Truthfully, between primarily using Mac OS X these days and the fact that Windows PCs have become such a commodity item, I haven't felt much need to build a PC clone from parts for a long time. But then I decided to dabble in litecoin mining - an endeavor requiring pretty customized machine configurations. I wound up putting together 3 altcoin mining rigs, which fully paid for themselves during the time I ran them -- and after retiring them, rebuilt one as a gaming PC for one of our kids.

I would have come out a few hundred bucks ahead, in fact, if it weren't for Micro Center selling me a dud Radeon R9280x card that I wasted even more time and money for return postage on, trying to get Gigabyte to repair or replace it under the factory warranty. (Bastards held onto the dud card for over a month, during the peak value of litecoin -- when it could have *really* been earning its purchase price, and then sent me the same card back, claiming it was repaired -- but no evidence they so much as touched the thing. Exact same issues it had when I shipped it off!)

Unfortunately, yes.... this is SO true. I blame some of this on the 2 party political system we've got in America. Although yes, you have a number of other party platforms out there that candidates can choose to run on, they're largely irrelevant. Everyone knows that if you want a real chance at getting elected, you have to run as either a Democrat or a Republican. If you join one of those parties but clearly have an agenda that's very far outside the parameters they've set - again, you won't make it very far.

Every so often, an exception happens, but most of the time when you see an independent candidate get elected to some office, it's because it's an uncontested position or the competition is so widely viewed as corrupt and incompetent, they win by virtue of being a different option available on the ticket.

The 2 major parties have no intentions of giving the people too much liberty or personal freedom, and neither one will ever decide that small government is better for the country! Their candidates are too hung up with delusions of making the nation stronger and better through some new/additional government organization, legislation, cabinet or office they can CREATE while in power.

This is just the latest blast of greed from Sony with this console.
I purchased a PS4 just a week or two ago, after holding out this long with our aging PS3 system -- under the assumption it would be a worth successor. In a few ways, it is. Certainly, the new DualShock controllers are one of the highlights. They're more comfortable to hold, have the ability to plug in headphones and route the game audio through them, have the touch-pad in the middle, different colored lights indicating player 1, 2, 3, etc. Good stuff. But then I discovered you couldn't even download your MP3 music to the PS4 from a memory stick to play it! The only way it seems to allow music playing is via a subscription service! Then you have to pay for the PSNetwork, or else you're pretty much locked out of playing games online. (That was always a reason I preferred PS3 to X-Box in the past... Don't like to pay subscription fees just for the privilege of online play of games I just paid $60 a pop for!)

I'm *almost* surprised Sony didn't tell me that like my satellite TV box, I'm simply renting it from them and must return it when my subscription with them expires!

I'm inclined to agree!

I worked for one place that tried to roll out a big ERP system and even though it was done in multiple stages, just the "stage 1" portion was an incredibly costly undertaking that enlightened the in-house I.T. staff as to just what a bloated kludge the software really was.

I remember we encountered certain system errors trying to run reports which stumped the support people for the software.... What finally got it fixed was my boss devoting an afternoon to looking at it himself. He was pretty savvy with Oracle databases and rewrote some buggy queries in the code, correcting it.

All of the money charged for maintenance and support and licensing for these systems is NOT necessarily equivalent to receiving a superior level of actual assistance with the software. So IMO, just spend your money more wisely on in-house developers.

Well, it's not *quite* like that....

What Apple does on the computer side of things is generally stocks 2 to 3 configurations for each product in the lineup. So you can choose from a "base model" or an all around upgraded form of that, or in some cases you get a "low", "mid spec" and "high spec" config. to pick from.

All of the other combinations would be custom orders that aren't stocked.

Right now, they actually have 5 product lines: Macbook Air or Macbook Pro for laptops, the Mac Mini, the iMac and the Mac Pro workstation.

That's why I said I was a little surprised the maxxed out configuration was in the store, ready to sell. It's not something you can select on the website without manually picking the highest end pre-configured model and then manually choosing several options to upgrade various components further.....

