Sounds like standard "Street Date" shipping to me. Used to work retail electronics. Wasn't uncommon to have half a dozen boxes with "DO NOT SELL UNTIL $Date" on the shelf. (Hell, I had "Finding Nemo" DVD's sitting on the stockroom shelf while the movie was just hitting the second run theater.)
But good to know that there's not going to be a shortage. This game is almost as heavily anticipated as Doom 3 or even Half Life 2.
Quite simply, I don't patronize any place that slaps a TV in every corner. If I'm eating out, its with my wife, or with her and some friends. Hell, I didn't know until the other day that the local "Ruby Tuesdays" had an assortment of TV's until I looked up.
Blessedly, their staff keep the captions on, and the sounds to mute.
However, in my Handspring, I keep the most wonderful springboard module. The Omniremote. And in it, several buttons with the "Mute" functions for several different brands of TV. I'm not an asshole who will turn off the local sports game, but it has come in handy when being the only couple in the "patio" section, to turn down the mood-killing sports channel.
I won't buy this device, even if its $5. If it had a -MUTE- function, I would perhaps. While "Mute" is in some cases a lesser evil. I've found that really, I've not -NEEDED- to use the one I already have.
I preferr patronizing restraunts that don't shove television at me, to prevent me from needing to be social with my wife and friends.
Same here. I've got the same model (AJR-10) that I aquired from a friend when the drive died.
Tore it apart, bought an off-the-shelf 40gb drive, did the magic hand wave incantation (i.e. formatted it FAT-32) dumped my MP3's to it, replaced the 1500mAh's with COTS 2300mAh's, and re-assembled. Cable went the way of all those Special Cables, so I grafted two USB-A Male ends together and made my own. Installed the RockBox rom, and BOOM replaced the standard archos rom with one that has the functionality I needed.
For $125 in parts cost, and an hour's work. I got a 40gb mp3 player that does about 12 hours on a single charge. I pop the plastic battery plates, and I can swap in any regular AA size batteries. Doesn't hook to the USB port on my big FreeBSD machine. No big deal. five minutes with the screwdriver, and the drive is free again, I stick it right on the IDE chain. Who the hell would xfer gigs of data over USB, when you've got IDE.
I've got four people who want me to make them one, all I need is the parts. Okay, so the construction is not Most Ideal. But I can fix a solder weild if it goes bad. Hell, Archos haven't gone forth and shut down the "How to mod your Archos" people, nor the 'open source rom' people. Isn't that something that slashdotters like?
"... Perhaps most interestingly, 'HD TeAm' is offering to release the code to the world if enough donations are given to the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
In other words, "We'd like our defense fund paid in advance before we release That-Which-Will-Get-Us-Sued-Out-Of-Our-Lives.
Sorry, but this is nothing more than a "Oh cool." to me. It has no value to me as an admin. I lost my root pw, or my user passwords? I have physical access to the machine, I just reboot single user, and boom, I'm in.
I purchase old computers all the time (where old is relative of course) often with passworded logins, or -always- the owner forgot the root password. Every OS I've come across with has had a way to get past the password protection -IF YOU HAVE PHYSICAL ACCESS-
Now if you lose your login on your unix machine that you have remote access to only, contact whoever hosts it, have -them- break it open for you. If they don't know how... question their admin-fu.
A short range MD5 cracker. Neat tho, but nothing more than brute force no?
Actually, I preferr to use the CF -> PCMCIA adapter for reading CF cards. I have a 256M card I keep in my digital camera, and often never empty it, I'll keep the pictures on the card so that I never forget. And while there are some nice USB2 card readers out there, PCMCIA's bus speed (which doesn't even compare versus Cardbus, and I don't recall the USB2.0 speeds) is far, far superior than my laptop's USB1.0 speed.
Downloading 200M of images, takes quite a bit over USB, over pcmcia, its as fast as the HD in the computer. I can delete the crap ones and always have it handy.
I have one of these, and changed the default password as the -very- first thing I did, before it even got connected to the cable modem.
I then locked it down as best as I knew how, and took my laptop outside for a walk.
I hadn't walked down a full flights of stairs (I'm on a third floor walkup) and the signal dropped to nil. No problem, metal siding, metal stairwell, should get -some- signal at least, lets walk to the car. Get to my car, parked just outside, and not a blip. I've repeated this test more than a few times.
If anyone is feeding off my connection, they're sitting on my doorstep. I do know my neighbors pretty well, and the ones in range, I've told them that they're welcome to use it if they have guests (Since they all have Cable modems themselves) who have wifi. Sort of a "Scratch my back, I won't get pissy if you ask me to turn my stereo down at 1am" good neighbor thing. They know to just come knock and I'll give them the wep of the week... It happens, it gets me beer. "Hey, a buddy of mine needs to borrow your wireless to check his mail, here, have a Guinness."
