A built-in web browser -- at least MS has the excuse that all they're doing is providing a few hooks to IE
As far as I can tell, at least on Windows, it just uses IE's rendering engine, cookies, etc. Kind of a useless feature, but... not really bloat, since it's not like they actually made their own browser from scratch or something.
I agree with you on the replication of the Windows desktop and start menu. WTF is that all about?!?!
Why do we always see comparisons of 2.0ghz P4's vs 1.4ghz Athlons? Even a 1.4ghz P4 vs. 1.4ghz Athlon doesn't make much sense.
I would rather see a comparisons of CPU's at the same price point. "Intel's $150 CPU vs. AMD's $150 CPU".
Of course, maybe you would need to include the cost of RAM in that evaluation as well, since the P4 (for now) uses the vastly more expensive and stupid RDRAM. So I guess an even better comparison would be, "a $1200 Athlon system vs a $1200 P4 system". Of course then there's debates on how to equip the systems... the AMD CPU+compatible RAM would be like $300 cheaper, so where do you spend the xtra cash? More RAM? Better vid card? Still, although less precise, it's more of a real-world comparison.
What if they just created artificial gravity via centripetal force by simply rotating the craft about its axis on the way to Mars? I don't know the physics involved here, maybe it's just not possible to create enough gravity that way unless you have a spacecraft with a really big radius, such as the space station in 2001.
I'm sure that more-informed minds then mine have already considered this simple idea, I'm just wondering why it's not feasible.
If the manned Mars spacecraft wasn't big enough to create sufficient gravity that way, maybe they could just hire really fat astronauts, in order to make the most of the limited gravity. just kidding...
Don't get me wrong, this is great, but is it worth the implementation? The numbers say no.
I think one of the big turn-offs people have about comptuers is how long they take to boot up. Computers will be more popular with the "teeming masses" when it's something they can flick on like a TV.
And there's nothing wrong with that mentality either. Computers are tools. My machine takes like a minute to boot the OS... how many other tools or appliances take that long to boot? What if your TV took 60 seconds before it could perform its task? Or the phone, etc. Even cars don't have to be warmed up for that long in average conditions.
Of course, true geeks just leave their boxes running 24/7 anyway so boot times aren't terribly important.:)
Each point would link up 10 or so houses, until a grassroots net could spring up, catering exclusively to the town.
You have a good point, a cooperative net like that could conceivably work, BUT...
All it would take is one individual, perhaps working collectively with 20 other people, to get a high bandwidth connection, say a T1, or whatever, even a 'normal' 2mb DSL line
I think you're pretty naive if you think a T1 or 2-megabit DSL line is going to offer enough bandwidth to serve this whole neighborhood or town. Let's see... a T-1 offers you a symmetrical 1.5Mbits/sec, which is about 150kilobytes of data per second. And you want to service a whole town with that?
By the time you've got 30 people on this wonderful grass-roots network of yours, each person's slice of the internet bandwidth is roughly equivalent to a 56K modem. Of course, file-sharing and LAN gaming amongst the members of your little guerilla network would still be pretty zippy.:)
See, the article is great, but TOTALLY glosses over the fact that you need a fat pipe to the internet to make this work. And there's really no way of getting around The Man to make that work.
With hundreds of thousands of copies of an OS that won't do Java, that will have a very deep impact on developers. It doesn't do much good to make software that nobody can run.
Yeah, but how popular was Java on the client side, anyway? I don't see many client-side Java apps. Java seems to have found its niche, and it's server-side development (server apps and server components).
As for client-side Java web apps... they're usually stupid and frilly anyway. I've seen soem "wow, that's neat" ones but never anything useful...
Not in my experience. I've had nothing but consistently excellent service from them. My install was scheduled for 1pm-5pm... the dude literally rang my doorbell just as the clock turned to 1:00pm. Several of my friends had the exact same, excellent, experience with Covad and Speakeasy.
