Walmart being open 24/7 is the best part of this news. I'm going on faith that they will stock decent merchandise. But the important thing that is that they will be open when my next PSU blows up at 2am on a Sunday.
I am not aware of any other computer parts retailer who has done that, certainly there are none in my area.
1) Computer parts source that's open 24/7. There have been many times when I needed a part urgently in the middle of the night or even on weekends when the local computer stores, Frys, Compusa, etc, just are not open. Walmart never closes.
2) Price competition. I support my local computer shop when I can but he wants $80 for the same PSU Newegg sells for $40. Frys will sell me one for $60, if they actually have it in stock. Walmart is likely to bring parts to market at the lower end of that price scale and there won't be shipping costs.
Now before people jump up and down and say that doesn't support the local guy, yeah, I agree. But he's already priced himself out of the market when I can order the same thing from Newegg and pay for next-day shipping and still get it it for less money -and get it delivered early in the AM before the local store even opens.
The main question is, WHAT brands is Walmart going to sell. If they go low-end, then it will only be useful for basic parts. I'm not going to buy much less use a no-name $15 PSU. Fans and parts, OK, but I want decent brands for drives, cases, motherboards, videocards, etc.
Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
Compare the movement of a gamepad and a remote.
Gamepad: push button, stuff happens.
Remote: lift remote, look at it to find the right button, push it, look back at screen to see if the 12:00 or AV1 has gone away. Curse. Repeat.
Most geeks can work remotes without looking but a lot of people still point, look, squint, pray for luck and hit what they hope is the right thing. My point is that this is not suitable for gaming and any sort of twitch gaming is going to be nothing but piles of bodies at the respawn point.
Hey! Maybe I could actually get some kills in such a game! Bring it on!
Chain of trusted sources
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm a fan of NEC's burners and happily recommend the brand to my friends. Good stuff.
One of these friends said "Wow, I am sure am glad I get my NEC stuff from a reputable online dealer, like Newegg!"
My question is, where'd Newegg get these drives? Did their distributor vouch for the goods? How about their distributor's distributor or the originating factory?
When somebody up the chain said "I _KNOW_ these are good drives" and vouched for them, then that product carried that credential all the way to the end users and that's what we're trusting. But we don't know, really.
"It came from Newegg" might be nice sentiment but Newegg probably has no idea if they were selling fakes or not. I don't think they would knowingly do so, of course. That kind of cheap money is not worth the hassle with an IPO in the works.
What if you pull the battery, do this do that whatever. Too complicated.
What if the theif simply carries a sound-proof case in which to put his new prize?
Cheap, simple, fast, works for any laptop, etc.
You guys talking about plugging in headphones and doing on-the-spot mods are thinking too hard. Think like someone on the prowl for a laptop:
The problem is that it might make noise. You want the noise to stop. So you carry a well-insulated case and beat your feet, which any decent "office creeper" thief is going to do anyway. Plus the case puts the object out of sight.
Done.
Plenty of time later to figure out how to disable the noise. Most fences can do that for an extra cut. Not a problem.
I'm guessing you have no idea how easy it is to defeat a "car club" device? Easy. Very easy.
They're of no value at all other than making the car owner think they're doing something useful. And they make Winner International that much richer for every unit sold.
Kensington laptop locks are also easy to bypass. I see officeworkers using the things but what's the point? Deterance? But thieves know how easy it is to bypass so they'll take the hardware anyway, after they stop smugly laughing of course.
Same as those infamous bike locks from last year. Defeated with a 10 cent Bic.
Any lock you can think up, someone else will think around.
It doesn't matter what PCWorld says or even what Microsoft says. Computers are sold by salespeople who will usually do what they have to do to move the computers. You can safely bet a lot of boxes will be sold as "sure this Pentium 3 will run Vista just great and dandy, you can trust me!" and customers will believe it.
When it turns out that Vista won't run or runs like a dog, those customers won't blame the shifty salesdroid, they'll blame Microsoft.
Of course, half these customers will try to run Vista will ALL the graphical junk turned on and accept slowdowns are just normal.
