In the world of the copyable Ferrari, the company won't make money from building Ferraris. Designing and building the prototype is just an incidental expense - the real money will be made from the servicing the millions of people with Ferrari copies. There's the 3000-mile engine rebuilds, selling Ferrari tires (with patented 7-lug wheels), providing parts for wrecked Ferraris, driving schools, and money from the Ferrari Bikini Team concert tour.
In Martin Caiden's "Dark Messiah", a primitive African tribe knocks down a helicopter gunship squadron using hundreds of giant crossbows. Since the stealth aren't armored, they should be even more vulnerable to giant crossbow bolts than the helicopters.
I'll go with forehead-slapping. Our company ordered all new furniture for the offices: big heavy desks with attached credenzas and file drawers, all with solid wood privacy panels pushed up against the wall jacks on three walls of each office. It took weeks to disassemble the furniture, rewire with low-profile plugs, then reassemble everything.
There are three follow-up books so far: The Edge of Human, Replicant Night, and Eye and Talon. Book 2 was interesting, Book 3 was odd, haven't read the last yet.
I had to drop out of a Chemistry program because the instructors (or rather the grad students they had filling in for them) were unintelligible. Not only could be not understand what they were speaking, but none of us could read their chalkboard writing (half of which was in Chinese). We did figure out that "fus" meant "phosphorous", but we couldn't match up most of the others. After the first few weeks, the instructor was talking to an empty room. It doesn't matter how many PhD's a person has, they're useless if they can't pass the information on (and it's doubly aggravating when you are paying them for it).
Microsoft crippled FAT32 in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Both of these can only format a 32GB FAT32 drive, anything bigger requires NTFS (or a third-party formatter). FAT32 also has a 4GB file size limit which is an issue when dealing with large avi files and DVD rips.
Their collection of external hard drives is often re-shrinkwrapped customer returns. Most of them have not been erased, so there's usually a collection of mp3s and assorted files to rummage through. One may have to buy and return a few before finding a genuinely new drive, but collecting a few hundred gigabytes of music along the way makes up for some of the hassle.
Our company went the other way. The Lotus Notes group was able to remove all (non-Notes) email servers in the other division because "Notes would be easier to support". Anyone in the other divisions who wasn't a Notes admin (meaning everyone) was pink-slipped and escorted out.
I expect their Novell admins to start ripping out the AD controllers any day now...
The RIAA claims $150K in damages and penalties with each copy downloaded. The website allofmp3 was sued for $1.65 TRILLION by multiplying the number of downloads (11 million tracks) by $150K each. It's not conjecture, it's in the court documents, it's the number the RIAA uses to beat down defendants and make the settle for smaller amounts, it's the number they take to Congress to push for more laws to protect them. Multiplied across every download on every networks, the RIAA lawsuits will exceed the world's money supply. (And obviously your sarcasm meter has failed utterly.)
(Troll? Cool. One of my better works, I must say. To all those people who read this as a serious note, get a life.)
In the liquor store shooting, society loses the $50 in the till and an easily-replaced minimum wage clerk ($15K per year, tops). The copyright infringer costs society $150K with every copy. With an internet connection, the pirate could be causing millions or even billions of dollars in damages every day. Imprison the infringers, and the world's money supply doubles.
And since they brought a couple of (armed) Marshals with them, it's gonna happen. Not all of the requests will be sent by mail, a few will be delivered in person. If they already have an order allowing them to access to the records, they can always bring along enough firepower and moving vans to simply take the servers somewhere else no matter how loudly you complain. (It doesn't even have to go to court. As soon as the ISP is out of business, the RIAA drops the case and returns what's left of the servers. Our bad.)
NewEgg doesn't sell the 3.0GHz quad-core, so the $4000 Macpro has no competitor.
The real entry-level MacPro is $2200, which competes quite well a NewEgg pile-o-parts. (Add in the price of Vista Ultimate to the parts pile and the price point looks even better.)
Many companies I've worked with have leased equipment that is replaced every three years when the lease expires. The new machines come every three years, rain or shine. For them, costs nothing. If the next batch of machines were to show up with Linux on them instead of Vista, the cost would be the same since their is no discount (except that their Windows-only software quits working). Open-source software has no effect on their hardware costs.
On the other hand, companies that upgrade purely to run Vista deserve whatever shellacking they get.
My company has no plans to even begin testing Vista until 2009. When we do switch, it will be rolled into the next hardware cycle after that. (About a third of our network runs on Linux, everything else is perfectly happy with XP, so we're in no particular hurry.)
