When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy instead that will take up as little space and do as much for the same price (or less)?
You could just buy the Mac Mini. I know it seems silly, but this is exactly what Apple is hoping you'll do. For iLife, a BSD userland, and some other fun stuff, how can you resist? I know you can, thank you peanut gallery.
I tried pricing something similar a while ago -- look at OEM parts, and consider putting the whole thing into a cardboard box; you can do well with an Athlon 64, a couple hundred megs of memory, and a bulk HD. Size, however.. that's hard. MiniITX doesn't come cheap.
Even better, it's the presentation. You play a game once without them, and you play it with cheats the second or third time around -- it's an entirely different game.
Last year when bored I became a fan of turning my UT2003 single-player speed ('slomo') down to something far below normal, like 0.001, 1.0 being normal. At that speed it became more like an elaborate chess game, where you had minutes to decide where to go or who to shoot first. While it's not for everyone, it made for some very interesting matches -- you savor the triumph of a frag a little more, and then kick your own ass for not noticing the guy behind you for four minutes.
There's something that we like in games that's more about situations than strictly playing. Cheat codes allow us to get to the parts we really liked about the game.
Try Geeklog. Very similar in looks to Slashcode -- has a poll, articles, site calendar, and so on. Geeklog is pretty basic at this point -- all sites tend to look more or less the same 3-column layout -- but very easily themeable (and with a community that makes up for the features it lacks).
I've been researching CMSs recently, and the problem I've come across is that they tend to look similar across themes, and/or their framework is overbroad and poorly documented, making it a monster just to make a few pages.
In a word, the US Constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms -- some people read it differently, as the right of the government to keep a well-regulated militia (army), and not the right of the people.
Regardless, the idea is that the 2nd amendment right can't be conditional on if a gun sensor is installed, or say, the people are black. Think of it like school uniforms, where the right of the students to free speech and public education (more a common law right) can't be conditional on what clothes they wear. Sorta.
The IRS has a Free File program that a number of companies provide assuming you don't have any "special cases", that is to say, can use the basic 1040 -- don't own a business, take standard deduction, etc. I've found (whodathunkit) H&R Block's Free File program to be quite good. I did my taxes in my lunchbreak and got my refund the next week.
In addition to the "compare and contrast" contributions we'll see, it's also this: in the next decade, it will be about a return to communities on the web. In the early 90s it was a bunch of local BBSs, and now the web is too big to be a "community" most of the time. People want to reach out to other people, and blogs, for better or for worse, often do that. (For worse, I know I've made fun of blogs as a way for people to be passive-aggressive to those they don't want to talk to in person..:)
I think Six Apart wants to be a major force in that movement, in generating communities, and how communities will play into the future of the web and how we communicate with one another. For one, LJ subscribers (myself included) will be paying Six Apart AFAIK, not Danga, so there's profit there. Also, competition; the fewer games in town, or the more that you control, the better.
On a separate note, does anybody seem to see a trend with the next 'dot-com' being funded open-source, or even just homegrown, web solutions ("we're not selling the product, we're selling the service")? It seems like I've heard of quite a few open source projects getting bank from just being good for long enough.. one clear example being Linux, but also reading Mena's blog -- (paraphrased) "me and my husband released Moveable Type in 2001, when I was 24". Now they have offices in Tokyo, Paris, and San Francisco. It seems like I need to find a killer app and a web server.
Hell, if they find out ways to get around stuff like authpf, they can *have* their internet access, and then I'll tell them their internet access is now directly linked to their progress on proving P/NP.
Unless, of course, they're nerd children, in which case all of the above examples make the assumption they have friends to talk to, hang out with, purchase identical sweaters with, be popular with by having seen TRL, drive to, or finally, throw up on.
I'm guessing you're either a law student, or lawyer? I have read Sony, but that's neither here nor there. I bow humbly to your opinion, though I think a simple correction might have sufficed.:)
The major difference is in the primary claim. In Sony, the claim was about the legality of a product that allowed you to violate copyright law. Here, it's about liability. Criminal vs. civil.
It's a subtle difference, but it's important -- in Sony, we're talking about making VCRs illegal to make and sell, the same way that pot is illegal to make and sell, but with obviously different penalties.
Here, we're talking about the companies being, more or less, required to perform "good faith" filtering of copyrighted works.
Who's the bigger badass? Who set fire to the their home city to collect the insurance? And when they collected, did they bling the hell out of their horse-drawn carriage and get diamond-encrusted bonnets for their fineass bitches? Dollar dollar bill, y'all, trolls ain't touchin' that shit.