Cost-cutting is the real goal. Tradition has had customers going to see a teller. But that costs money. So the banks are trying to push ideas that turn out to have been done elsewhere.
The trick is getting the customers to break tradition and use the machines for more than withdrawals, so enter the train tickets and Paypal and whatever.
What they are really saying is "here's this great machine that does all THIS, and it's free*!!! or you can go to a teller and pay extra. You choose."
*until you have no choice and then there will surely be fees added on. Bet on it.
My bank ATMs are free but you'll pay extra to see a teller more than a couple times a month. This suits me because I visit the bank branch an average of 0.5 times a month and an ATM around one time a month.
But I am not about to do major banking at the ATM either, not with my back turned to people walking up. It's already dangerous enough standing there for 30 seconds trying to get cash or make a deposit. I like to get in, do the task, and get the hell out.
Beware the creative accounting of **AA companies. Whatever the actual losses will be, they are likely to make the situation sound far worse.
Even if HD wins with consumers and actually sells a ton to everyone and even IF there's minimal piracy, the studios will still claim huge losses because movies cannot be allowed to make money. There are too many people standing around waiting on a percent of a film's profits to allow any movie to actually show a profit.
Movie studios will look at HD theft as just another excuse for creative accounting and a way to avoid paying people, even if HD theft is not actually to blame. The problem comes in when people outside the industry -i.e. lawmakers- pay attention to these bogus loss statements.
Statements about billions in "losses" get the attention of congress who in turn figures they need to clobber average Americans to keep them from stealing this billion dollars worth of lost profits.
The Matrix sequels flopped, at least in part, because of the secrecy surrounding the sequel's storylines.
Lacking any info, virtually every one of us who saw the first film imagined what the sequel plot would be, what would be revealed, what the hell it all meant anyway, and so on.
Once the second film came out, it was clear that nearly all of that imaginary storyline stuff turned out to be a WHOLE lot more ambitious than what they actually filmed.
In fact, the sequels -while profitable- were more or less a huge letdown. This is pretty normal for sequels. The main difference was the incredible level of hype and the gigantic expectations from the public and the movie company. Other than that, nobody would have paid a lot of attention to the weak story or cared what the heck the thing was about.
I cared enough to not bother seeing the third film. Caught it on HBO one lonely Christmas Day. Neo was blind and I sure wished I was.
If true, this smells like Dell trying to make an end-run around Samsung and the other OEM builders for Dell's notebooks.
With this, they'd get a company that makes it's own AND gain access to some supply of AMD without having to bring it in as a full mass market Dell product with the supply issues that would cause.
Samsung would probably jump for joy as they would no longer be embargoed from selling computers under their own name in the US.
Who knows. Voodoo says it's true. Dell denies it. Alienware will neither confirm nor deny. If these were politicians speaking, Dell's denial would be laughable and Alienware's respose would be code for confirmation.
Exactly, it's not that COFFEE was is supposed to be bad, it's caffiene. There was no discussion about whether Tea or Cola or other caffiene-containing drinks would have the same effects.
Additional caveat: the test subjects were all Costa Rican. I have no idea what Costa Ricans call coffee but it's probably quite different (i.e. stronger brew) than the pigswill that passes for coffee in most of the western world.
Does that make a difference? Can results based on Costa Rican coffee be applied to any other population group drinking a different sort of coffee? Again, they didn't test for that.
But they still applied the result to the entire world. I *hate* coffee and wouldn't care if it fell off the earth and froze in space, but this study is just lousy science that leads to BS headlines.
One of the US carriers should just introduce a phone with an OTA TV tuner and let it go. No more bandwidth issues, no more cell minutes used to watch TV.
The logo and colors on the trucks don't mean a lot. Somebody in marketing makes those choices and writes the corporate style books. They'll be first against the wall anyway when the merger happens.
I'm more concerned about quality of service, value for the dollar I spend (which with DSL and phone service is about $100 a month), and whether they can fix my DSL when it goes out.
I couldn't care less about whether they still use the old Bell logo or the yellow and blue paint. Vans can be repainted; many of the Bellsouth service vans now sport a "FastAccess DSL" paint scheme. Logos can be replaced. Don't get attached to anything that can be painted over in two seconds.