Now, thats not to say that there isn't a point where a good wifi antenna and an interested geek couldn't probably -find- it and eventually crack my wep key. But they've probably already scanned the local library and found that, gasp, they left their wifi on their isdn partly open. (The admin is mostly clued, the only thing open outbound, is http, anything else is eaten. However, I've not tested this...)
Perhaps "Security through having stupid neighbors" is at play...
I'm surprised that one of the first features isn't "Fully Skinnable Interface"
Unlike a certain OS video editor that the name of escapes me, which had -THAT- as its very first Feature element. Yeah, that makes me leap into inspirational fury.
Hey, lets go sneak around a military base with motive to find out its secrets.
Gasp! The Men In Military Outfits Are Coming After Us! They MUST be hiding something...
No shit they're coming after you, you're snooping at a MILITARY BASE... Wether its Groom Lake, or even the bloody smallest frigging military outpost, walking around with gear to snoop is -GOING- go get you shit.
Even if its abandoned totally, not like you can just wander in and videotape the structures...
I have one, it was bought for me. Many people who know me, know I've no problem at all if people ask if I can help, nearly every one has offered me something in return. (A couple bucks, a 6 of beer, a pizza, some home-made cookies...).
But there are too many people out there who -DEMAND- that you help them, and not only have no intention of saying thanks, or even "Hey, what do I owe you?" but "You get paid for this? All you did was press keys."
You're right. I've had total strangers in the grocery store, read my shirt, and you can -see- the "Maybe he can help me/No wait, he looks like he'll tear my arms off..." conflict. The ones that I see, I -do- offer my services to...
I get paid quite well in my 9-5 to repair computers, servers, you name it. When I am home, the last thing I need is to hunt down nine hundred copies of "Gator" and so forth because they clicked "Yes" on every gaim window and so forth.
The chiropractor in the above, wouldn't crack and pop my back into place for free... He, like I, have bills to pay, food to eat, beer to aquire... For friends and family, always free. Total strangers owe me guinness and a promise to never, ever, click "Yes" on those "trust content from...." boxes.
500 volts is more than enough to 'overcome' natural skin resistance. 10,000 volts at a few milliamps is not enough to do more than tickle. 10,000 volts at a few Amps, will turn you into bacon.
40 times the strength? they might mean that the batteries are 40x the amperage of a regular car battery (in my truck, that is 750Amps.) In other words combined to be about 30,000 Amps.
Yes, I certainly would be -very- concerned at 500V/30,000 amps potential. drop -ANY- metal piece across open contacts of that potential, and you've got one quickly vaporized metal thing.
As I've always told the mantra as it was told to me. Volts Hurt, Amps Kill. 500V at even 1 Amp is enough to severely kill you.
I've redeemed 24 caps. My "find" rate was on the order of 50%. I still have three left in my "To be used" stack, that I doubt I -will- be able to use before the expiration period.
Why? Because there is not enough music I -LIKE- on iTunes. I don't like 90% of the pablum they tried to force to me, and when I was browsing around, there wasn't anything I wanted that I Didn't Already Have. Nearly a third of my 24 redeems were recommendations from friends, or re-aquisitions of songs I don't have on CD alreay.
Did it change my soda drinking habits? Sort of. Before the promo, I was a diet coke drinker, I swapped to Diet Pepsi while I could find the bottles. Now, I drink Diet Coke again. (Well, Diet Mt Dew, there's another promo on Dew Points...)
As for breaking it? Eeh, I never worried about the first one. I burned to CD all the songs I DL'ed, and listen in the car. My MP3 Player is my PC where I have them legitimately anyway. Perhaps in the future that will change.
I've been part of this for years now I guess...
on
National TV Turn Off Week
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been successfully participating in this 'Week' of no TV for the better part of a year now. With the exceptions of my occasional remembering that on Sat Night, the local PBS plays Red Green / Red Dwarf / Dr Who in a block, I would not have any change in my life if I did not own a TV at all.
I do not watch television outside of the afforementioned three shows, and I'm lucky if I remember once a month. I have never watched "Survivor", I had no idea "Apprentice" ended, nor do I really care what other crap is being shoved at me over airwaves I do not listen to.
I have never seen "The Sopranos", "Seinfeld" or even "Friends". Even when I watched TV, I never watched outside of Cartoon Network/Boomerang or one of the "TLC/Discovery Channel" Use Your Brain channels. Those channels never -once- insulted my intelligence. Yes, Cartoon network used to try and convince me my life was meaningless unless I was breathing Scooby Doo, so I just turned -that- off too.
Am I missing out? No. The only real reason I have a TV anymore, is to connect to my DVD player|PS2|XBox and if I had a decent VGA box for the latter two, I'd not need more than my monitor. (Except I have a 17" monitor and a 29" TV and a better home theater than my computer's audio....) (Yes, I know I can use a vga converter, but I'm a zealot. Ever played a Dreamcast on VGA? Lord love a duck, there's no comparison.)
