I had a friend who moved out to San Fransisco to live on a boat. He had some wicked-cool software to do navigation and stuff. It would even interface with his boat's autopilot system, so he had the laptop, autopilot, GPS, and all that hooked all together and could, in theory anyway, click a couple of buttons and then sit up on deck for the journey reading a book or something. The software took into account tides and water speed, and weather, and all sorts of stuff.
No. You will buy a $99 (maybe even less) box that sits on top of your TV
Yes! That's the answer! Buy! Buy, buy, buy! Spend more money! Your government mandates it! Consume! Use up resources! Your life is meaningless without things! Surely this is the easy way out we've been hoping for! Give me your products, government!
Um, people can certainly see the difference between an analog broadcast and digital cable, and there are still people (myself included) who think that analog is just dandy. I refuse to spend money to get cable TV or satellite or what have you, and if my analog signals go away, I'm likely to not spend the money just so that I can get public TV and Simpsons back. The TV I've got is plenty good enough, why spend the money to replicate perfectly good hardware like that? Where is my old TV going to go? Some landfill? What a waste.
It's one thing to have the content providers decide independantly to move over to digital and cut off the old analog signals. Nothing I can do about that, and that's their choice. I'm rather upset that the government seems to be mandating that my perfectly good equipment be obsolete by a certain date.
Huh. I must be the odd one out here, because I've been using basically nothing *but* WD drives for some time now (they're usually the cheapest in the area), and I've never had any problems with them at all. In my Linux box right now, I've got a 20GB, 30GB, and 40GB drive, and they've all been in there for some time, and I've had nary a problem with them.
And, by the way, it should be made entirely clear that every human being on the planet should go and read Cryptonomicon. Seriously. If you don't know English, learn it, and then read that book. It's fantastic.
Just in case anyone here hasn't read it yet and is looking for something to do.
Oh, whoops. Misinformation on Slashdot, who'd've guessed?:) Although, to be fair, what's the difference between a digital recorder and something that'll allow you to paus, fast-forward, and rewind programs, and also start them up whenever you want? Although, now that I look at it, it doesn't say that iControl lets you start programs whenever you want . . . Hm.
Man, that makes me even more upset about those damn billboards, though. At least this TIVO-like thing was legitimately cool. iControl just sucks. Grrrrr. That's the kind of thing that makes you want to go all Fight Club on billboards. Although I probably shouldn't say that. I might get reported to TIPS or something.
Of course, heh, you'll see a lot of people telling you your life is hollow and meaningless just because you own a TV at all.
I've got a number of friends who don't own TVs, and I always feel like a jerk after I've visited them. They never do the whole "more righteous than thou" thing with it, but these are also the kind of people who, in the course of an ordinary day, will, like, personally save three thousand children from starvation and then convince the U.S. to forgive the debt of some impoverished African country. and then cure cancer, and then when they get home, spend the rest of the night making up songs with a bunch of friends and their guitar. So you just feel like, "wow, so today I, uh, cleaned up my hard drive a bit.":P
I don't know . . . I think I probably could if I actually wanted to. Literally the only TV programs I watch now are Simpsons and PBS occasionally, and I don't have problems with either. What I *do* enjoy having a TV for is watching movies, and to me that's really not "watching TV" per se, because there's more action involved on your part, ie: you have to actually go to the video store, actually go back home (unless, of course, you already own the movie), then actually decide to put the thing in your VCR, &c. Plus watching movies is something typically done with groups of people (at least for me it is) than just "watching TV." But I do think I could live w/out a TV. (Of course, I'd just end up watching movies and simpsons episodes on my computer, but that's beside the point.)
Wow, that sounds like I'm rationalizing quite a bit, doesn't it?:)
... is what they're calling it. They've got absolutely atrocious advertising for the thing. I swear, every fifth billboard around here is some damn "ICONTROL" advertisement. They're all very sneaky and don't say anything about Time Warner, it's just these big black and orange monstrosities like "iControl . . . It's gonna change your life!" (seriously) and other such garbage. (To be fair, there IS one of them that actually says Time Warner Now. It was bad enough when I thought it was some new company, but now I know that it's coming from a corporation I already hate!) It's just all this "whoo, life without our PRODUCT is unimaginable!" "Hey, your life is HOLLOW and MEANINGLESS without our PRODUCT!" "If you don't own our PRODUCT you are a WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING." And they're all over the place. After the third or fourth billboard I saw, I decided I would never buy whatever the hell it was. Yeah, something that's basically a VCR. That's gonna change my life all right. I'll tell you what would change my life: throwing away my damn TV.