I don't doubt that you had a bad experience with them, but in my experience, you are by far in the minority.
At a highway rest stop the other week, I saw a brand spanking new Namco machine that had Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in the same box! I thought that was cool and a great idea. It was the same old classic 8-bit arcade games that have been in arcades since the early 80's, not with revamped updated 3D 256-bit graphics.
I proceeded to play a (rather successful, by my standards) game of Galaga, and the WEIRDEST FREAKING THING HAPPENED when my last ship got destroyed.
Galaga asked me to CONTINUE!!! I am still sort of shaken up by this. They released the classic Galaga, but with a hack in it that lets you continue. How ODD! I mean, I've been playing Galaga for like 20 years now, and it never asked me to continue until last month. What the hell?
For a game dork like me, that's like looking up one day and noticing there are two suns or something.
It might have something to do with the fact that most people have better things to do on Sundays than wait to make "first posts" on Slashdot. Just a thought.
A couple of people posted corrections to my original post... and since they haven't been modded up or anything, I thought I'd quote them here so more people see them.:)
"Only 12 episodes of Bebop aired on TV Tokyo in Japan, and the episodes that did air were lightly edited. Bebop was later picked up by WOWOW (satellite network in Japan) and aired in it's entirety. -and- "Um, it wasn't just the first episode that was cut. Almost half of the entire series was omitted when first broadcast on TV. Later on, they played an uncut version on a satellite channel which had less restrictions than broadcast"
OK you can mod this post down as redundant or whatever, I wanted people to see the corrections. Thx all:D
With all the talk about censoring Bebop, it's interesting to note that Bebop was censored in Japan, too! At Otakon in 1999, the director of the series was there, and it turns out that the very first episode of the series was considered too bloody to be shown on TV by the network. Apparently, Japanese fans didn't get to see episode #1 until much later, possibly until the home video release.
Of course, only episode #1 was blocked, and as far as I know there weren't any cuts made from the rest of the series. Which is kind of odd, since I didn't really think episode 1 was much bloodier than anything else in the series.
I've watched a lot anime, and I'd have to say Bebop is in the top five of all anime series of all time, IMHO. I also have to say that it has the best animation, hands-down, of any anime television series ever, by a wide margin. I don't even think that's a matter of opinion. The animation is as good as many theatrical and direct-to-video (OVA) anime releases I've seen.
God damn, I hate censorship. I also hate the English dub of Cowboy Bebop. Spike is one of the coolest characters ever, but the English dub actor sounds like he's trying really hard to sound cool. Sorry. If you have to try to be cool, then you're a thousand miles away from cool.
So what American audiences are going to see is one of the greatest series ever, hacked to bits, with a shitty dub that makes the characters sound retarded. And non-anime fans are gonna say, "what the hell is the big deal with anime? This is supposed to be one of the greatest series ever, and it's pretty lame. Anime is so over-rated, guess it must have some hidden appeal for geeks".
So I'd just as soon not see Bebop on TV under those circumstances. Ideally, I'd like to see HBO or something pick it up, then at least it would only have the shitty dub to drag it down, not the censoring. God, I hope I'm wrong, and they don't censor it too badly. I really want to be wrong.
Also, I love how the battles take place right on the map, instead of doing some effect or other and going to a different screen.
You're right! That may have been the coolest part of Chrono Trigger. Why don't more games use that? The Black Isle AD&D roleplaying games for the PC (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) have this feature as well. Well, so do the MMORPG's, obviously.:) If I was gonna be producer on an RPG that would be a huge design goal of mine. It's so disruptive to have some swirly effect and then switch to a different playfield to fight an actual battle, like all the FF games do.
Oh okay, thanks for refreshing my memory!:) I forgot the events leading up to it, but the scene in the forest, watching his family waving goodbye from the train will always stick with me. More than any of the details, it's the way that scene in the forest made me FEEL. It might be the saddest thing I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Brilliant!
