I don't get the whole "911" thing. I've had to call 911 on my Vonage phone and it worked fine. As I'm sure everyone here knows, when you sign up you have to "activate" 911 service (i.e. fill out a form with your address and wait for them to verify it) - it's no big deal.
My best friend and I both had a Game Genie - we would daisy chain them together so we could enter twice the number of codes. It didn't always work and sometimes had really weird effects but it was still totally awesome.
Ultimate 7 was definitely one of the best games of the 1990's - it also provided the engine for Crusader:No Remorse and Crusader:No Regret, two other amazingly awesome games that were way ahead of their time. I'm fairly certain that series was killed off by EA when they bought out Origin.
Totally buggy and didn't fit the back-story at all. I think WC3 was actually the best of the series, the movie-based cut-scenes were generally well done and not overbearing. The original Privateer was definitely one of the best games of that era, I'm still disappointed that Origin killed the Privateer Online project, although after Privateer2 I have a feeling it would have been butchered anyways so perhaps it's a good thing.
Definitely, a lot of the best SF authors these days are either in England or Scotland - their books tend to be available in Europe long before they are in the US. I'm sure this is true for other genres as well. It's always worthwhile to check out book stores when you are overseas.
Bad comparison I think. It makes more logical sense to bring a library of music with you since chances are good you will use a significant percentage of it. If you bring either library of ebooks with you on a long trip or a library of mp3s, which provides the greater benefit? Clearly it's the mp3s, even if you are a voracious reader you're not going to read more than a few books. You may listen to several hundred songs though, and you may want access to a variety of musicians and genres because music listening is often much more mood based than book reading.
I actually remember traveling before the existence of mp3 players, I used to bring a lot of CDs with me, it was a huge hassle - an mp3 player was a logical replacement. An ebook reader does not make a lot of sense for my book needs.
Until there is decent hardware to read books on, projects like this aren't going anywhere beyond niche markets.
I love books, I own a few thousand of them and buy new ones every few months. I don't own a single ebook and I doubt I ever will because I've yet to see an ebook reader that was superior to an actual book. The only benefit to ebook readers over physical books are portability and storage capacity. The problem with this is that neither of these are big problems with physical books - if I'm going on a long trip it's not a big deal to bring even a few full sized hardbacks along to read. I don't need to have a library of books on my person at any time, the most books I've ever needed to bring with me anywhere at one time (since high school) was 4, and that was to read on a flight to the other side of the planet. I don't often fly to the other side of the planet.
Where is the line then? The few times I've tried to figure out what the hell is up with myspace my browser gets beaten to death by the horrific web design. I saw one page where multiple flash players loaded several video and audio files AT THE SAME TIME. The inmates can only run the asylum for so long. It's great they've managed to build a "web 2.0" version of Geocities, but when half the pages they host required a multi-ghz beast of a machine to even load I don't see how their model can really be sustainable. You either follow standards and good design or you let your users produce web pages which crash most peoples browsers.
I'd love to see the BBC turn the Baroque Cycle into a miniseries. I fear it would be the longest miniseries ever created though. It would probably make a better regular TV series, I think you could get about 4 or 5 years out of it (assuming 15 hours of video per season).
Your loss. I think the Baroque novels are Stephenson's best work yet. I'm almost done reading the whole set for the second time. It holds up to a second reading better than any of his other novels, there is just so much going on at so many different levels. I agree that it's odd he used ancestors of characters from Cryptonomicon, at first it's difficult to get past that if you've recently read Cryptonomicon. I would say that the characters are very unique though, you won't get them confused with the Cryptonomicon characters.
I agree. It was a great scene, it just lacked a real set up. The last 100 pages of that book did feel rushed, I imagine the book could easily have gone the Baroque Cycle route if his publisher/editor would have let him. Perhaps the set up for how the crazy bow-wielder got there was in the missing ~200 pages. I don't think Stephenson deserves to get so much shit about not being able to write an ending at all. Hell, each of the books in the Baroque Cycle has a nice little ending and he was under no obligation to wrap things up tightly. He maybe deserves some shit about not being able to write anything but epic novels, I personally like my novels epic as long as the author is good and Stephenson is excellent so I'd say that would be unwarranted criticism.
