Selling PCs at supermarkets has rocked the German PC market.
ALDI (a very popular discount retailer, similar to Wal-Mart) began selling computers a few years back, both desktop PCs and laptops. They still do so on a regular basis and just this week they had a not-too-bad all-in-one all-purpose PC for home users.
These computers are special time-limited offers, marketed in large quantities over a few days, about twice a year. So limited that when the first series was sold in 1997, one customer tried to secure his PC using a gun.
Several other competing supermarket chains have joined the market with their own line of bargain PCs and now there are a number of "Schnappchen PC" offers popping up in several supermarkets chains before Christmas every year. You pick up your fully-installed, ready-to-go PC right next to your milk, bread and toilet paper.
Although computer pros initially laughed at the thought of buying an ALDI PC, it turned out to be a pretty good offer. Thanks to huge numbers of absolutely identical PCs to be sold, the company preparing these boxes had time to slash prices and still do the configuration better than what you'd often get at the likes of Dell or your local selfmade-PC-shop.
The ALDI PC is targeted at home users and its first versions were quite well thought-out and sold like crazy. (See gun story, linked above.)
These days, customers aren't that mad about the ALDI PC anymore, it seems. The recent offerings were more and more prone to feature-overload. The current ALDI PC comes with everything and a kite: Next to the standard stuff it includes a universal card drive, a TV-in card, a remote control, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN and a DVD burner on top of the DVD read only drive...
But still, ALDI teared down the wall, put massive price pressure on everyone else and literally brought the multimedia PC to the masses with a PC that's actually really ok.
Disney's 2D department is in limbo because recent scripts were weak. Their animators are still great!
Cynical businessmen have looted the Disney legacy, with classy projects such as "Peter Pan 2", "Hunchback 2", "Cinderella 2", "Aladdin: The Series" etc.
Disney dug its own grave, believing in their homemade "sure" formula for success. The formula is deader than dead. The audience didn't want to be fooled any longer and chose the better films: Those made by Pixar, where you can still see the spark and joy of the people creating these films.
If you're looking for what modern Disney could be, look for the films of Miyazaki. It's still a mystery to me why the old films from the back catalog of Ghibli is still being ignored by Europeans and Americans.
Does anyone know Klaus' favourite drink?
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 1
Knoppix has been a great tool for me quite a few times and I thought about giving him a free round of beer every now and then. Does anyone know the favourite beverage of Mr. Knopper?
Oz began spraying Hamburg long before Schill was even a radar blip of the Stammtisch. Oz began spraying the smiley faces more than 15 years ago, according to this source.
Oz would probably find sympathy by the folks here if he had some artistic talent or some wit in the comments he sprays on the walls. But he has neither.
Oz' exaggerations of being a Jew prosecuted by Nazis when he's actually a weirdo followed by subway watchmen and brought to court for damages he inflicted on private property have little to do with Schill's stupid right-wing politics.
Schill was a disgrace for Hamburg as is the current senate that still builds upon Schill's votes - but the Schill topic is quite off-topic in this thread.
Here in Hamburg, we have OZ, our very own local weirdo. According to two similar newspaper articles from last year (article 1, article 2), he is in his 50s and made more than 120.000 graffiti tags around the city, nothing could stop him yet.
He was first known for spraying smileys everywhere - road signs, car wheels, everywhere he could find something round. It was cute at first, but he sprayed everywhere. He later started spraying his "oz" tag and there is virtually no public space without his tag all over Hamburg, a major German city. You can find miles and miles of small "oz oz oz oz oz" carefully sprayed on subway walls, he climbs buildings to tag the roofs...
Oz is presumed to be a mental case. He has no income, lives on welfare, the only thing he does is graffiti and even while on trials, he was caught several times when tagging. He usually tries to escape the officers who catch him by beating them up.
He has appeared to court with a sign "I am a Jew" and has now begun spraying "policemen are Nazis" or "subway watchmen are Nazis" and simple "Stop the Nazis" graffitis - again, everywhere all over town.
It's somewhat embarassing: I had US visitors in Hamburg recently and had a hard time explaining to them that all these "Stop Nazis" graffitis are in fact the work of a weirdo who declared the people trying to stop him "Nazis", not of concerned citizens afraid of a new rise of the neo-fascists.
Ok, none of the articles linked in this thread mention when the whole thing started. When did people spot the first?
I've been on a 2-month backpacking trip around the United States in 1993. Back then, I took a photograph of one of these tiles located on a street in Washington DC. I still have the photograph and will scan it for the guy at toynbee.net.