I agree with you SO much about FF Tractics. I consider that possibly my favorite game of all time. I loved the tactical combat, and I thought the storyline was amazing as well.
Yeah, I played FF7 and thought it was really good, but it never floored me like FF3 or Tactics did later on. There were some gripping scenes though, like the one scene where Red13 discovers his father's remains, and learns the truth about his heroism. I did get kind of attached to Tifa though. I was hoping they'd hook up on that monorail ride in the amusement park.:) And I did like the total mind-fsck the story took in the end when the truth about Cloud and Sephiroth was revealed.
FF8 didn't even make me want to play it at all. It looked like a pretty-boy soap opera. I dunno, seemed very "mass market". FF9 looks like a possible return to old-school values (well, old-school chara design at least) so I'll play it if/when it comes out for PC.
Ooooh! While we're digging out the memories, here's another trademark Squaresoft heart-wrenching scene from the 16bit era. How about in Chrono Trigger, when Robo meets up with his fellow robots, and they all turn on him. Now that was damn sad. My description doesn't do the scene justice, of course, but people who played the game know what I mean.
I don't know, but I sort of miss the SNES roleplaying games of yesteryear. As cheesy as it sounds there was something I really loved about those low-tech graphics. I don't know, maybe it's similar to the nostalgia people feel for the text-adventure games.
I remember one scene in Final Fantasy 3 (6 in Japan). It's been many years, so I may have a detail or two wrong but the gist remains. Anyway, war is sweeping the land. At one point your adventurers come upon a young woman and her daughter. The woman is bedridden, gravely ill. She asks you to take a message to her husband, who's off fighting the war. By the time you can return with her husband, though, she's dead... killed as the fighting swept through her village.
The husband is very stoic. He said something to the effect that since he was a soldier (and therefore part of the war) too, he had no right to be upset or angry. And he walked away.
Later in the adventure, you're traveling through an enchanted forest when you meet up with the soldier again. It turns out there's a train traveling through the forest... a supernatural train that takes departed souls to the afterlife. As the train pulls away, your party and the soldier stand there watching it. And then you see the ghostly image of the soldier's wife and child standing at the back of the train, silently waving goodbye to him. The soldier takes a few fitful steps after the train and then just quiently falls to his knees, sobbing.
I swear that was the most heartwrenching thing I've ever seen in a videogame. Hell, 99% of movies don't have anything that powerful emotionally IMHO. What was my point? Oh yeah, that I miss those "old-skool" RPG's, and that they had some awesome stories too that didn't rely on graphics. Having said that though, FFX does look awesome so if they can combine the wonderful storytelling and drool-worthy graphics I guess it will be cool. I'm just a little skeptical that's all.... yeah yeah I know... memories are often rose-colored... maybe FF3 would seem retarded if I played it today... I'm probably being a cranky 25 year-old bastard....:)
That's an excellent post and I agree with everything you (guess I'll be modded down for agreeing, heh) except for one thing...
for those who played the games a lot, it was superb
I'm not sure what playing the games has to do with the movie. One of the hallmarks of the FF games' plots was that they had nothing, absolutely no connection with eachother, except for a couple of things...
There's always a character named Cid. He's always a completely different character, but he's always named Cid.
There are Chocobos
And the movie was an even bigger departure from the games than each installment in the series usually is. Both thematically, and because of the notable omission of chocobos. There were a few similarities here and there... the earth-spirits sort of reminded me of the end of FFVII, but I think that kind of thing is pretty generic, I don't even know if I'd call it a similarity. Also, I've never played FFVIII or FFIX so maybe I've missed something.:)
Anyway, I'll I'm saying is that it bears no resemblance to the games...
Please tell me: is there any cross dressing, breeding of giant golden chickens or riding of said chickens? I thought the games were pretty lame on account of that stuff.
Does the movie have ANYTHING to do with the games besides the name?