It's just a very large group of people that have similar opinions, then.
Largely, nobody wants them -- I read an Economist article this July with an introduction of "Wind farms disfigure the countryside and threaten to cost £1 billion a year. Apart from that, they're great."
Usually, those trying to push wind power have to create artificial financial incentives to get the land owners to accept the towers.
I'm not trying to troll, wind power is really cool, so is clean energy independence. But I think we do ourselves a disservice by taking these things personally. If it's got flaws, it's got flaws. Let's fix them.
Yah, I know.:) But I've actually heard it before, and even the different password mnemonics (memorize a sentence, use first letter from each) are too much. When entire pages can be written on "password strategy", it's gotten out of control.
Computing's biggest hurdle in the coming years is going to be disappearing entirely. By which I mean, if computers really are a magical black box that makes our lives easier, then things like security shouldn't be taking up chunks of my life. They should take care of themselves. Just, nobody's sure how to do it yet.
Is seven different 8 character passwords (with numbers and mixed cases) really too much to ask?
Absolutely it is. This is one of those examples of culture clash: the tech-inclined, and not. Absolutely it's too much to ask, just like asking mom or dad to "just open the command line.. it's so easy!" Yeah, it is too much.
It's a good question. There have been any number of movies and papers that deal with the topic of 'what if we found a way to make more clean energy than we could ever use in a thousand years out of $1.25 in beer cans?' The conclusion most come up with is that it would be a new era in human endeavor, but not before the economies of the world crashed overnight. I agree.
Today, it's a similar thing. Previously, it took large conglomerates and hundreds of workers to create a newspaper or deliver the news on TV or publish an album. Now, it takes anybody with some free time and $3 a month in hosting fees. We haven't even begun to see the revolution that's coming with this kind of thing; the current backlash against it are the birth pangs of something great that nobody can think of yet.
As for the answer, I don't claim I have it either, but I'd bet a billion dollar check or two for anybody that comes up with it.:) Of course, the answer might invalidate that idea entirely.
I won't. Subscription only sites will only survive if people consider the site to be worth it. For example why would I ever subscribe to NYT when I can get the same news from news.google.com and get multiple sources to boot?
I liked your points, but let's keep in mind that Google News is pretty much lifting headlines right now, a fact that major news sites are aware of and none too pleased about. But, it's an arguable point because Google News is like a giant RSS aggregator, driving some traffic to the site, for those that want to read more than the headlines. Traffic is good, because that's ad revenue.
A pay model that swept across the web would mean that news (and other pay sites) will be more aggressive in protecting their headlines. Google News will become a blogs aggregator -- it could offer headlines, only to find that clickthroughs want you to put up or shut up. Moving to pay models pretty much does exactly the opposite of what you propose.
And moreover, how are people without a CC supposed to get their news on the internet? I think the great electronic utopia and medium of change we all envision as being the internet would be less rich if every time you wanted more sources, you had to pay $4.95/mo. That doesn't encourage a spectrum of opinions and sources, that encourages CNN.com and Abcnews.com to sweep the market, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that.
Let's take this a step further -- if people don't have the internet as it once was, those that choose not to pay will go to their previous sources: TV and radio; all owned by the same company, giving the same opinions. Is this really the way we want the press to work in this country?
Slashdot Mirror
When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy instead that will take up as little space and do as much for the same price (or less)?
You could just buy the Mac Mini. I know it seems silly, but this is exactly what Apple is hoping you'll do. For iLife, a BSD userland, and some other fun stuff, how can you resist? I know you can, thank you peanut gallery.
I tried pricing something similar a while ago -- look at OEM parts, and consider putting the whole thing into a cardboard box; you can do well with an Athlon 64, a couple hundred megs of memory, and a bulk HD. Size, however.. that's hard. MiniITX doesn't come cheap.
You forgot one:
Duke Nukem Forever. Coming this millenium.
We think.
Even better, it's the presentation. You play a game once without them, and you play it with cheats the second or third time around -- it's an entirely different game.
Last year when bored I became a fan of turning my UT2003 single-player speed ('slomo') down to something far below normal, like 0.001, 1.0 being normal. At that speed it became more like an elaborate chess game, where you had minutes to decide where to go or who to shoot first. While it's not for everyone, it made for some very interesting matches -- you savor the triumph of a frag a little more, and then kick your own ass for not noticing the guy behind you for four minutes.