However, I don't remember where in DC the tile was. (Being a regular tourist who doesn't write down the address of every odd object I photographed.)
I remember being very strangely amused about the tile that noone else but me seemed to notice. I had been a fan of Clarke's novel and the movie long before and it was eery that even just this single line of text contained so much weirdness.
In fact, the FTC accepts international complaints about US companies, as well. I just filed mine against SCO.:-)
Subject of Your Complaint: Investment Name of Company You Are Complaining About: The SCO Group Street Address: 355 South 520 West, Suite 100 City: Lindon State or Canadian Province: Utah Country: UNITED STATES Zip Code or Postal Code: 84042 Company Web Site: http://www.sco.com Phone Number: (801)7654999 Ext.
Explain Your Problem:
SCO is under new management which is currently engaging in a scheme that appears to be an elaborate "pump & dump" scam.
I urge the FTC to investigate recent stock market events and related SCO press releases and SCO legal threats against Linux users.
Re:Look to the past, the future holds nothing
on
KnoppiXMAME 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Check out some of those ancient Mame Roms. Back then, there were lots and lots and lots of pretty lackluster arcade games. We all just remember the good ones, but there were countless 1:1 space invader and pac man clones out there.
and of course she's running around in her skivvies
Every Terminator movie featured a time travel "arrival" scene and each time, the Terminators arrived naked. It's obvious that the filmmakers would use this again.
Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit
The McDonalds Coffee case was not "fucking bullshit". Please read:
Know the Facts: The McDonalds Coffee Case: No one is in favor of frivolous cases of outlandish results; however, it is important to understand some points that were not reported in most of the stories about the case. McDonalds coffee was not only hot, it was scalding - capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle. Here is the whole story.
The TRUTH behind the McDonalds coffee case: To get more coffee per pound of beans and increase profits, McDonalds served its coffee up to 40 degrees hotter than other fast food eateries. The coffee was so hot that if spilled would cause 3rd degree burns.
What's disturbing about this harrassment in particular, is that they're using tax payers' money by abusing the US courts as a means to go after their arch-enemies
This has been a common tactic since decades. See: Scientology, RIAA, MPAA and other organizations that use harassing law suits to intimidate others.
You alreay do live in a police state. Welcome to the real world.
Nazi Germany, which my grandparents and the older ones among my aunts and uncles lived in and can still talk about, was a police state. I guess you'd agree with that. It had thugs, sure, and beatings, sure, but most of the oppression in the first years of Nazi Germany was done through laws and intimidation.
Nazi Germany is known for its slaughter of its German-Jewish population, but they didn't go for that right from the start. First, they stripped the Jews and other unwanted individuals such as communists and members of the opposition from their jobs, their offices, their personal belongings, etc. It was a subtle step-by-step way of humiliating them, to take away their rights as citizens of a formerly democratic country. Because the Nazis could. Through laws.
Remember that while there was a majority of Germans who supported Hitler (I know that my grandparents were Nazis, and I'm not exactly proud about it), the German population was nonetheless afraid of being the next ones the state put an eye on. State-organzied neighbourhood watch was an easy method of intimidating the population into following party orders. Suddenly, your neighbours could turn you in, and the laws were broad enough that simple things became violations of the law. At some time it was forbidden to listen to non-German radio and news. Older Germans still talk about how afraid they were each time they listened to news or jazz music on the BBC, afraid that some neighbour might tell the police about it.
Watching what is going on the United States right now is a very frightening thing for someone who has a personal perspective on fascism.
I consider the US a great country and a great concept, I have the highest respect for the US, but never have I been more afraid of your government than now. The laws and rules that your government is putting into effect now - with surprisingly little complaining by the general population - is indeed the road to a police state. You're already halfway there, and it is getting worse.
Breast-feeding *hurts* for the first week or so. This can't be denied. Trust me: it does get better.
A friend's wife was all gung-ho on all the "breast is best" advice, and is a quite insecure person to start with, so she gobbled up all the "good advice" about being the "perfect mother" during her pregnancy. Rarely have I seen a young mother with more books about pregancy than her.
When the kid arrived, she had massive pain when she tried breast-feeding and for her, it did not get better.
She started feeling a massive guilt because she thought that she wouldn't be a "good mother" for her child since she could not give her kid the "best" initial food to grow up.
She ended up having depressions about this issue. Since everyone around her told her that only breast-feeding is good and everything else is basically chemical warfare against your child.