One good thing about the merger: no more annoying "Pat the DSL guy" advertisements from Bellsouth.
The weakpoint isn't the deadbolt or the striker or the door frame. It's the damn wall.
If a steel door and super deadbolt blocks the way, make a new door through the flimsy drywall next to the door.
No keys needed, no fancy prox cards, no tools even. All you need is a strong shoulder or a kick or two and you're in. Yeah it makes a mess. You're breaking in. Do you care about a mess? No.
Too lazy to make a geek-sized hole? Make a hole big enough to reach in and open the door from the inside.
Bricks? Cinder blocks? No problem. Just get a sledge or an electric demolition hammer. It merely takes longer and makes a bigger mess. Helps to not have anyone around to hear this of course.
Walls too much of a hassle? Get a ladder, go up into the drop ceiling and climb over the wall. Done correctly, this one can be very hard to detect afterward.
Moral of this story? Don't bother protecting a million-dollar data center with fancy locks when you still want to use low-bid drywall for the walls. When the doors become armored and tough, go around the door instead of through it.
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart being open 24/7 is the best part of this news. I'm going on faith that they will stock decent merchandise. But the important thing that is that they will be open when my next PSU blows up at 2am on a Sunday.
I am not aware of any other computer parts retailer who has done that, certainly there are none in my area.
This is good news on two major fronts:
1) Computer parts source that's open 24/7. There have been many times when I needed a part urgently in the middle of the night or even on weekends when the local computer stores, Frys, Compusa, etc, just are not open. Walmart never closes.
2) Price competition. I support my local computer shop when I can but he wants $80 for the same PSU Newegg sells for $40. Frys will sell me one for $60, if they actually have it in stock. Walmart is likely to bring parts to market at the lower end of that price scale and there won't be shipping costs.
Now before people jump up and down and say that doesn't support the local guy, yeah, I agree. But he's already priced himself out of the market when I can order the same thing from Newegg and pay for next-day shipping and still get it it for less money -and get it delivered early in the AM before the local store even opens.
The main question is, WHAT brands is Walmart going to sell. If they go low-end, then it will only be useful for basic parts. I'm not going to buy much less use a no-name $15 PSU. Fans and parts, OK, but I want decent brands for drives, cases, motherboards, videocards, etc.
Compare the movement of a gamepad and a remote.
Gamepad: push button, stuff happens.
Remote: lift remote, look at it to find the right button, push it, look back at screen to see if the 12:00 or AV1 has gone away. Curse. Repeat.
Most geeks can work remotes without looking but a lot of people still point, look, squint, pray for luck and hit what they hope is the right thing. My point is that this is not suitable for gaming and any sort of twitch gaming is going to be nothing but piles of bodies at the respawn point.
Hey! Maybe I could actually get some kills in such a game! Bring it on!
I'm a fan of NEC's burners and happily recommend the brand to my friends. Good stuff.
One of these friends said "Wow, I am sure am glad I get my NEC stuff from a reputable online dealer, like Newegg!"
My question is, where'd Newegg get these drives? Did their distributor vouch for the goods? How about their distributor's distributor or the originating factory?
When somebody up the chain said "I _KNOW_ these are good drives" and vouched for them, then that product carried that credential all the way to the end users and that's what we're trusting. But we don't know, really.
"It came from Newegg" might be nice sentiment but Newegg probably has no idea if they were selling fakes or not. I don't think they would knowingly do so, of course. That kind of cheap money is not worth the hassle with an IPO in the works.
With masterbation, only you end up raw and sore after 20 minutes too much.
With PowerPoint, everybody ends up raw and sore after 20 minutes too much.
Give this man (or, woman as unlikely as that may be on /.) a gold star!
This is how you bypass the alarm, ladies and germs. Forget the hardware mods and magic USB keyloaders and headphones.
You put the laptop in a well-insultated case and get the hell out of there.
So WHAT if it starts making noise? You or your fence can deal with that later.
What if you pull the battery, do this do that whatever. Too complicated.
What if the theif simply carries a sound-proof case in which to put his new prize?