I don't know if I'd call the whole credit scoring system a scam, but it's certainly flawed - especially for people just starting out. Basically, they're saying that if they have no history on you and how you handle loaned money, they have no way to assign you a meaningful score. You're a ghost in the system. So anyone considering offering you credit checks the score, finds you basically have no score yet, and is afraid to be the first to take a chance on you.

I remember having this problem when I tried to get my first car loan. Basically, I couldn't do it without getting my dad to co-sign on the loan, even though I'd purchased 2 cars before that with straight cash.

I think once you're off and running with things like credit cards or a loan, though, the scoring system is generally pretty effective. A lot of people complain about all the oddities of what boosts your score or hurts it. But the flip side of that is, if they used a static formula, people would easily figure it out and it would making gaming the system much easier. That's why I suspect they regularly change things up in certain ways, deciding that a certain financial move will penalize you more for a while, and then less than something else for a while, etc.

You'd be surprised what Apple stores have in stock.

We use their products where I work and I occasionally have to run in to the local store to do a "grab and go" purchase on the corporate credit card when a new person is hired and needs to be issued a machine. I needed the highest spec custom configuration of their retina 15" Pro for a new graphics designer/video editor guy they hired, and it turned out the local store kept that config. in stock -- despite it not being shown anyplace on the shelves as an option.

In general, they apparently stock the "fully maxxed out" configuration of all of their machines in their high volume stores, but don't really advertise it. It's just there for the cases where people come in and request it, which seems to happen just often enough to justify stocking 1 or 2, vs. making people do a special order and wait an extra 1-2 days to receive it.

I'm wondering though if presenting one's own expired/cancelled cards for transactions wouldn't set up some kind of data trail leading back to you, with scams like this one? We don't really know how the guy was finally caught -- but I'd have to think repeatedly presenting a known cancelled card for a transaction and causing it to be rejected would set up red flags someplace?

I thought in many cases, the merchant would just receive a "capture card" notification when this was tried?

What's really such a big deal about this?

I mean, sure -- it's cool that he shrunk a hand-held game system concept down into something this tiny. But practically speaking, I can't see much marketability for something that just allows replaying the same old, relatively simplistic arcade games of the 80's (and "standards" like chess)?

Strikes me as more of a novelty, especially for Arduino fans. But again, just how many pieces of electronics do we need to run this stuff? Sure, you can suggest that other programmers take on the challenge of making the "coolest game able to run" on it -- but WHY should they bother? They'd have better luck even if they were targeting old PalmPilot devices rescued from some electronics recycling dump.

... environmental movement in a nutshell!

Seriously, I think most sane human beings DO care about trying not to trash up the only planet we've got. But that thinking doesn't require big special interest groups pushing agendas! It doesn't even require our schools to waste valuable classroom time teaching recycling and shoving feel good eco/Green stuff down our kid's throats!

If companies see a true FINANCIAL benefit to using clean energy, they'll willingly and even happily switch to it. I'm pretty sure Amazon's upper management isn't sitting in a boardroom, saying "Yeah... we could install solar panels for our server rooms and save many thousands per year on power per building, but we'd rather spend more for our power, as long as it's helping pollute the planet! Muahahah!"

Groups like Greenpeace are just struggling to justify their own existence in a world that gets along just fine without them. They try to vilify any business with deep enough pockets who does something "less Green" than the absolute "most Green, at ANY cost" solution they can come up with as an alternative.

Personally? I'm *really* tired of our government handing out incentives to switch to Green energy or mandating recycling. These are all things which should be self-sustaining and desirable to do on their own accord! (For example, our local recycling program provides you a large blue roll-away can free of charge, as well as a second plastic basket if you request it. They come by every other week to pick up your recyclables with a single-stream recycling system in place, making it pretty easy to do it. The county makes quite a bit of extra money reselling the recycled materials, so it's a win for them financially-speaking. Residents have very little to lose by participating because there are limits to how much trash the garbage truck will pick up each week without charging you extra. It's a free way to get rid of a lot more of your junk without even having to use your own additional can or plastic trash bags!)

