...and I predict the next Slashdot story will be: "Gullible not in dictionary" "Posted by Cmdr Taco"
More like, "Gullible Not Found at Wikipedia". And in fact, it really isn't!
Now you have to decide between a) wanting to know if it's really at Wikipedia and possibly being gullible for thinking it wasn't, or b) wanting to avoid being fooled but never really knowing the truth. What a conundrum!
I see nothing wrong with any of the actual policies. You're taking it back LATE. Instead of being charged ungodly fees, you're charged less. According to the parent, it's only a $1.50 for up to 30 days. Try that last year and see if you weren't paying over $20.
The reason people are complaining is that, by saying "No More Late Fees", it strongly suggests that if you take the movie back late, you will not receive a fee. Instead, you receive a "restocking fee", which only happens when you take the movie back late. How is this not a late fee? How is this not false advertising? And as such, how is this not illegal?
Maybe I should buy SCO stock, so I can get in on the impending class-action suit:)
If the outcome is anything like the Iomega Zip Disk click-of-death class action, all you'll get is a coupon for $20 off a Linux license from SCO. Now only $679 with coupon!
Imagine instead of Dante and Veronica, a conversation between Klaus Knopper and Pamela Jones of Groklaw:
PAMELA: That was Gentoo.
KLAUS: Why do you call him that?
PAMELA: Linus made it up. It's a live linux CD thing.
KLAUS: What do you mean?
PAMELA: After he boots a live CD, he likes to download and compile new binaries from source. It's called gentooing.
KLAUS: He requested this?
PAMELA: He gets off on it.
KLAUS: Linus can be talked into anything.
PAMELA: Why do you say that?
KLAUS: Like you said - he gentooed him.
PAMELA: Linus? No; I gentooed him.
KLAUS: Yeah, right.
PAMELA: I'm serious...
KLAUS: You booted that guy's live CD?
PAMELA: Yeah. How do you think I know he liked...
KLAUS: But...but you said you only installed three distros! You never mentioned his!
PAMELA: That's because I never installed his!
KLAUS: You booted his live CD!
PAMELA: We went out a few times. We didn't install, but we fooled around.
KLAUS: Oh my God! Why did you tell me you only installed three distros?
PAMELA: Because I did only install three distros! That doesn't mean I didn't just live-boot with people.
KLAUS: Oh my God-I feel so nauseous...
PAMELA: I'm sorry, Klaus. I thought you understood.
KLAUS: I did understand! I understand that you installed three different distros, and that's all you said.
PAMELA: Please calm down.
KLAUS: How many?
PAMELA: Klaus...
KLAUS: How many live CDs have you booted?!
PAMELA: Let it go...
KLAUS: HOW MANY?
PAMELA: All right! Shut up a second and I'll tell you! Jesus! I didn't freak like this when you told me how many distros you installed.
KLAUS: This is different. This is important. How many?!
PAMELA: Something like seventeen.
KLAUS: WHAT? SOMETHING LIKE SEVENTEEN?
PAMELA: Lower your voice!
KLAUS: What the hell is that anyway, "something like seventeen?" Does that include mine?
PAMELA: Um. Eighteen.
KLAUS: I'M EIGHTEEN?
PAMELA: I'm going to class.
KLAUS: Eighteen?! My girlfriend booted eighteen live CDs!
RMS: In a row?
P2P wireless isn't terribly realistic given the scaling issues involved, I don't think, but I would LOVE a commercial WiMax provider if it became a viable option.
Unless your local government gets involved and sets up a free wireless network for your town, chances are you're going to be buying WiMax from the local phone monopoly as well.
I remember when Bank Street Writer was the shit in my high school.
One of the great things about Bank Street Writer was that it would load completely into memory, meaning you could boot several machines off of one floppy. Also, it copied pretty easily in Copy ][+.
I still preferred AppleWorks at home - 2.(1?) was decent, but 3.0 brought about so many nice changes (including a dictionary, I think?) that I used it through high school and even into college, until we got a PowerMac 7100/66av. My mom used AppleWorks for school for almost 10 years until I bought a PowerBook for her for Christmas during my first year of teaching. Using AppleWorks while in high school, I was even able to write and upload (using Kermit) a Pearl Jam guitar tab file that I posted to USENET and can still find on Google, 12 or 13 years later.