I don't know... those are pretty much the reasons why I *liked* the games. I mean, come on. Chocobos just rule.
I would have to say that being chased by Sinistar ranks among the all-time scariest moments in video game history that I've ever experienced. There were a few monents in Doom that came close, but nothing else as remotely scary comes to mind....
God, I miss Sinistar. And, thanks to its 49-direction custom joystick, it's something that will never really be duplicated in the home, MAME or no MAME.....
I my experience teaching older people and newbies about computers, I always find that it's worth it to start with the "basics"... ie, the concepts of windows (the windows on the screen, not Windows(tm), moving the mouse, etc.
People sometimes get a little frustrated with slow progress at first (because it's a while before they can get to the "fun stuff") but I think it turns out to be well worth it.
Also, I've noticed a sign that things aren't going well is when your "students" have to resort to rote memorization. For example, my mom writes down every single step I tell her. If I say "go to the File menu, and then pick Print" she has to write it down in excruciating detail, ie, "move mouse pointer to the word 'file', press left mouse button, move mouse down to word 'print', press left mous button, etc..."
And she wonders why her progress is so slow. You can't really begin to be productive with a computer until the basics (moving the mouse, pulling down menus, etc) are intuitive.
Of course, we were all newbies at one point. And old people don't have the benefit of having grown up with all sorts of electronic gizmos like us. Come on... how many of you had your paths into the computer world paved by Ataris and NES's? Hehee...
Slashdot Mirror
A built-in web browser -- at least MS has the excuse that all they're doing is providing a few hooks to IE
As far as I can tell, at least on Windows, it just uses IE's rendering engine, cookies, etc. Kind of a useless feature, but... not really bloat, since it's not like they actually made their own browser from scratch or something.
I agree with you on the replication of the Windows desktop and start menu. WTF is that all about?!?!
Why do we always see comparisons of 2.0ghz P4's vs 1.4ghz Athlons? Even a 1.4ghz P4 vs. 1.4ghz Athlon doesn't make much sense.
I would rather see a comparisons of CPU's at the same price point. "Intel's $150 CPU vs. AMD's $150 CPU".
Of course, maybe you would need to include the cost of RAM in that evaluation as well, since the P4 (for now) uses the vastly more expensive and stupid RDRAM. So I guess an even better comparison would be, "a $1200 Athlon system vs a $1200 P4 system". Of course then there's debates on how to equip the systems... the AMD CPU+compatible RAM would be like $300 cheaper, so where do you spend the xtra cash? More RAM? Better vid card? Still, although less precise, it's more of a real-world comparison.
What if they just created artificial gravity via centripetal force by simply rotating the craft about its axis on the way to Mars? I don't know the physics involved here, maybe it's just not possible to create enough gravity that way unless you have a spacecraft with a really big radius, such as the space station in 2001.
I'm sure that more-informed minds then mine have already considered this simple idea, I'm just wondering why it's not feasible.
If the manned Mars spacecraft wasn't big enough to create sufficient gravity that way, maybe they could just hire really fat astronauts, in order to make the most of the limited gravity. just kidding...
Don't get me wrong, this is great, but is it worth the implementation? The numbers say no.
I think one of the big turn-offs people have about comptuers is how long they take to boot up. Computers will be more popular with the "teeming masses" when it's something they can flick on like a TV.
And there's nothing wrong with that mentality either. Computers are tools. My machine takes like a minute to boot the OS... how many other tools or appliances take that long to boot? What if your TV took 60 seconds before it could perform its task? Or the phone, etc. Even cars don't have to be warmed up for that long in average conditions.
Of course, true geeks just leave their boxes running 24/7 anyway so boot times aren't terribly important.
Each point would link up 10 or so houses, until a grassroots net could spring up, catering exclusively to the town.
:)
You have a good point, a cooperative net like that could conceivably work, BUT...