Cheap, simple, fast, works for any laptop, etc.
You guys talking about plugging in headphones and doing on-the-spot mods are thinking too hard. Think like someone on the prowl for a laptop:
The problem is that it might make noise. You want the noise to stop. So you carry a well-insulated case and beat your feet, which any decent "office creeper" thief is going to do anyway. Plus the case puts the object out of sight.
Done.
Plenty of time later to figure out how to disable the noise. Most fences can do that for an extra cut. Not a problem.
I'm guessing you have no idea how easy it is to defeat a "car club" device? Easy. Very easy.
They're of no value at all other than making the car owner think they're doing something useful. And they make Winner International that much richer for every unit sold.
Kensington laptop locks are also easy to bypass. I see officeworkers using the things but what's the point? Deterance? But thieves know how easy it is to bypass so they'll take the hardware anyway, after they stop smugly laughing of course.
Same as those infamous bike locks from last year. Defeated with a 10 cent Bic.
Any lock you can think up, someone else will think around.
"...or there will be .... trouble."
It doesn't matter what PCWorld says or even what Microsoft says. Computers are sold by salespeople who will usually do what they have to do to move the computers. You can safely bet a lot of boxes will be sold as "sure this Pentium 3 will run Vista just great and dandy, you can trust me!" and customers will believe it.
When it turns out that Vista won't run or runs like a dog, those customers won't blame the shifty salesdroid, they'll blame Microsoft.
Of course, half these customers will try to run Vista will ALL the graphical junk turned on and accept slowdowns are just normal.
Cost-cutting is the real goal. Tradition has had customers going to see a teller. But that costs money. So the banks are trying to push ideas that turn out to have been done elsewhere.
The trick is getting the customers to break tradition and use the machines for more than withdrawals, so enter the train tickets and Paypal and whatever.
What they are really saying is "here's this great machine that does all THIS, and it's free*!!! or you can go to a teller and pay extra. You choose."
*until you have no choice and then there will surely be fees added on. Bet on it.
My bank ATMs are free but you'll pay extra to see a teller more than a couple times a month. This suits me because I visit the bank branch an average of 0.5 times a month and an ATM around one time a month.
But I am not about to do major banking at the ATM either, not with my back turned to people walking up. It's already dangerous enough standing there for 30 seconds trying to get cash or make a deposit. I like to get in, do the task, and get the hell out.
Complicated stuff I do with online banking.
Beware the creative accounting of **AA companies. Whatever the actual losses will be, they are likely to make the situation sound far worse.
Even if HD wins with consumers and actually sells a ton to everyone and even IF there's minimal piracy, the studios will still claim huge losses because movies cannot be allowed to make money. There are too many people standing around waiting on a percent of a film's profits to allow any movie to actually show a profit.
Movie studios will look at HD theft as just another excuse for creative accounting and a way to avoid paying people, even if HD theft is not actually to blame. The problem comes in when people outside the industry -i.e. lawmakers- pay attention to these bogus loss statements.
Statements about billions in "losses" get the attention of congress who in turn figures they need to clobber average Americans to keep them from stealing this billion dollars worth of lost profits.
Wonder when they'll acquire a big-screen "TV" company and just give them away for free -and how many saps will go for the freebie.
Google is your friend. Accept the free TV and enjoy.
(look ma: right topic this time! wheee!)
!@#$ Somebody mod this down and make it go away. It got posted under the wrong topic.
Error between keyboard and chair.
Wonder when they'll acquire a big-screen "TV" company and just give them away for free -and how many saps will go for the freebie.
Google is your friend. Accept the free TV and enjoy.
The Matrix sequels flopped, at least in part, because of the secrecy surrounding the sequel's storylines.
Lacking any info, virtually every one of us who saw the first film imagined what the sequel plot would be, what would be revealed, what the hell it all meant anyway, and so on.
Once the second film came out, it was clear that nearly all of that imaginary storyline stuff turned out to be a WHOLE lot more ambitious than what they actually filmed.