The amazing thing about Bank Street Writer and AppleWorks is that if the computers they ran on had internet connectivity, most of us would still be able to use those programs today and get a lot of work done. The same could be said of MS Word 5.1a for Macintosh, but certainly not Office 95 or 97.
Hell, one of the reasons I like pico so much is because it reminds me of the QBasic editor for DOS. With any luck, Pages will bring some simplicity and sanity back into word processing.
You can take your east coast, harvard educated, french speaking, elitist attitude and shove it up yer east coast asshole. It is no wonder why you lost the election with an attitude like that.
It's no wonder you're alienating the rest of the world with an attitude like that - especially when responding to a well-written, self-depricating joke.
And I can't resist pointing out that George W. Bush attended Yale as an undergraduate, which is in the same Ivy League group of universities as Harvard, and he even received an MBA from Harvard Business School. It doesn't get much more east coast elitist than that!
Oh, and let's not forget that Dubya was born in Connecticut, which certainly qualifies as "east coast".
Re:What's with the very young kids sharing files?
on
Inside the Shadow Internet
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· Score: 3, Informative
Unlike adults with paying jobs and disposable income, these kids have the motivation to enter the piracy scene: They want a game, a CD, or a movie, but they don't have the funds.
Also, if they're under 18, they're very useful because they're more likely to take bigger risks than someone who might end up in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. As long as you're just infringing and not outright stealing, you're usually pretty safe if you're under 18.
However, I did know one guy who got caught carding over $10k worth of stuff that he would have sent to his friend's house in a nearby county. His friend's mom found a bunch of stuff they had carded and were going to sell in his closet, and the kid who did the carding went to juvie for a year and a half.
if you get bit by this, you're in no position to fight back. Sure, you can sue for the damage done to your computer, but that money is dwarfed by what they sue for if you have just one pirated mp3, let alone the collection most people have. So the short answer is: they can get away with it, and they know it.
I disagree. Intellectual Property violations can certainly be punished in court or by an out of court settlement, but they're on a different level than malicious activity designed to damage your data. Imagine a situation where a small business owner was using his computer to keep track of invoices, finances, etc., when after he downloaded a song (illegally), his computer was damaged to the point where Windows wouldn't start up and his data was lost. I can't imagine that even the U.S. court system, with its preference for high-priced corporate lawyers, would find that a company that purposefully distributed the song with the knowingly destructive payload was not liable for damaging someone's unrelated personal or business data.
I guess an extreme analogy would be for the feds to slip a bomb into a package of fertilizer ordered by terrorists who might be planning to blow up a building a la Timothy McVeigh, but when the bomb goes off, it also injures some of the terrorists' children. As satisfyingly karmic as it may sound, vigilantism of that sort has no place outside of the movies (which might explain why the MPAA is sponsoring this sort of thing).
Mario, as a brand, has definitely lost strength lately. Each new Mario game used to be a huge release by Nintendo, but now it's much weaker. Super Mario Sunshine is a good example of this since it sold much less than expected.
I know you didn't write this, but my argument about SMSunshine is that the game didn't break much new ground beyond Mario 64, so if you drove yourself nuts trying to finish Mario 64 and finally beat Bowser at the end, you're not very likely to buy another game that's almost exactly the same but now has a water pump.
For that matter, Nintendo is doing the same thing with Zelda by putting Link everywhere (Soul Calibur 2, etc.) -- it's another brand that's going to lost strength. I guess they'll continue this trend by creating a Metroid Party or something...
Something that worked in the opposite direction was Super Smash Bros and SSB Melee. When we would hold lan parties after school in the cafeteria, my students would ask me to bring two things: the projector, and my Gamecube w/Super Smash Bros Melee. That thing's chock full of Nintendo characters almost completely out of context, yet it's one of the most popular fighting games out there. People like familiarity, and that's what Nintendo has to offer.