All it would take is one individual, perhaps working collectively with 20 other people, to get a high bandwidth connection, say a T1, or whatever, even a 'normal' 2mb DSL line
I think you're pretty naive if you think a T1 or 2-megabit DSL line is going to offer enough bandwidth to serve this whole neighborhood or town. Let's see... a T-1 offers you a symmetrical 1.5Mbits/sec, which is about 150kilobytes of data per second. And you want to service a whole town with that?
By the time you've got 30 people on this wonderful grass-roots network of yours, each person's slice of the internet bandwidth is roughly equivalent to a 56K modem. Of course, file-sharing and LAN gaming amongst the members of your little guerilla network would still be pretty zippy.
See, the article is great, but TOTALLY glosses over the fact that you need a fat pipe to the internet to make this work. And there's really no way of getting around The Man to make that work.
Boy do you not know what you are talking about! It never ceases to amaze me when some 15 year old kid...
:)
I don't know which is funnier... this post, or the replies of those who didn't "get it".
With hundreds of thousands of copies of an OS that won't do Java, that will have a very deep impact on developers. It doesn't do much good to make software that nobody can run.
Yeah, but how popular was Java on the client side, anyway? I don't see many client-side Java apps. Java seems to have found its niche, and it's server-side development (server apps and server components).
As for client-side Java web apps... they're usually stupid and frilly anyway. I've seen soem "wow, that's neat" ones but never anything useful...
"Yeah, so their service sucked"
Not in my experience. I've had nothing but consistently excellent service from them. My install was scheduled for 1pm-5pm... the dude literally rang my doorbell just as the clock turned to 1:00pm. Several of my friends had the exact same, excellent, experience with Covad and Speakeasy.
I don't doubt that you had a bad experience with them, but in my experience, you are by far in the minority.
At a highway rest stop the other week, I saw a brand spanking new Namco machine that had Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in the same box! I thought that was cool and a great idea. It was the same old classic 8-bit arcade games that have been in arcades since the early 80's, not with revamped updated 3D 256-bit graphics.
I proceeded to play a (rather successful, by my standards) game of Galaga, and the WEIRDEST FREAKING THING HAPPENED when my last ship got destroyed.
Galaga asked me to CONTINUE!!! I am still sort of shaken up by this. They released the classic Galaga, but with a hack in it that lets you continue. How ODD! I mean, I've been playing Galaga for like 20 years now, and it never asked me to continue until last month. What the hell?
For a game dork like me, that's like looking up one day and noticing there are two suns or something.
Re:Multi Processor Boxes (Score:2, Informative)
thursday
best moderation ever.
It might have something to do with the fact that most people have better things to do on Sundays than wait to make "first posts" on Slashdot. Just a thought.
You're new here, aren't you?
> But don't think that you'll win a fight with God
;)
I can't win with God? Guess I'll just have to fight without him, then
If it wasn't for Pong, I'd be probably be on Jerry Springer.
A couple of people posted corrections to my original post... and since they haven't been modded up or anything, I thought I'd quote them here so more people see them. :)
:D
"Only 12 episodes of Bebop aired on TV Tokyo in Japan, and the episodes that did air were lightly edited. Bebop was later picked up by WOWOW (satellite network in Japan) and aired in it's entirety.
-and-
"Um, it wasn't just the first episode that was cut. Almost half of the entire series was omitted when first broadcast on TV. Later on, they played an uncut version on a satellite channel which had less restrictions than broadcast"
OK you can mod this post down as redundant or whatever, I wanted people to see the corrections. Thx all
With all the talk about censoring Bebop, it's interesting to note that Bebop was censored in Japan, too! At Otakon in 1999, the director of the series was there, and it turns out that the very first episode of the series was considered too bloody to be shown on TV by the network. Apparently, Japanese fans didn't get to see episode #1 until much later, possibly until the home video release.
Of course, only episode #1 was blocked, and as far as I know there weren't any cuts made from the rest of the series. Which is kind of odd, since I didn't really think episode 1 was much bloodier than anything else in the series.