Sorry, that's been building up in me for some time now.:)
Yeah. It's too bad I don't have a Vmware license laying around; I could just use that and be doubly-sure. I should try out freemware or plex86 or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. Thanks for the response . . .
So you've actually played it, then? I downloaded it but never installed it. I was a bit weirded out by the fact that the developers were anonymous for the most part, and they don't let you see the source. Ordinarily I wouldn't care about not having the source to a game, but that combined with the anonymity combined with the relative lack of info other than the main site (I did some Googling and found next-to-nothing about it) made me a bit leery about the whole affair.
Although I suppose installing the thing under a Wine installation wouldn't be too risky; could even chroot the thing probably . . .
Granted. I agree I was oversimplifying a bit. What I was more driving at were differences in prices between VHS and DVD (and cassettes vs. CD, too); if they can afford to sell a movie on VHS for however much, they can certainly afford to sell a DVD for less. And I'm guessing that the VHS releases are going to cost significantly less than the DVD versions. Which is where the "artificial price gouging" comes in.
Rock on, that's what I was planning on doing, too. The way I figure it, pretty much all of my friends will probably own it anyway, so whenever I want to see it, it's just a matter of going over to someone else's house. Plus I have friends who actually own DVD players and spend money buying DVDs, so I'll actually be able to see the cool extra stuff that probably won't be present on the VHS release.
New Line would have to create a single 6-disc release, which would be WAY too expensive for most consumers to even consider.
Well, maybe with all the artificial price-jacking going on. I mean, it costs what, NOTHING to manufacture a DVD? I'd like to know what the profit margins are. I'm sure they could sell a 6-disc set for twenty bucks and still make money. Whatever. I'm just gonna wait until the whole trilogy comes out in a boxed set or whatever. Of course, by then there might not be a VHS version (come to think of it, is there a VHS version of *this* one, even?), so I might just have to cope without.
Ditch the three hard drives for one large hard drive. Partition as necessary.
But why just throw away 100 perfectly good gigs of storage? Besides, I like it great the way it is now. My/home partition's on it's own drive, immune to crashes from the others, one holds my (long-dormant) Win95 installation plus swap and some space for the root partition. Someone else brought up the issue w/ speed in this thread, too . . .
If you're got a CDRW, you don't really need a "regular CD-ROM drive." In fact, if you buy a CDRW/DVD drive, you've got all of your bases covered.
Well, I refuse to buy a DVD drive for DeCSS-related reasons, so we won't go there, but I'm not going to waste money replacing hardware, like I said above. I've got a perfectly good double-speed burner I got three years ago which, like I said, still functions perfectly, and I've got a 32x regular CDRom that I've had for ages, too. Also, it's nice to be able to copy disc to disc without having to copy to the hard drive first.
Put an IDE internal ZIP drive in the floppy bay, or use an external parallel port/USB ZIP drive... Put it in the 3.5" floppy drive bay. Duh!
Well, it *is* an internal IDE ZIP drive that I've got, and obviously it can't share the 3.5" bay w/ the floppy drive itself. And again, I'm not going to waste money (and resources) buying USB versions of hardware I already have that still works perfectly. Oh, and parallel port solutions are just plain awful. That CD Burner of mine actually used to be a parallel port drive until I ripped it apart to find it was just IDE inside. I've been much happier ever since (although at the time it was very convenient).
There's already a PCI slot for your sound card upgrades, and the next model is supposed to have an AGP slot so that you can upgrade your video card.
Sure, but then I've got the second IDE controller I need for all those devices, also if I feel like getting a new NIC or Modem or TV tuner card, or this or that or the other thing. Plus, what if I get sick of dealing with IDE and decide to get a SCSI card? I like having ROOM to expand.
I'm not trying to be a troll here, but you did ask how to put it all together. I'm just answering.
No need to justify responses, it was obviously non-troll. Thanks for the responses, although I think you're wrong.:P
And you tell me how that little tiny thing is going to hold three hard drives, a CD-R, regular CD-ROM, Zip drive, floppy (yes, I still use a floppy), and my video card / sound card upgrades I periodically buy. There's a reason some of us like big cases.
Well, he *did* open up at least one of the vials . . . So there's one city down at least. But you're right; I *do* love movies that have the guts to kill off their main characters. (I can see it now: "12 Monkeys II: The Vengeance") . . .