If you want to make a comparison with another entertainment company, Mario is really Nintendo's Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is in almost every damned Disney product and regularly appears in crappy straight-to-video movies, yet you see the mouse ears and immediately think of Disney and their entire product line. Sony and Microsoft could only dream of the kind of brand recognition carried by a silly little plumber with an impossible moustache and a red cap. Brand dilution may take away from purity, but it certainly increases recognition.
Then try to press charges against your drug dealer.
Except in this case, the drug dealer is actually being paid by a corporation to distribute a substance that is normally just illegal but is now knowingly harmful (outside of the drug's regular effects). Isn't the corporation, who is sponsoring this harmful activity, legally culpable?
The "average user," and especially the media, is already convinced that p2p is synonymous with illegal activity, so this is unlikely to raise much of an uproar outside of the geek and college student communities.
The media may be convinced that p2p is synonmous with illegal activity, but they love scaring viewers by "exposing" crimes that may be happening in your neighborhood! Right next door!
However, the "average user" is much more concerned with their pocketbook than with nebulous notions such as "intellectual property" and "digital rights management". When I bring up the subject to family members, friends and students, their eyes just sort of glaze over. I honestly don't think the average person gives a shit about copyright. The only people who care are those who make money by creating copyrighted works, and those who market/produce/protect those works.
At the high school where I teach and do tech support, the first RIAA lawsuits a few years ago sent a number of students and teachers scurrying to me to see if they might be in trouble for downloading music. My two favorites were the stoner kid who didn't realize he was sharing 4000+ songs on Kazaa, and the evangelical principal who subscribed to Roadrunner for the sole purpose of downloading Christian music (illegally).
The RIAA/MPAA fight is not one that they can ultimately win, because the rules have changed with the ease of copying. They should really look to the model that Scott Kurtz of PVP and Epitonic - give the content away as a means of promotion, then make your money selling related items such as t-shirts, books, concerts, etc. Sure, books and videos can also be pirated, but until they're as easily accessible as music is via an iPod or something similar, there's still money to be made. Hell, most bands make their money on tour from t-shirt sales.
Anyway, don't think for a second that the "average user" thinks p2p is "wrong" - most users I've encountered are just annoyed that it isn't easier to find things.
Split the tracks. It's usually obvious where track breaks will be.
There are several programs out there that will auto-split tracks for you; some of them will also encode to mp3 or other formats as well. RIP Vinyl (available at download.com) is an inexpensive Windows program that will automagically split tracks up based on the silence between them, and you can change a whole bunch of other settings as well. I don't know if there's anything there's anything like that for Linux, but Audio Companion seems like a good bet for Mac OS X, or CD Spin Doctor if you have Toast Titanium 6.
I've wanted to convert my record collection into mp3s for a while now, and after doing a few albums for friends manually using Peak, I would recommed the auto-splitting recording programs. If the industry was really serious about DRM, they'd release all music on vinyl and movies on film since it's so much more difficult to encode analog sources.
What exactly were you expecting from your $18 investment then?
I originally wrote $20,000, then I thought about it and remembered it was closer to $18,000, so I modified it and missed it in proofreading. I guess that's what I get for trying to be accurate.
I expect them to be much like when IBM spun off the printer devision which became lexmark. Lenovo will re-orginize, probably just scrap much of what they had. Probably rename under a new catchy name, and grow to be a big time player.
I wasn't aware that Lexmark sprung from IBM's printer division, so I hope that this Lenovo purchase goes better. Lexmark makes some of the worst inkjet printers I've ever encountered. Our school district made the mistake of purchasing around $18 worth of Lexmark printers (5700s) when we ordered Dells back in 1999. Within a year, nearly half of them were dead, and all were out of warranty.
We were actually able to get one of the engineers to come up to our school since we're located near Lexington, KY, and he was the one that told us the problem was due to a manufacturing flaw in the motherboard (faulty controller chip?). He offered to drive some of the printers back to Lexmark, put them in for repair on his account - he could "vouch for" up to eight printers at a time, regardless of warranty - and then send them back to us. However, the whole process would take months, and eventually we just gave up. We ended up with a wall of dead Lexmark printers on shelves waiting for the Disposal of Assets forms to come back so we could throw them away, but after waiting for three years, we eventually just took them all down to the dumpster.