If I wish to catch up on something that I might have missed, that a co-worker/friend/some-putz-on-irc things I -NEED- to see, oddly enough, there's Torrents and shares of practically any broadcast TV show now these days, if you know where to look.
If you cannot give up something, even for a mere -week- then you are addicted, and should seriously take the time to to a self check on if thats good, or bad.
That's a stab in the back as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I have an X-box, and I can play the Xbox games on it.
But, as a part-time salesdroid, one of the larger selling points of the PS2, at least as far as "Parents buying for Kids" is concerned, is that they can just plug in the PS2 where the PS1 is, the OLD games still play on it, and the new games will as well.
To me, that was one of the wisest decisions of Sony, as well as keeping the -same- form factor of their interconnects. Nintendo was close, but had the N64 been able to play the NES/SNES games out of the box? There would have been no contest in that segment of the console wars.
No HD? Fine, I can deal with that. I'll get a mem card. I have one for my OTHER consoles, I can do that with the Xbox2. But -please- don't make me have to purchase an additional kit just to play DVD's... my PS2 doesn't need it, why should the Xbox?
Also, ditch the "Xbox Only" games. FINE, so your competitors can get a shot at them. If your hardware is -superior- are you really worried? These days, since I now own pretty much all of the 'current' consoles, if I'm getting a game, I go for the one that looks, and 'feels' the best. I'm not a platform zealot.
And take a lesson from the Nintendo Book Of Things To Not Do. (That they seem to be good at writing, but never reading from.) Don't make your controller look like a Klingon Hand-to-Hand weapon. Don't add more buttons Just Because You Can.
And while you're at it, sure, your games are targetted at "Mature Gamers"... from my experience as a salesdroid, that's where you're losing to all the other systems. Other than "Barbie rides a horse again" game for girls, and the occasional sports game or what have you, 90% of your titles, a parent isn't going to purchase, even for a teen, because its Questionable. I'm not saying, take the Nintendo Route Of Least Offensiveness And Family Entertainment. Just take some of your Huge Wad Of Cash, and make a few Games Parents Will Buy For Their Kids. You don't know how many copies of Mario Party / Mario Cart I've sold to parent's who bought it because "Well, its a Mario game..."
(Oh, like Microsoft will read my slashdot post and listen to me.)
Yup. I've got an archive of one of my old HD's burned to CD, dated 1996. Used "Toast" on a Mac. burned at the Nose-bleeding speed of 2x. This was when disks cost $9 each in -bulk- mind you.
...such that all links were turned alphabetically rather than by PageRank...
I'm definitely glad they don't do this. Look at your "White Pages" first few pages of listings. How many "AAA Plumbing" or "AAAAAAA Painters" do you see? Businesses who set up their name to show up first in the listings have been around a Long Time. Looking at heavily spammed Usenet traffic, you see in a subject list, ####!!!!____ Spam That tries to show up topmost in the thread list by being sorted first. All we'd see is a thousand sites with a series of "!" 's as the first character of their name, so they'd show up first.
It was actually three mirrors (each about the size of a 4 by 6 notecard) standing up on a fourth, not a real kaleidoscope. Its quite difficult to explain, seeing the geometrical patterns the beams were bouncing around. (We used a green laser pen from ThinkGeek, and an COTS red laser as well.)
All the comments seem to be of the type "Wow, what a waste of research time/money, -EVERYONE- knows there is no air in space."
What ever happened to "Because its there."? You've got the capacity of generating Mach 5 winds... So you take your Enterprise model, and bolt it in and give it a go.
OF COURSE the Enterprise isn't designed to enter atmosphere. Its also a fictional vehicle.
People who do things like this, do it Because They Can.
I sure as hell would. Ever build a kaleidoscope, and shine a laser into it? What about with one of those clear crystal isocahedrons inside it as well... I know for a fact that there was no New Science being done. I also know it was fucking cool as shit. Yes, I proved nothing with my shiny thing, except it looked good, and was fun.
The Enterprise test was perhaps just that. Dicking around with shit. It just happened that the experiment returned "Its surprisingly aerodynamic". And they wished to share their results. Its geeky news, and so it made it onto Slashdot.
Relax, science doesn't always have to have a purpose. That's how discoveries are often made. Not by "That proves my theory." but "Hey, That's funny..."
Has anyone seen Mr Bean play the part of The Doctor in the two part "Charity" short "Curse of the Fatal Death"?
While I may get occasionally tired of him as his Mr Bean persona, Rowan -definitely- can pull off the suave groovitude of The Doctor. I'd probably preferr him second only to Tom Baker.
Not too far off. Don't laugh, but I think the "Power Glove" would be a far better device than the U-Force. I've had and coded up interfaces to both. Other than having to "bit-bang" the ports, the Power Glove was a rather robust 3d interface device. You could -almost- get decent precision with it, it had 3 "finger" buttons, each with three states (Open, partly closed, closed) a directional pad, ten digit buttons, and a few other things...