I've watched a lot anime, and I'd have to say Bebop is in the top five of all anime series of all time, IMHO. I also have to say that it has the best animation, hands-down, of any anime television series ever, by a wide margin. I don't even think that's a matter of opinion. The animation is as good as many theatrical and direct-to-video (OVA) anime releases I've seen.
God damn, I hate censorship. I also hate the English dub of Cowboy Bebop. Spike is one of the coolest characters ever, but the English dub actor sounds like he's trying really hard to sound cool. Sorry. If you have to try to be cool, then you're a thousand miles away from cool.
So what American audiences are going to see is one of the greatest series ever, hacked to bits, with a shitty dub that makes the characters sound retarded. And non-anime fans are gonna say, "what the hell is the big deal with anime? This is supposed to be one of the greatest series ever, and it's pretty lame. Anime is so over-rated, guess it must have some hidden appeal for geeks".
So I'd just as soon not see Bebop on TV under those circumstances. Ideally, I'd like to see HBO or something pick it up, then at least it would only have the shitty dub to drag it down, not the censoring. God, I hope I'm wrong, and they don't censor it too badly. I really want to be wrong.
Also, I love how the battles take place right on the map, instead of doing some effect or other and going to a different screen.
:) If I was gonna be producer on an RPG that would be a huge design goal of mine. It's so disruptive to have some swirly effect and then switch to a different playfield to fight an actual battle, like all the FF games do.
You're right! That may have been the coolest part of Chrono Trigger. Why don't more games use that? The Black Isle AD&D roleplaying games for the PC (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) have this feature as well. Well, so do the MMORPG's, obviously.
Oh okay, thanks for refreshing my memory! :) I forgot the events leading up to it, but the scene in the forest, watching his family waving goodbye from the train will always stick with me. More than any of the details, it's the way that scene in the forest made me FEEL. It might be the saddest thing I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Brilliant!
:) And I did like the total mind-fsck the story took in the end when the truth about Cloud and Sephiroth was revealed.
I agree with you SO much about FF Tractics. I consider that possibly my favorite game of all time. I loved the tactical combat, and I thought the storyline was amazing as well.
Yeah, I played FF7 and thought it was really good, but it never floored me like FF3 or Tactics did later on. There were some gripping scenes though, like the one scene where Red13 discovers his father's remains, and learns the truth about his heroism. I did get kind of attached to Tifa though. I was hoping they'd hook up on that monorail ride in the amusement park.
FF8 didn't even make me want to play it at all. It looked like a pretty-boy soap opera. I dunno, seemed very "mass market". FF9 looks like a possible return to old-school values (well, old-school chara design at least) so I'll play it if/when it comes out for PC.
Ooooh! While we're digging out the memories, here's another trademark Squaresoft heart-wrenching scene from the 16bit era. How about in Chrono Trigger, when Robo meets up with his fellow robots, and they all turn on him. Now that was damn sad. My description doesn't do the scene justice, of course, but people who played the game know what I mean.
I don't know, but I sort of miss the SNES roleplaying games of yesteryear. As cheesy as it sounds there was something I really loved about those low-tech graphics. I don't know, maybe it's similar to the nostalgia people feel for the text-adventure games.
:)
I remember one scene in Final Fantasy 3 (6 in Japan). It's been many years, so I may have a detail or two wrong but the gist remains. Anyway, war is sweeping the land. At one point your adventurers come upon a young woman and her daughter. The woman is bedridden, gravely ill. She asks you to take a message to her husband, who's off fighting the war. By the time you can return with her husband, though, she's dead... killed as the fighting swept through her village.
The husband is very stoic. He said something to the effect that since he was a soldier (and therefore part of the war) too, he had no right to be upset or angry. And he walked away.