I know that inkjet printers are generally terrible, but I can never recommend Lexmarks because of that experience. Also, we have something like 13 computer labs in the high school where I teach, and the labs that have the most problems are the ones with whitebox PCs from a crappy local company in our business/vocational labs, and the IBM PCs in our science lab. We've soldered off and replaced so many goddamned bad capacitors from IBM motherboards that we're never going to buy IBM again.
With any luck for Lenovo, this purchase might bring IBM's name brand back into the forefront of American consumers' minds, but I for one have no interest in anything associated with IBM.
Re: the "In a world..." guy--do yourself a favor, if you haven't already, and find the trailer for Jerry Seinfeld's "Comendian" [later] OK, never mind, here it is. Enjoy.
I'm so glad you showed me that - that's exactly what I was talking about. I would have loved to have seen that (the trailer) in a theatre.
However, what if this company, instead of trying to send out an e-mail, instead stores a web page with your final message on it. Then you leave the URL of the final page in an envelope in the drawer.
Why don't we make a company that text messages the family's cell phones with a URL, which has a form that they have to fill out, which sends them an email with the location of the hand-written note that tells them to refer to the amendment to the will stored in the lawyer's filing cabinet that tells the family members they're not getting any money because they're all too fucking stupid to deserve any?
This service will be popular with the ring tone and Claria/Gator crowd, which means they'll make millions. Eventually, they'll find a way to set up kiosks at Walmart so people can retrieve their loved ones' final words and have them printed on the base of a battery-powered fiber optic color-changing angel with big teardrop eyes and fake feathers glued to the wings.
Re:the extras dvd is impressive...
on
Star Wars Minutiae
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And for the trailers - they are ruly insufferable - hard to believe anyone went to see ANH on the strength of the trailer - the ROTJ trailer is just tolerable by today's standards,
It was probably sometime in the late 80s or early 90s when movie trailers began to be tolerable. Often, I prefer watching the trailer to sitting through the actual movie, so I used to try to show up early to the theater to catch all the trailers. Now, of course, they beat you over the head with 20-30 minutes of trailers and stupid MovieTickets.com commercials. It's easier to watch them at Apple's Quicktime movie trailers page.
For a while in the 90s, every movie trailer that I ever saw seemed to be done by the guy who did the voice for Optimus Prime in the original Transformers series, Peter Cullen. You could pretty much tell whether or not a movie studio took the trailer seriously if they used him for the voiceovers....
"(rising voice) A time of prosperity.... (lowering voice) A place of peace. (slow, heavily enunciated lower voice) Now.... one man... threatens.. it.. all." Fun stuff, even though there seem to be more trailers now that don't use voiceovers at all but instead rely on screens of text to piece things together.
My major pet peeve about trailers, though, is when they show the entire movie plot in the trailer. It completely removes any element of surprise, and makes it almost pointless to go see the movie. For example, the new trailer for Flight of the Phoenix does just that - the entire story is compressed down into a two minute version, sort of like a Readers Digest condensed book. It's sort of how trailers for comedy flicks show you the funniest parts of the movie in the hopes that you'll shell out $9 to see it, but then have nothing additional to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but since Wiktionary has (arguably) less name recognition than Wikipedia, it wouldn't be as funny a target.
More like, "Gullible Not Found at Wikipedia". And in fact, it really isn't!
Now you have to decide between a) wanting to know if it's really at Wikipedia and possibly being gullible for thinking it wasn't, or b) wanting to avoid being fooled but never really knowing the truth. What a conundrum!
The reason people are complaining is that, by saying "No More Late Fees", it strongly suggests that if you take the movie back late, you will not receive a fee. Instead, you receive a "restocking fee", which only happens when you take the movie back late. How is this not a late fee? How is this not false advertising? And as such, how is this not illegal?
If the outcome is anything like the Iomega Zip Disk click-of-death class action, all you'll get is a coupon for $20 off a Linux license from SCO. Now only $679 with coupon!
Is that you, Dvorak?
PAMELA: That was Gentoo.
KLAUS: Why do you call him that?
PAMELA: Linus made it up. It's a live linux CD thing.