Time to break out your 80's NES toys, your VHS copy of "The Wizard", and see if you still have an old "ROB" to play with.
If not for mp3's given to me by a friend, I would have never heard of Neil Morse's work. From Liquid Tension Experiment, to Dream Theater, to Transatlantic, I've savoured every single moment of his work. I've hunted down bands like Spock's Beard and Flower Kings, because he (Neil) listed them as some of his favourite work (That, and members were in Transatlantic, but I digress).
Without shared mp3's, I would have never found out about these great bands who I've scoured half the good record stores for their CD's. "ClearChannel" and other ConglomCo Music won't ever play these guys...
I don't share any of these on Kazaa, (or any other p2p,) I give them to friends who are looking for something new to listen to.
What is your opinion on fans sharing select mp3's from bands that would never get airtime in an American Commercial Market? I've -tried- calling radio stations to get a song or two on the air, I'm lucky if I don't get "Never heard of them"...
Wouldn't perhaps over here in the USA, the long weekend, centering on the July 4 holiday, give a -natural- decrease in file sharing traffic? Vacations, beach trips, blowing shit up with fireworks?
Don't know about you, but between pimping around on Kazaa and going to the beach and hanging out, Kazaa doesn't come close.
I'll bet you other traffic for that time period has a decrease too. I'll have to scope my server logs at home,see if I had a 15% decrease that week too.
Geez. Thats like saying that 20% of the sick days off work are taken on friday, and another 20% are taken on Mondays...
Comments like this one make me wish there was a higher than 5 rating.
I did this. To the letter. Seven years ago. I even PGP signed my resignation e-mail (Which I followed up with a printed version that I signed infront of the boss)
Seven of us left the company two weeks later. Those two weeks were almost -chaos- in the company.
We left. Founded our own company. We're still here. We survived the Dot Com Boom. We have quite a nice clientelle list, and we've had a nearly unheard of growth trend.
Now, not saying that its going to happen this way for everyone. There was thankfully quite a good bit of handshaking, networking, and string pulling that kept us from taking the offers of all those investors. (And there were a -ton- of them, this was the height of DotComSwell) To this date, we have no shareholders demanding to us. We've been in the black since day 1, and we're almost alwyas actively hiring.
Seven years ago, I left a cushy cubicle job, programming for an average corporate behemoth. I still have a cubicle, but its -my- cubicle. In more ways than a name plate.
Wow. There's a Walmart there now? They're definitely moving forward. Unless my memory is wrong (Which I'm probably betting it is, I tried to block most of that time out.) they had a K-mart, but no Walmart.
IIRC, there was also a Hammermil paper processing plant. Ah the delightful smells. [/sarcasm] I can't imagine why the town -hated- the college kids so much. Could be that they saw anyone who "got their learn on" as Chris Rock said, was an uppity SOB who needed shunned. Most of the town's commercial centers probably all but collapsed or went into hibernation when school was out.
in 1993, the Comp Sci program was okay. The dorms weren't wired at all, if you needed onto the class computer, you had to go to the lone lab and try and get on a machine. The modem pool was about five 9600 modems.
None of the classes that were even "Senior" level were very advanced. Now, this was 1993, so things have changed in the industry as we all know.
The hospital? Dear god I'd rather have gone to a mideval blood letting barber than that hospital ever again.
I broke my ankle. (Yes, I know you can't -break- an ankle, I severely fucked it up.) When I went to the hospital to get it taken care of, I had to wait an hour in triage just to get the paperwork filled out, then about an hour (The blissfull haze of memory might have the #'s wrong) just to get told "You need to go to $other_side_of_the_hospital."... No wheelchair, no orderlies to help. Just a pair of crutches, and a handful of paperwork. Please tell me that if you still live there, you go to another hospital if you're ever in need. That place was practically a nightmare.
Damn, I need alot of beer. I'm remembering a time I don't want to.
I went to the college there from 1991-1993. Other -than- the college, the town was about as "High Tech" as any other small town nestled in the backwater woods of the north east USA 'mountain' towns. Go a mile off any decently paved road, toss a stone, and you'll hit Amish.
Now mind you, this was 1993 when I left. The college had -just- gotten hooked up to that (to us) Super High Tech Internet Highway!
Lock Haven creeped me out. I kept expecting to hear dueling banjos when I walked into town. The cops and "Townies" all but despised the college kids to the point of almost lynching any college kid who wandered off campus unaware...
It was a town that exhuded the feeling that 'Literacy' was not one of the top twenty sought after skills of the populace.
I'm not surprised nobody signed up, if the town was anything like I remember it being a decade ago. General concensus would have been "Fiber for $40? Lurleene can go down to the fabric store and get fiber for $2 a bag, I ain't paying no $40 for fiber."