One of the problems is that increased cost tends to reflect brand popularity rather than any real increase in actual quality. The only way to really know the quality of something before you purchase it is to find information about it, which is often difficult because marketing is inherently dishonest. I'm willing to pay more for certain items if I know they are high quality, but it is difficult to determine what is actually high quality without spending significant time doing research.
It was in the 1980's, can't recall the exact year but maybe '88 or '89? I don't remember how old I was in the 4th grade! My parents shrugged it off when I told them. No mention of lawsuits or anything like that, they seemed pretty disinterested when I told them about it.
I've got one of those stories too, not nearly as bad as yours though. In the 4th grade I fell off a jungle gym and broke my arm. It hurt like a motherfucker so I couldn't really think straight, I just knew I had to get medical attention immediately and that was all I could think of. The teacher who was watching the playground intercepted me as I was walking towards the school and asked where I was going, I said I had broken my arm and was going to the nurse. She said I had to get approval first. Then she grabbed my arm and shook it. When I get injured I go into this weird "damage mode" where I'm totally calm and hyper-focused, so because I was wasn't crying and screaming she figured I was faking it or something. It was one of the most physically painful experience of my life, I nearly vomited on her from the pain. I just kept saying something like, "I broke my arm, I medical attention" over and over until she finally got sick of it and told me to just go to the nurse.
I've seen sub-$100 6600GTs. I agree the low-end has been a lot of crap in the past, but a 6600GT is a solid card to have as the "low-end" even if it is a few years old now. I personally can't stand the contemporary nomenclature used by ATI and nVidia and I think it's one of the reasons people bitch about the low-end cards, it's really hard to figure out relative performance without doing a lot of research.
This is a common trick with scammers who sell high-end components. Sell that high-end and hard to get item for $20 less than anyone else even though you know you can't deliver it because you don't actually have any. Wait a month or two for prices to drop to what you sold it for, then order a bunch and ship them to your customers.
The only way you would automatically qualify is if you were born AFTER your parent was given citizenship. It's also taken into account if you are a minor applying for citizenship, but isn't officially an automatic qualifier. If you are an adult it makes no difference if your parents were granted citizenship under the right of return after you were born.
I did a few times while in Ireland - it was something cheap like 2 euros an hour and all the coffee you could drink. If you need to check your favorite websites or read your email it's worth it. I used the internet for a total of about 3 hours the entire two weeks I was in Ireland - the least time I've spent on the internet since probably about 1995 or so. It was worth the euros.
That said, I would never check my online banking or anything else more secure than my personal email from a machine I didn't personally own or someone I know and trust owns. People who check their online banking in an internet cafe or at a kiosk are totally insane - maybe if you could boot your own OS on the machine, I don't know if many places would let you do that though.
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.
When I was a starving college student I had phone service through Qwest. After a few months I started getting two identical bills as well as missing payment notices. I checked and they were cashing my checks so I called them up and they said the notices were sent in error, my account actually had a credit on it so just disregard them. Not too long after this my phone was disconnected and more angry notices arrived threatening to send collections after me. So I call them up and wasted several hours of my life talking to various people and explaining that my bank shows they are cashing my checks. Eventually someone discovers that for some reason I have two separate accounts with them, one of which has no services of any sort associated with it. For some mysterious reason all of my payments were being shuffled into this other account and just sitting there, probably waiting to be siphoned off into some slush fund somewhere. Because this included the late fees and missed payment fees as well it added up to quite a bit of money. It took them nearly a year to refund me the extra money. I've boycotted Qwest ever since.
Other fun billing experience was with Nextel. In addition to totally lying about the "contract" I agreed to and shipping me a broken phone, they were charging me California state phone taxes, which conveniently are some of the highest in the nation. I don't live in California. They aren't based in California. The phone support people couldn't explain it and kept asking me to confirm my address. Eventually after more than an hour and getting transferred around to a half dozen different people they agreed that they should refund me the money and charge me the proper state taxes. I've had nothing but trouble with those bastards, they a bunch of incompetent liars.