KLAUS: What do you mean?
PAMELA: After he boots a live CD, he likes to download and compile new binaries from source. It's called gentooing.
KLAUS: He requested this?
PAMELA: He gets off on it.
KLAUS: Linus can be talked into anything.
PAMELA: Why do you say that?
KLAUS: Like you said - he gentooed him.
PAMELA: Linus? No; I gentooed him.
KLAUS: Yeah, right.
PAMELA: I'm serious...
KLAUS: You booted that guy's live CD?
PAMELA: Yeah. How do you think I know he liked...
KLAUS: But...but you said you only installed three distros! You never mentioned his!
PAMELA: That's because I never installed his!
KLAUS: You booted his live CD!
PAMELA: We went out a few times. We didn't install, but we fooled around.
KLAUS: Oh my God! Why did you tell me you only installed three distros?
PAMELA: Because I did only install three distros! That doesn't mean I didn't just live-boot with people.
KLAUS: Oh my God-I feel so nauseous...
PAMELA: I'm sorry, Klaus. I thought you understood.
KLAUS: I did understand! I understand that you installed three different distros, and that's all you said.
PAMELA: Please calm down.
KLAUS: How many?
PAMELA: Klaus...
KLAUS: How many live CDs have you booted?!
PAMELA: Let it go...
KLAUS: HOW MANY?
PAMELA: All right! Shut up a second and I'll tell you! Jesus! I didn't freak like this when you told me how many distros you installed.
KLAUS: This is different. This is important. How many?!
PAMELA: Something like seventeen.
KLAUS: WHAT? SOMETHING LIKE SEVENTEEN?
PAMELA: Lower your voice!
KLAUS: What the hell is that anyway, "something like seventeen?" Does that include mine?
PAMELA: Um. Eighteen.
KLAUS: I'M EIGHTEEN?
PAMELA: I'm going to class.
KLAUS: Eighteen?! My girlfriend booted eighteen live CDs!
RMS: In a row?
Unless your local government gets involved and sets up a free wireless network for your town, chances are you're going to be buying WiMax from the local phone monopoly as well.
One of the great things about Bank Street Writer was that it would load completely into memory, meaning you could boot several machines off of one floppy. Also, it copied pretty easily in Copy ][+.
I still preferred AppleWorks at home - 2.(1?) was decent, but 3.0 brought about so many nice changes (including a dictionary, I think?) that I used it through high school and even into college, until we got a PowerMac 7100/66av. My mom used AppleWorks for school for almost 10 years until I bought a PowerBook for her for Christmas during my first year of teaching. Using AppleWorks while in high school, I was even able to write and upload (using Kermit) a Pearl Jam guitar tab file that I posted to USENET and can still find on Google, 12 or 13 years later.
The amazing thing about Bank Street Writer and AppleWorks is that if the computers they ran on had internet connectivity, most of us would still be able to use those programs today and get a lot of work done. The same could be said of MS Word 5.1a for Macintosh, but certainly not Office 95 or 97.
Hell, one of the reasons I like pico so much is because it reminds me of the QBasic editor for DOS. With any luck, Pages will bring some simplicity and sanity back into word processing.
It's no wonder you're alienating the rest of the world with an attitude like that - especially when responding to a well-written, self-depricating joke.
And I can't resist pointing out that George W. Bush attended Yale as an undergraduate, which is in the same Ivy League group of universities as Harvard, and he even received an MBA from Harvard Business School. It doesn't get much more east coast elitist than that!
Oh, and let's not forget that Dubya was born in Connecticut, which certainly qualifies as "east coast".
Also, if they're under 18, they're very useful because they're more likely to take bigger risks than someone who might end up in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. As long as you're just infringing and not outright stealing, you're usually pretty safe if you're under 18.
However, I did know one guy who got caught carding over $10k worth of stuff that he would have sent to his friend's house in a nearby county. His friend's mom found a bunch of stuff they had carded and were going to sell in his closet, and the kid who did the carding went to juvie for a year and a half.