Me? I'd've blown a nut the moment you would have said "$40/month for 10mb each way"
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like standard "Street Date" shipping to me. Used to work retail electronics. Wasn't uncommon to have half a dozen boxes with "DO NOT SELL UNTIL $Date" on the shelf. (Hell, I had "Finding Nemo" DVD's sitting on the stockroom shelf while the movie was just hitting the second run theater.)
But good to know that there's not going to be a shortage. This game is almost as heavily anticipated as Doom 3 or even Half Life 2.
Who am I joking. There will be a shortage.
Quite simply, I don't patronize any place that slaps a TV in every corner. If I'm eating out, its with my wife, or with her and some friends. Hell, I didn't know until the other day that the local "Ruby Tuesdays" had an assortment of TV's until I looked up.
Blessedly, their staff keep the captions on, and the sounds to mute.
However, in my Handspring, I keep the most wonderful springboard module. The Omniremote. And in it, several buttons with the "Mute" functions for several different brands of TV. I'm not an asshole who will turn off the local sports game, but it has come in handy when being the only couple in the "patio" section, to turn down the mood-killing sports channel.
I won't buy this device, even if its $5. If it had a -MUTE- function, I would perhaps. While "Mute" is in some cases a lesser evil. I've found that really, I've not -NEEDED- to use the one I already have.
I preferr patronizing restraunts that don't shove television at me, to prevent me from needing to be social with my wife and friends.
Same here. I've got the same model (AJR-10) that I aquired from a friend when the drive died.
Tore it apart, bought an off-the-shelf 40gb drive, did the magic hand wave incantation (i.e. formatted it FAT-32) dumped my MP3's to it, replaced the 1500mAh's with COTS 2300mAh's, and re-assembled. Cable went the way of all those Special Cables, so I grafted two USB-A Male ends together and made my own. Installed the RockBox rom, and BOOM replaced the standard archos rom with one that has the functionality I needed.
For $125 in parts cost, and an hour's work. I got a 40gb mp3 player that does about 12 hours on a single charge. I pop the plastic battery plates, and I can swap in any regular AA size batteries. Doesn't hook to the USB port on my big FreeBSD machine. No big deal. five minutes with the screwdriver, and the drive is free again, I stick it right on the IDE chain. Who the hell would xfer gigs of data over USB, when you've got IDE.
I've got four people who want me to make them one, all I need is the parts. Okay, so the construction is not Most Ideal. But I can fix a solder weild if it goes bad. Hell, Archos haven't gone forth and shut down the "How to mod your Archos" people, nor the 'open source rom' people. Isn't that something that slashdotters like?
"... Perhaps most interestingly, 'HD TeAm' is offering to release the code to the world if enough donations are given to the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
In other words, "We'd like our defense fund paid in advance before we release That-Which-Will-Get-Us-Sued-Out-Of-Our-Lives.
Sorry, but this is nothing more than a "Oh cool." to me. It has no value to me as an admin. I lost my root pw, or my user passwords? I have physical access to the machine, I just reboot single user, and boom, I'm in.
I purchase old computers all the time (where old is relative of course) often with passworded logins, or -always- the owner forgot the root password. Every OS I've come across with has had a way to get past the password protection -IF YOU HAVE PHYSICAL ACCESS-
Now if you lose your login on your unix machine that you have remote access to only, contact whoever hosts it, have -them- break it open for you. If they don't know how... question their admin-fu.
A short range MD5 cracker. Neat tho, but nothing more than brute force no?
No need to get a CF reader.
Actually, I preferr to use the CF -> PCMCIA adapter for reading CF cards. I have a 256M card I keep in my digital camera, and often never empty it, I'll keep the pictures on the card so that I never forget. And while there are some nice USB2 card readers out there, PCMCIA's bus speed (which doesn't even compare versus Cardbus, and I don't recall the USB2.0 speeds) is far, far superior than my laptop's USB1.0 speed.
Downloading 200M of images, takes quite a bit over USB, over pcmcia, its as fast as the HD in the computer. I can delete the crap ones and always have it handy.
I have one of these, and changed the default password as the -very- first thing I did, before it even got connected to the cable modem.
I then locked it down as best as I knew how, and took my laptop outside for a walk.
I hadn't walked down a full flights of stairs (I'm on a third floor walkup) and the signal dropped to nil. No problem, metal siding, metal stairwell, should get -some- signal at least, lets walk to the car. Get to my car, parked just outside, and not a blip. I've repeated this test more than a few times.
If anyone is feeding off my connection, they're sitting on my doorstep. I do know my neighbors pretty well, and the ones in range, I've told them that they're welcome to use it if they have guests (Since they all have Cable modems themselves) who have wifi. Sort of a "Scratch my back, I won't get pissy if you ask me to turn my stereo down at 1am" good neighbor thing. They know to just come knock and I'll give them the wep of the week... It happens, it gets me beer. "Hey, a buddy of mine needs to borrow your wireless to check his mail, here, have a Guinness."