$135 for Office, when bundled with a new system. Vista is effectively free from the large OEMs, since the price is the same whether it has Windows or Linux. For businesses ordering through OEMs, the price to stay on Windows isn't that much (and is a lot less hassle than rebuilding the network to use Linux).
If consumers were forced to an extra pay $1100 for retails copies of Vista and Office, change would happen fast, but the status quo will continue as long as the large OEMs can get 90% discounts on bundled software.
I've switched houses since then, making my wirings about ten years newer so I may have to test a few sockets. Electricity is cheap here, so it wasn't costing me all much to wait for CFL and LED technology to advance as long as I keep on eye how many bulbs I have burning. (The two computers and the television eat more power than the light bulbs anyway.)
I tried CFL bulbs in my house a few years back. We had a 100% failure rate over the next year, and were glad to see them go because of their slow startup times. I'd almost rather use propane lanterns than go back through that fiasco again.
The music and movie industries are often required to pay out money if their product makes money. Singers, directors and writers may have contracts that gives them a share of the profits. The more losses a studio can put on the books - real or imagined - the more money they get to keep for themselves (by transferring to a subsidiary as an expense, or bury it somewhere it can't be tracked). It's more profitable for them to lose money on every product.
A friend of mine had written "See ID" instead of a signature on the back of her card. At one store, she was required to sign the receipt as "See ID" before the clerk would accept it.
Mine are signed the same way. Most clerks look at it, shrug, and ring it through anyway.
Unfortunately, $600 at the Dell store will not buy a low-profile system with an embedded 20" LCD (neither will $1500, since they don't make one). Assemble a decent Core 2 Duo system through Dell's site and add in the $450 20" monitor, and the iMac markup doesn't look so bad for a system with half the footprint. The $999 with the 17" looks even better price-wise.
(And I work at a Dell-only shop. The Mac Pros would be cheaper that what we're buying, but no one wants to draw attention to themselves by buying something other than a Dell.)
Slashdot Mirror
In the world of the copyable Ferrari, the company won't make money from building Ferraris. Designing and building the prototype is just an incidental expense - the real money will be made from the servicing the millions of people with Ferrari copies. There's the 3000-mile engine rebuilds, selling Ferrari tires (with patented 7-lug wheels), providing parts for wrecked Ferraris, driving schools, and money from the Ferrari Bikini Team concert tour.
In Martin Caiden's "Dark Messiah", a primitive African tribe knocks down a helicopter gunship squadron using hundreds of giant crossbows. Since the stealth aren't armored, they should be even more vulnerable to giant crossbow bolts than the helicopters.
I'll go with forehead-slapping. Our company ordered all new furniture for the offices: big heavy desks with attached credenzas and file drawers, all with solid wood privacy panels pushed up against the wall jacks on three walls of each office. It took weeks to disassemble the furniture, rewire with low-profile plugs, then reassemble everything.
There are three follow-up books so far: The Edge of Human, Replicant Night, and Eye and Talon. Book 2 was interesting, Book 3 was odd, haven't read the last yet.
I knew some people that used Diablo II as a long distance phone system. Free real-time chat to anywhere in the world.
I had to drop out of a Chemistry program because the instructors (or rather the grad students they had filling in for them) were unintelligible. Not only could be not understand what they were speaking, but none of us could read their chalkboard writing (half of which was in Chinese). We did figure out that "fus" meant "phosphorous", but we couldn't match up most of the others. After the first few weeks, the instructor was talking to an empty room. It doesn't matter how many PhD's a person has, they're useless if they can't pass the information on (and it's doubly aggravating when you are paying them for it).
Microsoft crippled FAT32 in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Both of these can only format a 32GB FAT32 drive, anything bigger requires NTFS (or a third-party formatter). FAT32 also has a 4GB file size limit which is an issue when dealing with large avi files and DVD rips.
Their collection of external hard drives is often re-shrinkwrapped customer returns. Most of them have not been erased, so there's usually a collection of mp3s and assorted files to rummage through. One may have to buy and return a few before finding a genuinely new drive, but collecting a few hundred gigabytes of music along the way makes up for some of the hassle.
Go with the baby. It'll kind of be a "Fight Club" meets 'Looks Who's Talking"...
Our company went the other way. The Lotus Notes group was able to remove all (non-Notes) email servers in the other division because "Notes would be easier to support". Anyone in the other divisions who wasn't a Notes admin (meaning everyone) was pink-slipped and escorted out.