Later in the adventure, you're traveling through an enchanted forest when you meet up with the soldier again. It turns out there's a train traveling through the forest... a supernatural train that takes departed souls to the afterlife. As the train pulls away, your party and the soldier stand there watching it. And then you see the ghostly image of the soldier's wife and child standing at the back of the train, silently waving goodbye to him. The soldier takes a few fitful steps after the train and then just quiently falls to his knees, sobbing.
I swear that was the most heartwrenching thing I've ever seen in a videogame. Hell, 99% of movies don't have anything that powerful emotionally IMHO. What was my point? Oh yeah, that I miss those "old-skool" RPG's, and that they had some awesome stories too that didn't rely on graphics. Having said that though, FFX does look awesome so if they can combine the wonderful storytelling and drool-worthy graphics I guess it will be cool. I'm just a little skeptical that's all.... yeah yeah I know... memories are often rose-colored... maybe FF3 would seem retarded if I played it today... I'm probably being a cranky 25 year-old bastard....
for those who played the games a lot, it was superb
I'm not sure what playing the games has to do with the movie. One of the hallmarks of the FF games' plots was that they had nothing, absolutely no connection with eachother, except for a couple of things...
- There's always a character named Cid. He's always a completely different character, but he's always named Cid.
- There are Chocobos
And the movie was an even bigger departure from the games than each installment in the series usually is. Both thematically, and because of the notable omission of chocobos. There were a few similarities here and there... the earth-spirits sort of reminded me of the end of FFVII, but I think that kind of thing is pretty generic, I don't even know if I'd call it a similarity. Also, I've never played FFVIII or FFIX so maybe I've missed something.Anyway, I'll I'm saying is that it bears no resemblance to the games...
Please tell me: is there any cross dressing, breeding of giant golden chickens or riding of said chickens? I thought the games were pretty lame on account of that stuff.
Does the movie have ANYTHING to do with the games besides the name?
I don't know... those are pretty much the reasons why I *liked* the games. I mean, come on. Chocobos just rule.
I would have to say that being chased by Sinistar ranks among the all-time scariest moments in video game history that I've ever experienced. There were a few monents in Doom that came close, but nothing else as remotely scary comes to mind....
God, I miss Sinistar. And, thanks to its 49-direction custom joystick, it's something that will never really be duplicated in the home, MAME or no MAME.....
http://www.bootyproject.org
"And I still really need to get Star Blazers"
... uh.yeah.
Some things are more important than karma. So here goes...
Star Blazers 0WNZ J000 B|TC|-|Z!!!!!11!!1!!!!!
http://www.bootyproject.org
My '97 Ford Escort has a speed regulator that won't let me get over 107Mph or so
I used to drive a car equipped with a device that wouldn't let me go over 80mph. It was called the "engine". and yes, it was a Ford....
http://www.bootyproject.org
I my experience teaching older people and newbies about computers, I always find that it's worth it to start with the "basics"... ie, the concepts of windows (the windows on the screen, not Windows(tm), moving the mouse, etc.
People sometimes get a little frustrated with slow progress at first (because it's a while before they can get to the "fun stuff") but I think it turns out to be well worth it.
Also, I've noticed a sign that things aren't going well is when your "students" have to resort to rote memorization. For example, my mom writes down every single step I tell her. If I say "go to the File menu, and then pick Print" she has to write it down in excruciating detail, ie, "move mouse pointer to the word 'file', press left mouse button, move mouse down to word 'print', press left mous button, etc..."
And she wonders why her progress is so slow. You can't really begin to be productive with a computer until the basics (moving the mouse, pulling down menus, etc) are intuitive.
Of course, we were all newbies at one point. And old people don't have the benefit of having grown up with all sorts of electronic gizmos like us. Come on... how many of you had your paths into the computer world paved by Ataris and NES's? Hehee...
http://www.bootyproject.org
getting rich off gullible audiophiles
:P
Or perhaps more accurately, "getting off rich audiophiles"
http://www.bootyproject.org