Now, thats not to say that there isn't a point where a good wifi antenna and an interested geek couldn't probably -find- it and eventually crack my wep key. But they've probably already scanned the local library and found that, gasp, they left their wifi on their isdn partly open. (The admin is mostly clued, the only thing open outbound, is http, anything else is eaten. However, I've not tested this...)
Perhaps "Security through having stupid neighbors" is at play...
I'm surprised that one of the first features isn't "Fully Skinnable Interface"
Unlike a certain OS video editor that the name of escapes me, which had -THAT- as its very first Feature element. Yeah, that makes me leap into inspirational fury.
Hey, lets go sneak around a military base with motive to find out its secrets.
Gasp! The Men In Military Outfits Are Coming After Us! They MUST be hiding something...
No shit they're coming after you, you're snooping at a MILITARY BASE... Wether its Groom Lake, or even the bloody smallest frigging military outpost, walking around with gear to snoop is -GOING- go get you shit.
Even if its abandoned totally, not like you can just wander in and videotape the structures...
I have one, it was bought for me. Many people who know me, know I've no problem at all if people ask if I can help, nearly every one has offered me something in return. (A couple bucks, a 6 of beer, a pizza, some home-made cookies...).
But there are too many people out there who -DEMAND- that you help them, and not only have no intention of saying thanks, or even "Hey, what do I owe you?" but "You get paid for this? All you did was press keys."
You're right. I've had total strangers in the grocery store, read my shirt, and you can -see- the "Maybe he can help me/No wait, he looks like he'll tear my arms off..." conflict. The ones that I see, I -do- offer my services to...
I get paid quite well in my 9-5 to repair computers, servers, you name it. When I am home, the last thing I need is to hunt down nine hundred copies of "Gator" and so forth because they clicked "Yes" on every gaim window and so forth.
The chiropractor in the above, wouldn't crack and pop my back into place for free... He, like I, have bills to pay, food to eat, beer to aquire... For friends and family, always free. Total strangers owe me guinness and a promise to never, ever, click "Yes" on those "trust content from...." boxes.
500 volts is more than enough to 'overcome' natural skin resistance. 10,000 volts at a few milliamps is not enough to do more than tickle. 10,000 volts at a few Amps, will turn you into bacon.
40 times the strength? they might mean that the batteries are 40x the amperage of a regular car battery (in my truck, that is 750Amps.) In other words combined to be about 30,000 Amps.
Yes, I certainly would be -very- concerned at 500V/30,000 amps potential. drop -ANY- metal piece across open contacts of that potential, and you've got one quickly vaporized metal thing.
As I've always told the mantra as it was told to me. Volts Hurt, Amps Kill. 500V at even 1 Amp is enough to severely kill you.
I've redeemed 24 caps. My "find" rate was on the order of 50%. I still have three left in my "To be used" stack, that I doubt I -will- be able to use before the expiration period.
Why? Because there is not enough music I -LIKE- on iTunes. I don't like 90% of the pablum they tried to force to me, and when I was browsing around, there wasn't anything I wanted that I Didn't Already Have. Nearly a third of my 24 redeems were recommendations from friends, or re-aquisitions of songs I don't have on CD alreay.
Did it change my soda drinking habits? Sort of. Before the promo, I was a diet coke drinker, I swapped to Diet Pepsi while I could find the bottles. Now, I drink Diet Coke again. (Well, Diet Mt Dew, there's another promo on Dew Points...)
As for breaking it? Eeh, I never worried about the first one. I burned to CD all the songs I DL'ed, and listen in the car. My MP3 Player is my PC where I have them legitimately anyway. Perhaps in the future that will change.
I have been successfully participating in this 'Week' of no TV for the better part of a year now. With the exceptions of my occasional remembering that on Sat Night, the local PBS plays Red Green / Red Dwarf / Dr Who in a block, I would not have any change in my life if I did not own a TV at all.
I do not watch television outside of the afforementioned three shows, and I'm lucky if I remember once a month. I have never watched "Survivor", I had no idea "Apprentice" ended, nor do I really care what other crap is being shoved at me over airwaves I do not listen to.
I have never seen "The Sopranos", "Seinfeld" or even "Friends". Even when I watched TV, I never watched outside of Cartoon Network/Boomerang or one of the "TLC/Discovery Channel" Use Your Brain channels. Those channels never -once- insulted my intelligence. Yes, Cartoon network used to try and convince me my life was meaningless unless I was breathing Scooby Doo, so I just turned -that- off too.
Am I missing out? No. The only real reason I have a TV anymore, is to connect to my DVD player|PS2|XBox and if I had a decent VGA box for the latter two, I'd not need more than my monitor. (Except I have a 17" monitor and a 29" TV and a better home theater than my computer's audio....) (Yes, I know I can use a vga converter, but I'm a zealot. Ever played a Dreamcast on VGA? Lord love a duck, there's no comparison.)