I disagree. Intellectual Property violations can certainly be punished in court or by an out of court settlement, but they're on a different level than malicious activity designed to damage your data. Imagine a situation where a small business owner was using his computer to keep track of invoices, finances, etc., when after he downloaded a song (illegally), his computer was damaged to the point where Windows wouldn't start up and his data was lost. I can't imagine that even the U.S. court system, with its preference for high-priced corporate lawyers, would find that a company that purposefully distributed the song with the knowingly destructive payload was not liable for damaging someone's unrelated personal or business data.
I guess an extreme analogy would be for the feds to slip a bomb into a package of fertilizer ordered by terrorists who might be planning to blow up a building a la Timothy McVeigh, but when the bomb goes off, it also injures some of the terrorists' children. As satisfyingly karmic as it may sound, vigilantism of that sort has no place outside of the movies (which might explain why the MPAA is sponsoring this sort of thing).
I know you didn't write this, but my argument about SMSunshine is that the game didn't break much new ground beyond Mario 64, so if you drove yourself nuts trying to finish Mario 64 and finally beat Bowser at the end, you're not very likely to buy another game that's almost exactly the same but now has a water pump.
For that matter, Nintendo is doing the same thing with Zelda by putting Link everywhere (Soul Calibur 2, etc.) -- it's another brand that's going to lost strength. I guess they'll continue this trend by creating a Metroid Party or something...
Something that worked in the opposite direction was Super Smash Bros and SSB Melee. When we would hold lan parties after school in the cafeteria, my students would ask me to bring two things: the projector, and my Gamecube w/Super Smash Bros Melee. That thing's chock full of Nintendo characters almost completely out of context, yet it's one of the most popular fighting games out there. People like familiarity, and that's what Nintendo has to offer.
If you want to make a comparison with another entertainment company, Mario is really Nintendo's Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is in almost every damned Disney product and regularly appears in crappy straight-to-video movies, yet you see the mouse ears and immediately think of Disney and their entire product line. Sony and Microsoft could only dream of the kind of brand recognition carried by a silly little plumber with an impossible moustache and a red cap. Brand dilution may take away from purity, but it certainly increases recognition.
Except in this case, the drug dealer is actually being paid by a corporation to distribute a substance that is normally just illegal but is now knowingly harmful (outside of the drug's regular effects). Isn't the corporation, who is sponsoring this harmful activity, legally culpable?
The media may be convinced that p2p is synonmous with illegal activity, but they love scaring viewers by "exposing" crimes that may be happening in your neighborhood! Right next door!
However, the "average user" is much more concerned with their pocketbook than with nebulous notions such as "intellectual property" and "digital rights management". When I bring up the subject to family members, friends and students, their eyes just sort of glaze over. I honestly don't think the average person gives a shit about copyright. The only people who care are those who make money by creating copyrighted works, and those who market/produce/protect those works.
At the high school where I teach and do tech support, the first RIAA lawsuits a few years ago sent a number of students and teachers scurrying to me to see if they might be in trouble for downloading music. My two favorites were the stoner kid who didn't realize he was sharing 4000+ songs on Kazaa, and the evangelical principal who subscribed to Roadrunner for the sole purpose of downloading Christian music (illegally).
The RIAA/MPAA fight is not one that they can ultimately win, because the rules have changed with the ease of copying. They should really look to the model that Scott Kurtz of PVP and Epitonic - give the content away as a means of promotion, then make your money selling related items such as t-shirts, books, concerts, etc. Sure, books and videos can also be pirated, but until they're as easily accessible as music is via an iPod or something similar, there's still money to be made. Hell, most bands make their money on tour from t-shirt sales.
Anyway, don't think for a second that the "average user" thinks p2p is "wrong" - most users I've encountered are just annoyed that it isn't easier to find things.
There are several programs out there that will auto-split tracks for you; some of them will also encode to mp3 or other formats as well. RIP Vinyl (available at download.com) is an inexpensive Windows program that will automagically split tracks up based on the silence between them, and you can change a whole bunch of other settings as well. I don't know if there's anything there's anything like that for Linux, but Audio Companion seems like a good bet for Mac OS X, or CD Spin Doctor if you have Toast Titanium 6.
