It's costing him almost $1 million each. Even if he sells them at cost, it's hard to see how it would be "affordable". Maybe he's not planning on breaking even, but that's pretty crazy to spend that much on a low income home.
Assuming he's selling them. 104 of them are apartments for pensioners.
True that Valve has to police them anyway, but the more they do it out of scammers pockets and less out of users pockets the better
While I've been fortunate to have never received any of that junk, I do see this as a good move... and $5 is really low. Recall it's not $5 on any purchase, but $5 over the lifetime of your account. That's... well. If that's a problem for you, how exactly do you afford to have whatever it is you're running Steam on? I'll give you the internet - maybe public wifi (or stealing it)... but unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.
The question really is, does the $5/account cover the costs of policing them if they do pay up.
That's my entire point... any algorithm might be able to show you what you want/need *sometimes* but they can never know what you want/need *now*. Just because you search for, lets say, "batman vs superman" several times does not mean that in this very moment when you search "super bats attack man" that you're looking for batman vs superman.
Just like a personal assistant won't know that today you're feeling like a spiced latte instead of your usual black coffee, neither will any predictive algorithm. If you keep asking your personal assistant for a spiced latte and they keep bringing you black coffee they'd be fired pretty quickly. On the other hand if you ask your assistant for the TSP report and they bring it to you when you really wanted the TPS report you can't really fault them for that now can you?
I have 123 games in my Steam library, less than 1/3rd of them are installed due to lack of space on my 1TB platter drive. 90% of the time they can sit on any format of drive and it won't matter, but the other 10% of the time they need performance and they need it right away. They're too large to be continually deleting and re-downloading, so the ideal is to have them on an SSD so they have the performance when they need it.
That's just games not including video rendering applications, audio manipulation, etc. It took me less than 5 days to fill 1TB when I first got this machine - on a monthly basis I'll churn between 750GB and 1.6TB of data between 2x1TB drives according to my ISP and that's not including local uses of which there are numerous that require both performance and lots of capacity.
So you want a magic ball
They were only bad if you didn't know how to use them. I found them to be infinitely better than what we have now - even Google of 3-4 years ago was better than now.
Why would I want crappy results? I want it to give me what I want, which by definition isn't "crappy".
And you think a system built by man can divine what you and everyone else wants at the moment you type it in? That'll be the day. Until then, assume I know what I want and not your system.
Search for what I type in, not what you think I want
I want a search engine that searches for what I want, not what I type, and not even what I think I want.
I can't tell if that's sarcasm, stupidity, or trolling... you actually want a search engine that when you search it ignores your input (ie: gives top results saying "missing: stormtrooper" from a search specifically for stormtrooper information), ignores what you tell it not to give you (ie: -books will still give Google Books results) and generally give you crappy results (ie: try searching for terms which happen to coincide with a syndicated news story - it's impossible to filter out every news outlet that picks it up)?
oops.. never mind. Blekko is already gone... hrm... maybe Ark? Seems more social than geek though.
If you find a good one let me know. I've tried Bing, DuckDuckGo and a smattering of others - they all seem to have the same results or lack any sort of depth which is highly disappointing. My next to try is Blekko - I like the concept of
What made Google so great when it was still relatively new was the results were more relevant, i.e. they weren't just a bunch of advertisements. With the rise SEO that is less the case now, and looking for something on Google for me now means adding "-buy -purchase -price -shop" automatically.
Google seems to ignore '-term' when it comes to certain sites/terms.
Day to day needs I would want 3x2TB SSDs for laptop use, a 2TB SSD external for games run directly off the drive and the remainder could be platters. That would be my ideal situation if SSDs were cheaper. I can't afford that so I've stuck entirely with platters and limiting speed factor on my system is the drives in them... I'm constantly hitting 100% usage for extended periods keeping the systems hanging.
Search for what I type in, now what you think I want. I'm so sick of having to change every search to "verbatim" because my search terms are being ignored. I'd switch to someone else but they seem to be carbon copies.
More plausibly is that there's an array of antibiotic sources in their diet/cultural medicine that led them to develop a resistance.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