In fact, the sequels -while profitable- were more or less a huge letdown. This is pretty normal for sequels. The main difference was the incredible level of hype and the gigantic expectations from the public and the movie company. Other than that, nobody would have paid a lot of attention to the weak story or cared what the heck the thing was about.
I cared enough to not bother seeing the third film. Caught it on HBO one lonely Christmas Day. Neo was blind and I sure wished I was.
They DO have a couple of notebooks with Intel Extreme graphics.
Ooooh. Must order one of those!
I had to check twice to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Sad to see them going lowend.
If true, this smells like Dell trying to make an end-run around Samsung and the other OEM builders for Dell's notebooks.
With this, they'd get a company that makes it's own AND gain access to some supply of AMD without having to bring it in as a full mass market Dell product with the supply issues that would cause.
Samsung would probably jump for joy as they would no longer be embargoed from selling computers under their own name in the US.
Who knows. Voodoo says it's true. Dell denies it. Alienware will neither confirm nor deny. If these were politicians speaking, Dell's denial would be laughable and Alienware's respose would be code for confirmation.
Exactly, it's not that COFFEE was is supposed to be bad, it's caffiene. There was no discussion about whether Tea or Cola or other caffiene-containing drinks would have the same effects.
Additional caveat: the test subjects were all Costa Rican. I have no idea what Costa Ricans call coffee but it's probably quite different (i.e. stronger brew) than the pigswill that passes for coffee in most of the western world.
Does that make a difference? Can results based on Costa Rican coffee be applied to any other population group drinking a different sort of coffee? Again, they didn't test for that.
But they still applied the result to the entire world. I *hate* coffee and wouldn't care if it fell off the earth and froze in space, but this study is just lousy science that leads to BS headlines.
Nitpick alert: Ms. Pac Man isn't from Japan.
That game started in the US as a bootleg Pac Man project which was eventually sold to Midway, the US distributor of Pac Man.
Midway later sold it to Namco, the developer of Pac Man. Ms. Pac Man was a US er citizen. Pac being. Puck being. Whatever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Pac-Man
One of the US carriers should just introduce a phone with an OTA TV tuner and let it go. No more bandwidth issues, no more cell minutes used to watch TV.
Wait.
That would be free. Can't have that can we?
The logo and colors on the trucks don't mean a lot. Somebody in marketing makes those choices and writes the corporate style books. They'll be first against the wall anyway when the merger happens.
I'm more concerned about quality of service, value for the dollar I spend (which with DSL and phone service is about $100 a month), and whether they can fix my DSL when it goes out.
I couldn't care less about whether they still use the old Bell logo or the yellow and blue paint. Vans can be repainted; many of the Bellsouth service vans now sport a "FastAccess DSL" paint scheme. Logos can be replaced. Don't get attached to anything that can be painted over in two seconds.
One good thing about the merger: no more annoying "Pat the DSL guy" advertisements from Bellsouth.
"Hacked his own computer" is not worth any street cred.
So it instead becomes "Hacked the Fed, transferred $9bn to my Swiss account and I'm leaving the country scot-free!"
Same here. There was a demo involving some tigers in a cave or something. It was very pixelated even by PS1 standards.
Played it once. Died a lot. Cursed poor camera and indistinct graphics.
Yawned.
Never bothered again.
The weakpoint isn't the deadbolt or the striker or the door frame. It's the damn wall.
If a steel door and super deadbolt blocks the way, make a new door through the flimsy drywall next to the door.
No keys needed, no fancy prox cards, no tools even. All you need is a strong shoulder or a kick or two and you're in. Yeah it makes a mess. You're breaking in. Do you care about a mess? No.
Too lazy to make a geek-sized hole? Make a hole big enough to reach in and open the door from the inside.
Bricks? Cinder blocks? No problem. Just get a sledge or an electric demolition hammer. It merely takes longer and makes a bigger mess. Helps to not have anyone around to hear this of course.
Walls too much of a hassle? Get a ladder, go up into the drop ceiling and climb over the wall. Done correctly, this one can be very hard to detect afterward.
Moral of this story? Don't bother protecting a million-dollar data center with fancy locks when you still want to use low-bid drywall for the walls. When the doors become armored and tough, go around the door instead of through it.