Bullshit, I say. If you realize you can't breast-feed for whatever reason, don't let that put you down and find another solution (including formula).
Saddam Hussein is Immanuel Goldstein - the big bad scary man on who all society's woes and ills can be heaped.
Currently, he is. A few months ago, it was Osama Bin Ladin. A few years ago, it was Muammar el Gaddafi. Before him, it was Saddam once before. And before him, it was... you get the idea.
This is what worries me most about US politics: The Hollywoodization of its foreign policy. In recent years, the US government and media always picked one "supervillain" and kept him as a target for the public to put all blame on this one single person. It's "us", the good guys, against "him", the bad guy.
And just like in an action movie, people were and still are fed to believe that removing this person will magically resolve to a happy ending of all current problems.
And somehow the US media always forget that it's not like the movies, that with the removal of the megalomanical villain it is not that all his henchmen are suddenly gone, powerless or instantly converted to the good side.
Killing Bin Ladin will not kill Al Quaida, and killing Saddam Hussein will not magically convert the Iraqis to democratic citizens.
If, oh, if the US government would only stop to look for Hollywood action movie scripts when it sketches its foreign policy, and the US media would only stop to use Hollywood dramatization techniques for its news reporting.
P.S.: Yeah, I'm not a US citizen. Yes, I do watch CNN. No, I don't hate America. Yeah, I think you have a bad government at present. In fact, I'm afraid of your government like I have never been before. No, that doesn't make me "anti-American".
Slashdot Mirror
Since this story is a dupe , allow me to repeat myself, as well:
You guys should complain to the FTC and the SEC about SCO. I have. It's easy and yes, they do accept complaints from non-US citizens.
What is the difference between Opteron and Athlon64?
"Note that Linus says preemption should be turned off for now, there are odd problems."
Comments like these make me shy away from trying the kernel on my home box. Any rough idea what the odd problems are?
Selling PCs at supermarkets has rocked the German PC market.
ALDI (a very popular discount retailer, similar to Wal-Mart) began selling computers a few years back, both desktop PCs and laptops. They still do so on a regular basis and just this week they had a not-too-bad all-in-one all-purpose PC for home users.
These computers are special time-limited offers, marketed in large quantities over a few days, about twice a year. So limited that when the first series was sold in 1997, one customer tried to secure his PC using a gun.
Aldi has become so successful that its main supplier Medion has slowly become the #1 computer manufacturer in Germany (although it is unclear wether it can hold that spot - the company is struggling, too).
Several other competing supermarket chains have joined the market with their own line of bargain PCs and now there are a number of "Schnappchen PC" offers popping up in several supermarkets chains before Christmas every year. You pick up your fully-installed, ready-to-go PC right next to your milk, bread and toilet paper.
Although computer pros initially laughed at the thought of buying an ALDI PC, it turned out to be a pretty good offer. Thanks to huge numbers of absolutely identical PCs to be sold, the company preparing these boxes had time to slash prices and still do the configuration better than what you'd often get at the likes of Dell or your local selfmade-PC-shop.
The ALDI PC is targeted at home users and its first versions were quite well thought-out and sold like crazy. (See gun story, linked above.)
These days, customers aren't that mad about the ALDI PC anymore, it seems. The recent offerings were more and more prone to feature-overload. The current ALDI PC comes with everything and a kite: Next to the standard stuff it includes a universal card drive, a TV-in card, a remote control, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN and a DVD burner on top of the DVD read only drive...
But still, ALDI teared down the wall, put massive price pressure on everyone else and literally brought the multimedia PC to the masses with a PC that's actually really ok.
Disney's 2D department is in limbo because recent scripts were weak. Their animators are still great!
Cynical businessmen have looted the Disney legacy, with classy projects such as "Peter Pan 2", "Hunchback 2", "Cinderella 2", "Aladdin: The Series" etc.
Disney dug its own grave, believing in their homemade "sure" formula for success. The formula is deader than dead. The audience didn't want to be fooled any longer and chose the better films: Those made by Pixar, where you can still see the spark and joy of the people creating these films.
If you're looking for what modern Disney could be, look for the films of Miyazaki. It's still a mystery to me why the old films from the back catalog of Ghibli is still being ignored by Europeans and Americans.
And bugs will be fixed! Yay, open source!
Knoppix has been a great tool for me quite a few times and I thought about giving him a free round of beer every now and then. Does anyone know the favourite beverage of Mr. Knopper?
Guess which companies will still be around in 5 years' time?
All of them. I fully expect for the SCO name to survive. But the current management and owner structure of the company will explode.