Switching to solar (or wind) energy is still an "iffy" proposition. If you live in the right geographical area, it probably makes long-term financial sense to do it. BUT, the current state of the technology makes it relatively unaffordable to actually STORE your own energy you generate. That means you're still typically tied to the public utility company for power, and wind up having to do the round-about thing of selling electricity back to them (which they may or may not even really WANT from you in the first place), and still using their generated electricity whenever it's dark out or your needs exceed your ability to generate on your own. I'd bet that a good 50% or so of the residential solar installations wouldn't even happen right now if it weren't for government interference artificially sweetening the deal to force adoption. (You literally stand to get $6,000 or more back in tax rebates over the first 5 years or so you own the panels. Again, nice if you're on the receiving end, but means you might have just invested in something that makes no good financial sense on its own.)

Umm..... not so much. While you're on the rant though, any other things you want to blame on fracking?

The energy obtained by it is pretty much the only thing keeping the U.S. currency viable, for starters. That's a *bit* more of an issue than getting "fuel to cook food we aren't growing".

I'm not really sure why the fracking process requires clean, fresh water either? Seems to me any water would do -- including salt water from our oceans. If they use fresh water, it's probably because it's cheaper and easier than obtaining the alternative -- which in turn, indicates there must not be THAT much of a water shortage in those places. Otherwise, the scarcity would dictate a higher price.

I agree that most people won't notice or care.

I only have so much time to watch movies in the first place. An extra day to get one returned isn't going to impact my life in any significant way. If I'm THAT desperate to receive a movie for ASAP viewing, I probably better just go out and buy the thing locally.

What I mean is, most businesses keep everything of importance on their servers. Think of the salaries they pay in total all of their employees who spend time in front of computers each day. Everything you pay them to do is, essentially, tied to those servers. If the server runs a hosted application slowly, then all of your people using that application are forced to work more slowly -- making them less efficient. If a server crashes and people lose access to information until it's brought back up -- even more inefficiencies result.

Now, WHY would you cheap out over what's probably a $10,000 or less price difference buying a new server with a warranty, and some guy's used one that's less powerful (but probably uses just as much electricity and requires just as much cooling)?

As it is, I've never worked anyplace where servers get swapped out all that often. When it's time to shop for a new one, they've typically gotten a good 4 or 5 years of 24 hour/7 day use out of the old one already. (In bigger places where they get upgraded more often, I suspect they do a higher volume of business too -- and make more profit with each server than the places I worked.)

Used servers are nice to resell at steep discounts so "end users" get the opportunity to tinker with them. They're probably great as someone's home media server, or for the software developer who wants to experiment with hosting his/her own software app. They're probably even an option for the people who couldn't ever afford new systems in the first place (like charities running on shoestring budgets). But for most of corporate America -- IMO, servers should be purchased new and used no longer than their warranty period.

The Mother in Law is coming over!

The minivan suffers a stigma in America today.... It's viewed as a vehicle for moms who need to shuttle the kids and their things around. That hurts sales because even many of the moms who squarely fit into that category don't want to feel like they're defined by that part of their life. They don't want to drive a vehicle around that tells everyone that's what their purpose is on the planet -- especially when so many families are dual-income and they'd like to look more "professional".

It seems it's unavoidable though? As soon as enough people buy a functional alternative to avoid the stigma, they begin putting the same stigma on the alternative choice. Not that long ago, the station wagon held this distinction, and yet now -- driving a station wagon is viewed as trendy in a hipster way!

Honestly though, I think the minivan could enjoy a resurgence in popularity if it was approached from a slightly different angle. Make it *really* easy for all of the seats to fold flat (like "push a button and they all retract into the floor" easy), and market it to the homeowners who currently shop for light trucks! I know I've owned a couple of pickups because they were so darn functional and useful for things like hauling away yard waste or picking up a furniture or appliance purchase, or just helping a buddy move. But their big downside is the lack of any protection from the weather for the cargo, while driving. For 99% of the things I ever hauled around in my truck, I could have used a minivan just as well, if it didn't have seats in the way.