where they have to edit a configuration file by hand and use google to be able to play their mp3s. They are used to things just working with Windows. Look at the current outrage about Vista. Most problems are because some device or piece of software does not work. Quite often there are workarounds, but people are pissed that they even have to do a workaround. All Linux (without the proprietary drivers/software) is is a bunch of workarounds.
My final thought is this, maybe Linux shouldn't try to for significant desktop market share. I love Linux, I use it on my desktop and on my servers, but it is not for everyone. Maybe Linux should not worry about beating Microsoft for the home user and focus on what it is best for, servers and development.
Anyway, that is my 2 cents.
Depending on the area you live in, there could be no good reason at all for someone to be standing or stopped for an extended period of time. I live in a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. My street is a court (not a through street). There are only houses on the street and it is not a major crossroads. If someone was stopped in front of my house, it would be clear that they were in front of my house.
If someone was just outside for say 30 min or so, I probably would think nothing of it. If it was late at night or early in the morning, and it lasted for several hours, however, you can bet that I am going to call the cops. No, I don't own the street, but there is no reason for someone to be sitting outside my house like that. I would want someone to check it out. Pretty much every neighborhood in my area is similar.
yes, I am now a zombie...
...with $12!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BTW, thanks for the donation.
Okay, I'll bite. notserpmh@yahoo.com
Well since this is fairly on-topic, anyone want to sign up for a Free Flat Screen under my account?
**ducks head**
Have you ever seen this report
We had a Raid-5 setup on our major production server with Samba(files, PDC), cups, accounting database, email and today had 2 SCSI hard drive failures at the same time. Before today, we swore that would never happen, but it did. We were very glad to have other backups, including tape.