I've wanted to convert my record collection into mp3s for a while now, and after doing a few albums for friends manually using Peak, I would recommed the auto-splitting recording programs. If the industry was really serious about DRM, they'd release all music on vinyl and movies on film since it's so much more difficult to encode analog sources.
I originally wrote $20,000, then I thought about it and remembered it was closer to $18,000, so I modified it and missed it in proofreading. I guess that's what I get for trying to be accurate.
Actually, it was $18,000 - I must have trimmed the 0s off in editing.
I wasn't aware that Lexmark sprung from IBM's printer division, so I hope that this Lenovo purchase goes better. Lexmark makes some of the worst inkjet printers I've ever encountered. Our school district made the mistake of purchasing around $18 worth of Lexmark printers (5700s) when we ordered Dells back in 1999. Within a year, nearly half of them were dead, and all were out of warranty.
We were actually able to get one of the engineers to come up to our school since we're located near Lexington, KY, and he was the one that told us the problem was due to a manufacturing flaw in the motherboard (faulty controller chip?). He offered to drive some of the printers back to Lexmark, put them in for repair on his account - he could "vouch for" up to eight printers at a time, regardless of warranty - and then send them back to us. However, the whole process would take months, and eventually we just gave up. We ended up with a wall of dead Lexmark printers on shelves waiting for the Disposal of Assets forms to come back so we could throw them away, but after waiting for three years, we eventually just took them all down to the dumpster.
I know that inkjet printers are generally terrible, but I can never recommend Lexmarks because of that experience. Also, we have something like 13 computer labs in the high school where I teach, and the labs that have the most problems are the ones with whitebox PCs from a crappy local company in our business/vocational labs, and the IBM PCs in our science lab. We've soldered off and replaced so many goddamned bad capacitors from IBM motherboards that we're never going to buy IBM again.
With any luck for Lenovo, this purchase might bring IBM's name brand back into the forefront of American consumers' minds, but I for one have no interest in anything associated with IBM.
Especially if you're of Arab descent.
Actually, I thought the whole point of an unlikely coincidence is that it doesn't happen all of the time.
You already said they were running on Windows.
They killed Clippy.
I'm so glad you showed me that - that's exactly what I was talking about. I would have loved to have seen that (the trailer) in a theatre.
Why don't we make a company that text messages the family's cell phones with a URL, which has a form that they have to fill out, which sends them an email with the location of the hand-written note that tells them to refer to the amendment to the will stored in the lawyer's filing cabinet that tells the family members they're not getting any money because they're all too fucking stupid to deserve any?
This service will be popular with the ring tone and Claria/Gator crowd, which means they'll make millions. Eventually, they'll find a way to set up kiosks at Walmart so people can retrieve their loved ones' final words and have them printed on the base of a battery-powered fiber optic color-changing angel with big teardrop eyes and fake feathers glued to the wings.
It was probably sometime in the late 80s or early 90s when movie trailers began to be tolerable. Often, I prefer watching the trailer to sitting through the actual movie, so I used to try to show up early to the theater to catch all the trailers. Now, of course, they beat you over the head with 20-30 minutes of trailers and stupid MovieTickets.com commercials. It's easier to watch them at Apple's Quicktime movie trailers page.
For a while in the 90s, every movie trailer that I ever saw seemed to be done by the guy who did the voice for Optimus Prime in the original Transformers series, Peter Cullen. You could pretty much tell whether or not a movie studio took the trailer seriously if they used him for the voiceovers....
"(rising voice) A time of prosperity.... (lowering voice) A place of peace. (slow, heavily enunciated lower voice) Now.... one man... threatens.. it.. all." Fun stuff, even though there seem to be more trailers now that don't use voiceovers at all but instead rely on screens of text to piece things together.
My major pet peeve about trailers, though, is when they show the entire movie plot in the trailer. It completely removes any element of surprise, and makes it almost pointless to go see the movie. For example, the new trailer for Flight of the Phoenix does just that - the entire story is compressed down into a two minute version, sort of like a Readers Digest condensed book. It's sort of how trailers for comedy flicks show you the funniest parts of the movie in the hopes that you'll shell out $9 to see it, but then have nothing additional to offer.