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I don't get the whole "911" thing. I've had to call 911 on my Vonage phone and it worked fine. As I'm sure everyone here knows, when you sign up you have to "activate" 911 service (i.e. fill out a form with your address and wait for them to verify it) - it's no big deal.
maybe if we start now we can stop the crisis before it starts...
One way or another, early adopters almost always get screwed.
My best friend and I both had a Game Genie - we would daisy chain them together so we could enter twice the number of codes. It didn't always work and sometimes had really weird effects but it was still totally awesome.
Ultimate 7 was definitely one of the best games of the 1990's - it also provided the engine for Crusader:No Remorse and Crusader:No Regret, two other amazingly awesome games that were way ahead of their time. I'm fairly certain that series was killed off by EA when they bought out Origin.
Totally buggy and didn't fit the back-story at all. I think WC3 was actually the best of the series, the movie-based cut-scenes were generally well done and not overbearing. The original Privateer was definitely one of the best games of that era, I'm still disappointed that Origin killed the Privateer Online project, although after Privateer2 I have a feeling it would have been butchered anyways so perhaps it's a good thing.
Definitely, a lot of the best SF authors these days are either in England or Scotland - their books tend to be available in Europe long before they are in the US. I'm sure this is true for other genres as well. It's always worthwhile to check out book stores when you are overseas.
Bad comparison I think. It makes more logical sense to bring a library of music with you since chances are good you will use a significant percentage of it. If you bring either library of ebooks with you on a long trip or a library of mp3s, which provides the greater benefit? Clearly it's the mp3s, even if you are a voracious reader you're not going to read more than a few books. You may listen to several hundred songs though, and you may want access to a variety of musicians and genres because music listening is often much more mood based than book reading.
I actually remember traveling before the existence of mp3 players, I used to bring a lot of CDs with me, it was a huge hassle - an mp3 player was a logical replacement. An ebook reader does not make a lot of sense for my book needs.
Until there is decent hardware to read books on, projects like this aren't going anywhere beyond niche markets.
I love books, I own a few thousand of them and buy new ones every few months. I don't own a single ebook and I doubt I ever will because I've yet to see an ebook reader that was superior to an actual book. The only benefit to ebook readers over physical books are portability and storage capacity. The problem with this is that neither of these are big problems with physical books - if I'm going on a long trip it's not a big deal to bring even a few full sized hardbacks along to read. I don't need to have a library of books on my person at any time, the most books I've ever needed to bring with me anywhere at one time (since high school) was 4, and that was to read on a flight to the other side of the planet. I don't often fly to the other side of the planet.
Where is the line then? The few times I've tried to figure out what the hell is up with myspace my browser gets beaten to death by the horrific web design. I saw one page where multiple flash players loaded several video and audio files AT THE SAME TIME. The inmates can only run the asylum for so long. It's great they've managed to build a "web 2.0" version of Geocities, but when half the pages they host required a multi-ghz beast of a machine to even load I don't see how their model can really be sustainable. You either follow standards and good design or you let your users produce web pages which crash most peoples browsers.
I'd love to see the BBC turn the Baroque Cycle into a miniseries. I fear it would be the longest miniseries ever created though. It would probably make a better regular TV series, I think you could get about 4 or 5 years out of it (assuming 15 hours of video per season).
Your loss. I think the Baroque novels are Stephenson's best work yet. I'm almost done reading the whole set for the second time. It holds up to a second reading better than any of his other novels, there is just so much going on at so many different levels. I agree that it's odd he used ancestors of characters from Cryptonomicon, at first it's difficult to get past that if you've recently read Cryptonomicon. I would say that the characters are very unique though, you won't get them confused with the Cryptonomicon characters.
I agree. It was a great scene, it just lacked a real set up. The last 100 pages of that book did feel rushed, I imagine the book could easily have gone the Baroque Cycle route if his publisher/editor would have let him. Perhaps the set up for how the crazy bow-wielder got there was in the missing ~200 pages.
I don't think Stephenson deserves to get so much shit about not being able to write an ending at all. Hell, each of the books in the Baroque Cycle has a nice little ending and he was under no obligation to wrap things up tightly. He maybe deserves some shit about not being able to write anything but epic novels, I personally like my novels epic as long as the author is good and Stephenson is excellent so I'd say that would be unwarranted criticism.