Oz began spraying Hamburg long before Schill was even a radar blip of the Stammtisch. Oz began spraying the smiley faces more than 15 years ago, according to this source.
Oz would probably find sympathy by the folks here if he had some artistic talent or some wit in the comments he sprays on the walls. But he has neither.
Oz' exaggerations of being a Jew prosecuted by Nazis when he's actually a weirdo followed by subway watchmen and brought to court for damages he inflicted on private property have little to do with Schill's stupid right-wing politics.
Schill was a disgrace for Hamburg as is the current senate that still builds upon Schill's votes - but the Schill topic is quite off-topic in this thread.
Schill is out of office (where he he belongs to be). I hope for new elections in Hamburg soon.
Here in Hamburg, we have OZ, our very own local weirdo. According to two similar newspaper articles from last year (article 1, article 2), he is in his 50s and made more than 120.000 graffiti tags around the city, nothing could stop him yet.
He was first known for spraying smileys everywhere - road signs, car wheels, everywhere he could find something round. It was cute at first, but he sprayed everywhere. He later started spraying his "oz" tag and there is virtually no public space without his tag all over Hamburg, a major German city. You can find miles and miles of small "oz oz oz oz oz" carefully sprayed on subway walls, he climbs buildings to tag the roofs...
Oz is presumed to be a mental case. He has no income, lives on welfare, the only thing he does is graffiti and even while on trials, he was caught several times when tagging. He usually tries to escape the officers who catch him by beating them up.
He has appeared to court with a sign "I am a Jew" and has now begun spraying "policemen are Nazis" or "subway watchmen are Nazis" and simple "Stop the Nazis" graffitis - again, everywhere all over town.
It's somewhat embarassing: I had US visitors in Hamburg recently and had a hard time explaining to them that all these "Stop Nazis" graffitis are in fact the work of a weirdo who declared the people trying to stop him "Nazis", not of concerned citizens afraid of a new rise of the neo-fascists.
Ok, none of the articles linked in this thread mention when the whole thing started. When did people spot the first?
I've been on a 2-month backpacking trip around the United States in 1993. Back then, I took a photograph of one of these tiles located on a street in Washington DC. I still have the photograph and will scan it for the guy at toynbee.net.
However, I don't remember where in DC the tile was. (Being a regular tourist who doesn't write down the address of every odd object I photographed.)
I remember being very strangely amused about the tile that noone else but me seemed to notice. I had been a fan of Clarke's novel and the movie long before and it was eery that even just this single line of text contained so much weirdness.
...at my former computer science department, a whole room of SUN server equipment was emptied over a long holiday weekend in 1998.
One does wonder who steals servers and where these stolen goods end up later.
So should everyone else. Just be polite and and to the point.
Yes, you too can complain to the FTC, even if you are not a US citizen. Follow the link to learn how.
Yes, you too should complain to the FTC.
in Germany they were required to stop with their threatenting campaign by the German government
Halfway right, it was a German court, not the German government. There has been no government interference in Germany on this case, as far as I know.
In fact, the FTC accepts international complaints about US companies, as well. I just filed mine against SCO. :-)
Subject of Your Complaint: Investment
Name of Company You Are Complaining About: The SCO Group
Street Address: 355 South 520 West, Suite 100
City: Lindon
State or Canadian Province: Utah
Country: UNITED STATES
Zip Code or Postal Code: 84042
Company Web Site: http://www.sco.com
Phone Number: (801)7654999 Ext.
Explain Your Problem:
SCO is under new management which is currently engaging in a scheme that appears to be an elaborate "pump & dump" scam.
I urge the FTC to investigate recent stock market events and related SCO press releases and SCO legal threats against Linux users.
Thank you.
After the Empire
Check out some of those ancient Mame Roms. Back then, there were lots and lots and lots of pretty lackluster arcade games. We all just remember the good ones, but there were countless 1:1 space invader and pac man clones out there.
between work, beach and going out
You're lying.
Once my desktop's graphics card had more memory than my laptop's system memory, I knew the graphics hardware development was going a weird route.
The other indicators were: craphics cards that need external power plugs and graphics cards that need more than one slotplug for its cooler fan.
Fans, anyway, are the work of the devil and the main reason why computers are driving me nuts these days.
and of course she's running around in her skivvies
Every Terminator movie featured a time travel "arrival" scene and each time, the Terminators arrived naked. It's obvious that the filmmakers would use this again.
Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit
The McDonalds Coffee case was not "fucking bullshit". Please read:
Know the Facts: The McDonalds Coffee Case: No one is in favor of frivolous cases of outlandish results; however, it is important to understand some points that were not reported in most of the stories about the case. McDonalds coffee was not only hot, it was scalding - capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle. Here is the whole story.
The TRUTH behind the McDonalds coffee case: To get more coffee per pound of beans and increase profits, McDonalds served its coffee up to 40 degrees hotter than other fast food eateries. The coffee was so hot that if spilled would cause 3rd degree burns.
What's disturbing about this harrassment in particular, is that they're using tax payers' money by abusing the US courts as a means to go after their arch-enemies
This has been a common tactic since decades. See: Scientology, RIAA, MPAA and other organizations that use harassing law suits to intimidate others.
If we lived in a police state...
You alreay do live in a police state. Welcome to the real world.
Nazi Germany, which my grandparents and the older ones among my aunts and uncles lived in and can still talk about, was a police state. I guess you'd agree with that. It had thugs, sure, and beatings, sure, but most of the oppression in the first years of Nazi Germany was done through laws and intimidation.
Nazi Germany is known for its slaughter of its German-Jewish population, but they didn't go for that right from the start. First, they stripped the Jews and other unwanted individuals such as communists and members of the opposition from their jobs, their offices, their personal belongings, etc. It was a subtle step-by-step way of humiliating them, to take away their rights as citizens of a formerly democratic country. Because the Nazis could. Through laws.
Remember that while there was a majority of Germans who supported Hitler (I know that my grandparents were Nazis, and I'm not exactly proud about it), the German population was nonetheless afraid of being the next ones the state put an eye on. State-organzied neighbourhood watch was an easy method of intimidating the population into following party orders. Suddenly, your neighbours could turn you in, and the laws were broad enough that simple things became violations of the law. At some time it was forbidden to listen to non-German radio and news. Older Germans still talk about how afraid they were each time they listened to news or jazz music on the BBC, afraid that some neighbour might tell the police about it.
Watching what is going on the United States right now is a very frightening thing for someone who has a personal perspective on fascism.
I consider the US a great country and a great concept, I have the highest respect for the US, but never have I been more afraid of your government than now. The laws and rules that your government is putting into effect now - with surprisingly little complaining by the general population - is indeed the road to a police state. You're already halfway there, and it is getting worse.
It's called "common sense". Apply it, every now and then, it will work wonders.
Breast-feeding *hurts* for the first week or so. This can't be denied. Trust me: it does get better.
A friend's wife was all gung-ho on all the "breast is best" advice, and is a quite insecure person to start with, so she gobbled up all the "good advice" about being the "perfect mother" during her pregnancy. Rarely have I seen a young mother with more books about pregancy than her.
When the kid arrived, she had massive pain when she tried breast-feeding and for her, it did not get better.
She started feeling a massive guilt because she thought that she wouldn't be a "good mother" for her child since she could not give her kid the "best" initial food to grow up.
She ended up having depressions about this issue. Since everyone around her told her that only breast-feeding is good and everything else is basically chemical warfare against your child.
Bullshit, I say. If you realize you can't breast-feed for whatever reason, don't let that put you down and find another solution (including formula).
Saddam Hussein is Immanuel Goldstein - the big bad scary man on who all society's woes and ills can be heaped.
Currently, he is. A few months ago, it was Osama Bin Ladin. A few years ago, it was Muammar el Gaddafi. Before him, it was Saddam once before. And before him, it was... you get the idea.
This is what worries me most about US politics: The Hollywoodization of its foreign policy. In recent years, the US government and media always picked one "supervillain" and kept him as a target for the public to put all blame on this one single person. It's "us", the good guys, against "him", the bad guy.
And just like in an action movie, people were and still are fed to believe that removing this person will magically resolve to a happy ending of all current problems.
And somehow the US media always forget that it's not like the movies, that with the removal of the megalomanical villain it is not that all his henchmen are suddenly gone, powerless or instantly converted to the good side.
Killing Bin Ladin will not kill Al Quaida, and killing Saddam Hussein will not magically convert the Iraqis to democratic citizens.
If, oh, if the US government would only stop to look for Hollywood action movie scripts when it sketches its foreign policy, and the US media would only stop to use Hollywood dramatization techniques for its news reporting.
P.S.: Yeah, I'm not a US citizen. Yes, I do watch CNN. No, I don't hate America. Yeah, I think you have a bad government at present. In fact, I'm afraid of your government like I have never been before. No, that doesn't make me "anti-American".