The whole point of a time travel story is to have those from one time affect another. Having a time travel story where no-one can effect anything... would be expressing that free will does not exist - which leads to the idea that we are not responsible for our own actions. Such a thing would most likely be as boring as the worst fantasy novels that have seen print...
Except that in 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis couldn't do anything to affect the situation. He spent a big chunk of the movie trying to break out of his role and save the world, and keep all the bad things from happening, but in the end, he found out that he was just acting out exactly what had happened. The biological agents were still spread, humanity suffers, and he still has to watch himself get shot as a kid. Which is why the movie was so damn depressing. (Which is why I liked it, actually.)
The only hope of changing things and actually making a difference comes at the very, very end, when the biological agent guy is sitting on the plane talking to the woman who's one of the "authority figure" people Bruce Willis had to deal with in the "future," although personally I think that it was a younger version of her, unaware of the dangers of the man sitting next to her, rather than her come back from the future to try and set things right.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a friend who moved out to San Fransisco to live on a boat. He had some wicked-cool software to do navigation and stuff. It would even interface with his boat's autopilot system, so he had the laptop, autopilot, GPS, and all that hooked all together and could, in theory anyway, click a couple of buttons and then sit up on deck for the journey reading a book or something. The software took into account tides and water speed, and weather, and all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, but it's so much more fun to rant about how evil things are! :)
It's one thing to have the content providers decide independantly to move over to digital and cut off the old analog signals. Nothing I can do about that, and that's their choice. I'm rather upset that the government seems to be mandating that my perfectly good equipment be obsolete by a certain date.
Huh. I must be the odd one out here, because I've been using basically nothing *but* WD drives for some time now (they're usually the cheapest in the area), and I've never had any problems with them at all. In my Linux box right now, I've got a 20GB, 30GB, and 40GB drive, and they've all been in there for some time, and I've had nary a problem with them.
Just in case anyone here hasn't read it yet and is looking for something to do.
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostre ich/transcode/ e ich/transcode/html/modules.html
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostr
Man, that makes me even more upset about those damn billboards, though. At least this TIVO-like thing was legitimately cool. iControl just sucks. Grrrrr. That's the kind of thing that makes you want to go all Fight Club on billboards. Although I probably shouldn't say that. I might get reported to TIPS or something.
Wow, that sounds like I'm rationalizing quite a bit, doesn't it? :)
Sorry, that's been building up in me for some time now. :)
Yeah. It's too bad I don't have a Vmware license laying around; I could just use that and be doubly-sure. I should try out freemware or plex86 or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. Thanks for the response . . .
Although I suppose installing the thing under a Wine installation wouldn't be too risky; could even chroot the thing probably . . .
Granted. I agree I was oversimplifying a bit. What I was more driving at were differences in prices between VHS and DVD (and cassettes vs. CD, too); if they can afford to sell a movie on VHS for however much, they can certainly afford to sell a DVD for less. And I'm guessing that the VHS releases are going to cost significantly less than the DVD versions. Which is where the "artificial price gouging" comes in.
Rock on, that's what I was planning on doing, too. The way I figure it, pretty much all of my friends will probably own it anyway, so whenever I want to see it, it's just a matter of going over to someone else's house. Plus I have friends who actually own DVD players and spend money buying DVDs, so I'll actually be able to see the cool extra stuff that probably won't be present on the VHS release.
A-fucking men . . . Is that like the X-Men, but different? Or an A-Team reference, perhaps? :)
And you tell me how that little tiny thing is going to hold three hard drives, a CD-R, regular CD-ROM, Zip drive, floppy (yes, I still use a floppy), and my video card / sound card upgrades I periodically buy. There's a reason some of us like big cases.
Well, he *did* open up at least one of the vials . . . So there's one city down at least. But you're right; I *do* love movies that have the guts to kill off their main characters. (I can see it now: "12 Monkeys II: The Vengeance") . . .
Not much of an egg if there's a link to it on the left-hand side of every screen Slashdot draws, though . . .
The only hope of changing things and actually making a difference comes at the very, very end, when the biological agent guy is sitting on the plane talking to the woman who's one of the "authority figure" people Bruce Willis had to deal with in the "future," although personally I think that it was a younger version of her, unaware of the dangers of the man sitting next to her, rather than her come back from the future to try and set things right.
That was my take, anyway.