If I wish to catch up on something that I might have missed, that a co-worker/friend/some-putz-on-irc things I -NEED- to see, oddly enough, there's Torrents and shares of practically any broadcast TV show now these days, if you know where to look.
If you cannot give up something, even for a mere -week- then you are addicted, and should seriously take the time to to a self check on if thats good, or bad.
That's a stab in the back as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I have an X-box, and I can play the Xbox games on it.
But, as a part-time salesdroid, one of the larger selling points of the PS2, at least as far as "Parents buying for Kids" is concerned, is that they can just plug in the PS2 where the PS1 is, the OLD games still play on it, and the new games will as well.
To me, that was one of the wisest decisions of Sony, as well as keeping the -same- form factor of their interconnects. Nintendo was close, but had the N64 been able to play the NES/SNES games out of the box? There would have been no contest in that segment of the console wars.
No HD? Fine, I can deal with that. I'll get a mem card. I have one for my OTHER consoles, I can do that with the Xbox2. But -please- don't make me have to purchase an additional kit just to play DVD's... my PS2 doesn't need it, why should the Xbox?
Also, ditch the "Xbox Only" games. FINE, so your competitors can get a shot at them. If your hardware is -superior- are you really worried? These days, since I now own pretty much all of the 'current' consoles, if I'm getting a game, I go for the one that looks, and 'feels' the best. I'm not a platform zealot.
And take a lesson from the Nintendo Book Of Things To Not Do. (That they seem to be good at writing, but never reading from.) Don't make your controller look like a Klingon Hand-to-Hand weapon. Don't add more buttons Just Because You Can.
And while you're at it, sure, your games are targetted at "Mature Gamers"... from my experience as a salesdroid, that's where you're losing to all the other systems. Other than "Barbie rides a horse again" game for girls, and the occasional sports game or what have you, 90% of your titles, a parent isn't going to purchase, even for a teen, because its Questionable. I'm not saying, take the Nintendo Route Of Least Offensiveness And Family Entertainment. Just take some of your Huge Wad Of Cash, and make a few Games Parents Will Buy For Their Kids. You don't know how many copies of Mario Party / Mario Cart I've sold to parent's who bought it because "Well, its a Mario game..."
(Oh, like Microsoft will read my slashdot post and listen to me.)
Yup. I've got an archive of one of my old HD's burned to CD, dated 1996. Used "Toast" on a Mac. burned at the Nose-bleeding speed of 2x. This was when disks cost $9 each in -bulk- mind you.
However, I'm certain that I'm not the only one.
...such that all links were turned alphabetically rather than by PageRank...
I'm definitely glad they don't do this. Look at your "White Pages" first few pages of listings. How many "AAA Plumbing" or "AAAAAAA Painters" do you see? Businesses who set up their name to show up first in the listings have been around a Long Time. Looking at heavily spammed Usenet traffic, you see in a subject list, ####!!!!____ Spam That tries to show up topmost in the thread list by being sorted first. All we'd see is a thousand sites with a series of "!" 's as the first character of their name, so they'd show up first.
It was actually three mirrors (each about the size of a 4 by 6 notecard) standing up on a fourth, not a real kaleidoscope. Its quite difficult to explain, seeing the geometrical patterns the beams were bouncing around. (We used a green laser pen from ThinkGeek, and an COTS red laser as well.)
And yes, there were "Laser Floyd" comments.
All the comments seem to be of the type "Wow, what a waste of research time/money, -EVERYONE- knows there is no air in space."
What ever happened to "Because its there."? You've got the capacity of generating Mach 5 winds... So you take your Enterprise model, and bolt it in and give it a go.
OF COURSE the Enterprise isn't designed to enter atmosphere. Its also a fictional vehicle.
People who do things like this, do it Because They Can.
I sure as hell would. Ever build a kaleidoscope, and shine a laser into it? What about with one of those clear crystal isocahedrons inside it as well... I know for a fact that there was no New Science being done. I also know it was fucking cool as shit. Yes, I proved nothing with my shiny thing, except it looked good, and was fun.
The Enterprise test was perhaps just that. Dicking around with shit. It just happened that the experiment returned "Its surprisingly aerodynamic". And they wished to share their results. Its geeky news, and so it made it onto Slashdot.
Relax, science doesn't always have to have a purpose. That's how discoveries are often made. Not by "That proves my theory." but "Hey, That's funny..."
Has anyone seen Mr Bean play the part of The Doctor in the two part "Charity" short "Curse of the Fatal Death"?
While I may get occasionally tired of him as his Mr Bean persona, Rowan -definitely- can pull off the suave groovitude of The Doctor. I'd probably preferr him second only to Tom Baker.
Not too far off. Don't laugh, but I think the "Power Glove" would be a far better device than the U-Force. I've had and coded up interfaces to both. Other than having to "bit-bang" the ports, the Power Glove was a rather robust 3d interface device. You could -almost- get decent precision with it, it had 3 "finger" buttons, each with three states (Open, partly closed, closed) a directional pad, ten digit buttons, and a few other things...