I expect their Novell admins to start ripping out the AD controllers any day now...
http://www.betanews.com/article/US_Music_Publisher s_Sue_AllofMP3_for_165_Trillion_USD/1166739613
The RIAA claims $150K in damages and penalties with each copy downloaded. The website allofmp3 was sued for $1.65 TRILLION by multiplying the number of downloads (11 million tracks) by $150K each. It's not conjecture, it's in the court documents, it's the number the RIAA uses to beat down defendants and make the settle for smaller amounts, it's the number they take to Congress to push for more laws to protect them. Multiplied across every download on every networks, the RIAA lawsuits will exceed the world's money supply. (And obviously your sarcasm meter has failed utterly.)
(Troll? Cool. One of my better works, I must say. To all those people who read this as a serious note, get a life.)
In the liquor store shooting, society loses the $50 in the till and an easily-replaced minimum wage clerk ($15K per year, tops). The copyright infringer costs society $150K with every copy. With an internet connection, the pirate could be causing millions or even billions of dollars in damages every day. Imprison the infringers, and the world's money supply doubles.
Signing it's not a problem, just add a signing statement that it doesn't apply to the NSA and everything is golden.
And since they brought a couple of (armed) Marshals with them, it's gonna happen. Not all of the requests will be sent by mail, a few will be delivered in person. If they already have an order allowing them to access to the records, they can always bring along enough firepower and moving vans to simply take the servers somewhere else no matter how loudly you complain. (It doesn't even have to go to court. As soon as the ISP is out of business, the RIAA drops the case and returns what's left of the servers. Our bad.)
Only one Slashdot would people naturally assume that the term "new rack in my bedroom" involved computer equipment...
"Weird is an exception (there always seem to be exceptions in English)..."
Weird is also Germanic in origin, which doesn't help matters.
NewEgg doesn't sell the 3.0GHz quad-core, so the $4000 Macpro has no competitor.
The real entry-level MacPro is $2200, which competes quite well a NewEgg pile-o-parts. (Add in the price of Vista Ultimate to the parts pile and the price point looks even better.)
NASA has an 18.4MB 18000 x 18000 jpeg of the Orion nebula. We use it to stress-test our CAD systems at work.
u la_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Orion_Neb
Many companies I've worked with have leased equipment that is replaced every three years when the lease expires. The new machines come every three years, rain or shine. For them, costs nothing. If the next batch of machines were to show up with Linux on them instead of Vista, the cost would be the same since their is no discount (except that their Windows-only software quits working). Open-source software has no effect on their hardware costs.
On the other hand, companies that upgrade purely to run Vista deserve whatever shellacking they get.
My company has no plans to even begin testing Vista until 2009. When we do switch, it will be rolled into the next hardware cycle after that. (About a third of our network runs on Linux, everything else is perfectly happy with XP, so we're in no particular hurry.)
Priced Vista+Office lately?
$135 for Office, when bundled with a new system. Vista is effectively free from the large OEMs, since the price is the same whether it has Windows or Linux. For businesses ordering through OEMs, the price to stay on Windows isn't that much (and is a lot less hassle than rebuilding the network to use Linux).
If consumers were forced to an extra pay $1100 for retails copies of Vista and Office, change would happen fast, but the status quo will continue as long as the large OEMs can get 90% discounts on bundled software.
I've switched houses since then, making my wirings about ten years newer so I may have to test a few sockets. Electricity is cheap here, so it wasn't costing me all much to wait for CFL and LED technology to advance as long as I keep on eye how many bulbs I have burning. (The two computers and the television eat more power than the light bulbs anyway.)
I tried CFL bulbs in my house a few years back. We had a 100% failure rate over the next year, and were glad to see them go because of their slow startup times. I'd almost rather use propane lanterns than go back through that fiasco again.
The music and movie industries are often required to pay out money if their product makes money. Singers, directors and writers may have contracts that gives them a share of the profits. The more losses a studio can put on the books - real or imagined - the more money they get to keep for themselves (by transferring to a subsidiary as an expense, or bury it somewhere it can't be tracked). It's more profitable for them to lose money on every product.
A friend of mine had written "See ID" instead of a signature on the back of her card. At one store, she was required to sign the receipt as "See ID" before the clerk would accept it.
Mine are signed the same way. Most clerks look at it, shrug, and ring it through anyway.
Unfortunately, $600 at the Dell store will not buy a low-profile system with an embedded 20" LCD (neither will $1500, since they don't make one). Assemble a decent Core 2 Duo system through Dell's site and add in the $450 20" monitor, and the iMac markup doesn't look so bad for a system with half the footprint. The $999 with the 17" looks even better price-wise.
(And I work at a Dell-only shop. The Mac Pros would be cheaper that what we're buying, but no one wants to draw attention to themselves by buying something other than a Dell.)