I'd rather vote for John Carmack.
One of the problems is that increased cost tends to reflect brand popularity rather than any real increase in actual quality. The only way to really know the quality of something before you purchase it is to find information about it, which is often difficult because marketing is inherently dishonest. I'm willing to pay more for certain items if I know they are high quality, but it is difficult to determine what is actually high quality without spending significant time doing research.
It was in the 1980's, can't recall the exact year but maybe '88 or '89? I don't remember how old I was in the 4th grade! My parents shrugged it off when I told them. No mention of lawsuits or anything like that, they seemed pretty disinterested when I told them about it.
I've got one of those stories too, not nearly as bad as yours though. In the 4th grade I fell off a jungle gym and broke my arm. It hurt like a motherfucker so I couldn't really think straight, I just knew I had to get medical attention immediately and that was all I could think of. The teacher who was watching the playground intercepted me as I was walking towards the school and asked where I was going, I said I had broken my arm and was going to the nurse. She said I had to get approval first. Then she grabbed my arm and shook it. When I get injured I go into this weird "damage mode" where I'm totally calm and hyper-focused, so because I was wasn't crying and screaming she figured I was faking it or something. It was one of the most physically painful experience of my life, I nearly vomited on her from the pain. I just kept saying something like, "I broke my arm, I medical attention" over and over until she finally got sick of it and told me to just go to the nurse.
I've seen sub-$100 6600GTs. I agree the low-end has been a lot of crap in the past, but a 6600GT is a solid card to have as the "low-end" even if it is a few years old now. I personally can't stand the contemporary nomenclature used by ATI and nVidia and I think it's one of the reasons people bitch about the low-end cards, it's really hard to figure out relative performance without doing a lot of research.
Are you being mendacious or are you really so ignorant of history?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
This is a common trick with scammers who sell high-end components. Sell that high-end and hard to get item for $20 less than anyone else even though you know you can't deliver it because you don't actually have any. Wait a month or two for prices to drop to what you sold it for, then order a bunch and ship them to your customers.
The only way you would automatically qualify is if you were born AFTER your parent was given citizenship. It's also taken into account if you are a minor applying for citizenship, but isn't officially an automatic qualifier. If you are an adult it makes no difference if your parents were granted citizenship under the right of return after you were born.
I did a few times while in Ireland - it was something cheap like 2 euros an hour and all the coffee you could drink. If you need to check your favorite websites or read your email it's worth it. I used the internet for a total of about 3 hours the entire two weeks I was in Ireland - the least time I've spent on the internet since probably about 1995 or so. It was worth the euros.
That said, I would never check my online banking or anything else more secure than my personal email from a machine I didn't personally own or someone I know and trust owns. People who check their online banking in an internet cafe or at a kiosk are totally insane - maybe if you could boot your own OS on the machine, I don't know if many places would let you do that though.
I actually asked her what she was studying:
Feminism
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.
When I was a starving college student I had phone service through Qwest. After a few months I started getting two identical bills as well as missing payment notices. I checked and they were cashing my checks so I called them up and they said the notices were sent in error, my account actually had a credit on it so just disregard them. Not too long after this my phone was disconnected and more angry notices arrived threatening to send collections after me. So I call them up and wasted several hours of my life talking to various people and explaining that my bank shows they are cashing my checks. Eventually someone discovers that for some reason I have two separate accounts with them, one of which has no services of any sort associated with it. For some mysterious reason all of my payments were being shuffled into this other account and just sitting there, probably waiting to be siphoned off into some slush fund somewhere. Because this included the late fees and missed payment fees as well it added up to quite a bit of money. It took them nearly a year to refund me the extra money.
I've boycotted Qwest ever since.
Other fun billing experience was with Nextel. In addition to totally lying about the "contract" I agreed to and shipping me a broken phone, they were charging me California state phone taxes, which conveniently are some of the highest in the nation. I don't live in California. They aren't based in California. The phone support people couldn't explain it and kept asking me to confirm my address. Eventually after more than an hour and getting transferred around to a half dozen different people they agreed that they should refund me the money and charge me the proper state taxes. I've had nothing but trouble with those bastards, they a bunch of incompetent liars.