Time to break out your 80's NES toys, your VHS copy of "The Wizard", and see if you still have an old "ROB" to play with.
If not for mp3's given to me by a friend, I would have never heard of Neil Morse's work. From Liquid Tension Experiment, to Dream Theater, to Transatlantic, I've savoured every single moment of his work. I've hunted down bands like Spock's Beard and Flower Kings, because he (Neil) listed them as some of his favourite work (That, and members were in Transatlantic, but I digress).
Without shared mp3's, I would have never found out about these great bands who I've scoured half the good record stores for their CD's. "ClearChannel" and other ConglomCo Music won't ever play these guys...
I don't share any of these on Kazaa, (or any other p2p,) I give them to friends who are looking for something new to listen to.
What is your opinion on fans sharing select mp3's from bands that would never get airtime in an American Commercial Market? I've -tried- calling radio stations to get a song or two on the air, I'm lucky if I don't get "Never heard of them"...
Wouldn't perhaps over here in the USA, the long weekend, centering on the July 4 holiday, give a -natural- decrease in file sharing traffic? Vacations, beach trips, blowing shit up with fireworks?
Don't know about you, but between pimping around on Kazaa and going to the beach and hanging out, Kazaa doesn't come close.
I'll bet you other traffic for that time period has a decrease too. I'll have to scope my server logs at home,see if I had a 15% decrease that week too.
Geez. Thats like saying that 20% of the sick days off work are taken on friday, and another 20% are taken on Mondays...
Comments like this one make me wish there was a higher than 5 rating.
I did this. To the letter. Seven years ago. I even PGP signed my resignation e-mail (Which I followed up with a printed version that I signed infront of the boss)
Seven of us left the company two weeks later. Those two weeks were almost -chaos- in the company.
We left. Founded our own company. We're still here. We survived the Dot Com Boom. We have quite a nice clientelle list, and we've had a nearly unheard of growth trend.
Now, not saying that its going to happen this way for everyone. There was thankfully quite a good bit of handshaking, networking, and string pulling that kept us from taking the offers of all those investors. (And there were a -ton- of them, this was the height of DotComSwell) To this date, we have no shareholders demanding to us. We've been in the black since day 1, and we're almost alwyas actively hiring.
Seven years ago, I left a cushy cubicle job, programming for an average corporate behemoth. I still have a cubicle, but its -my- cubicle. In more ways than a name plate.
Wow. There's a Walmart there now? They're definitely moving forward. Unless my memory is wrong (Which I'm probably betting it is, I tried to block most of that time out.) they had a K-mart, but no Walmart.
... No wheelchair, no orderlies to help. Just a pair of crutches, and a handful of paperwork. Please tell me that if you still live there, you go to another hospital if you're ever in need. That place was practically a nightmare.
IIRC, there was also a Hammermil paper processing plant. Ah the delightful smells. [/sarcasm] I can't imagine why the town -hated- the college kids so much. Could be that they saw anyone who "got their learn on" as Chris Rock said, was an uppity SOB who needed shunned. Most of the town's commercial centers probably all but collapsed or went into hibernation when school was out.
in 1993, the Comp Sci program was okay. The dorms weren't wired at all, if you needed onto the class computer, you had to go to the lone lab and try and get on a machine. The modem pool was about five 9600 modems.
None of the classes that were even "Senior" level were very advanced. Now, this was 1993, so things have changed in the industry as we all know.
The hospital? Dear god I'd rather have gone to a mideval blood letting barber than that hospital ever again.
I broke my ankle. (Yes, I know you can't -break- an ankle, I severely fucked it up.) When I went to the hospital to get it taken care of, I had to wait an hour in triage just to get the paperwork filled out, then about an hour (The blissfull haze of memory might have the #'s wrong) just to get told "You need to go to $other_side_of_the_hospital."
Damn, I need alot of beer. I'm remembering a time I don't want to.
Dear $diety... Lock Haven?
I went to the college there from 1991-1993. Other -than- the college, the town was about as "High Tech" as any other small town nestled in the backwater woods of the north east USA 'mountain' towns. Go a mile off any decently paved road, toss a stone, and you'll hit Amish.
Now mind you, this was 1993 when I left. The college had -just- gotten hooked up to that (to us) Super High Tech Internet Highway!
Lock Haven creeped me out. I kept expecting to hear dueling banjos when I walked into town. The cops and "Townies" all but despised the college kids to the point of almost lynching any college kid who wandered off campus unaware...
It was a town that exhuded the feeling that 'Literacy' was not one of the top twenty sought after skills of the populace.
I'm not surprised nobody signed up, if the town was anything like I remember it being a decade ago. General concensus would have been "Fiber for $40? Lurleene can go down to the fabric store and get fiber for $2 a bag, I ain't paying no $40 for fiber."
Me? I'd've blown a nut the moment you would have said "$40/month for 10mb each way"