There's something that we like in games that's more about situations than strictly playing. Cheat codes allow us to get to the parts we really liked about the game.
Try Geeklog. Very similar in looks to Slashcode -- has a poll, articles, site calendar, and so on. Geeklog is pretty basic at this point -- all sites tend to look more or less the same 3-column layout -- but very easily themeable (and with a community that makes up for the features it lacks).
I've been researching CMSs recently, and the problem I've come across is that they tend to look similar across themes, and/or their framework is overbroad and poorly documented, making it a monster just to make a few pages.
That's insane, man. Your dog?!
I let my cat Toonces do the driving.
http://www.catass.com/toonces/
In a word, the US Constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms -- some people read it differently, as the right of the government to keep a well-regulated militia (army), and not the right of the people.
Regardless, the idea is that the 2nd amendment right can't be conditional on if a gun sensor is installed, or say, the people are black. Think of it like school uniforms, where the right of the students to free speech and public education (more a common law right) can't be conditional on what clothes they wear. Sorta.
The IRS has a Free File program that a number of companies provide assuming you don't have any "special cases", that is to say, can use the basic 1040 -- don't own a business, take standard deduction, etc. I've found (whodathunkit) H&R Block's Free File program to be quite good. I did my taxes in my lunchbreak and got my refund the next week.
I'm not, could somebody explain it? :)
Please, mods, mod parent up. This is phk -- read yo' code. He knows what he's talking about, not to mention that everybody else agrees.
In addition to the "compare and contrast" contributions we'll see, it's also this: in the next decade, it will be about a return to communities on the web. In the early 90s it was a bunch of local BBSs, and now the web is too big to be a "community" most of the time. People want to reach out to other people, and blogs, for better or for worse, often do that. (For worse, I know I've made fun of blogs as a way for people to be passive-aggressive to those they don't want to talk to in person.. :)
I think Six Apart wants to be a major force in that movement, in generating communities, and how communities will play into the future of the web and how we communicate with one another. For one, LJ subscribers (myself included) will be paying Six Apart AFAIK, not Danga, so there's profit there. Also, competition; the fewer games in town, or the more that you control, the better.
On a separate note, does anybody seem to see a trend with the next 'dot-com' being funded open-source, or even just homegrown, web solutions ("we're not selling the product, we're selling the service")? It seems like I've heard of quite a few open source projects getting bank from just being good for long enough.. one clear example being Linux, but also reading Mena's blog -- (paraphrased) "me and my husband released Moveable Type in 2001, when I was 24". Now they have offices in Tokyo, Paris, and San Francisco. It seems like I need to find a killer app and a web server.
Did Bill hire Inspector Gadget or something to keep the Venezuelan authorities from going open-source?
Anybody got tape on this, so to speak?
Hey, I'm going to lunch; anybody spot me $250,000?
Hell, if they find out ways to get around stuff like authpf, they can *have* their internet access, and then I'll tell them their internet access is now directly linked to their progress on proving P/NP.
Unless, of course, they're nerd children, in which case all of the above examples make the assumption they have friends to talk to, hang out with, purchase identical sweaters with, be popular with by having seen TRL, drive to, or finally, throw up on.
Who bit your ass?
:)
I'm guessing you're either a law student, or lawyer? I have read Sony, but that's neither here nor there. I bow humbly to your opinion, though I think a simple correction might have sufficed.
The major difference is in the primary claim. In Sony, the claim was about the legality of a product that allowed you to violate copyright law. Here, it's about liability. Criminal vs. civil.
It's a subtle difference, but it's important -- in Sony, we're talking about making VCRs illegal to make and sell, the same way that pot is illegal to make and sell, but with obviously different penalties.
Here, we're talking about the companies being, more or less, required to perform "good faith" filtering of copyrighted works.
This is like an east-west Slashdot nerd beef.
Who's the bigger badass? Who set fire to the their home city to collect the insurance? And when they collected, did they bling the hell out of their horse-drawn carriage and get diamond-encrusted bonnets for their fineass bitches? Dollar dollar bill, y'all, trolls ain't touchin' that shit.
It's just a very large group of people that have similar opinions, then.
Largely, nobody wants them -- I read an Economist article this July with an introduction of "Wind farms disfigure the countryside and threaten to cost £1 billion a year. Apart from that, they're great."
Usually, those trying to push wind power have to create artificial financial incentives to get the land owners to accept the towers.
I'm not trying to troll, wind power is really cool, so is clean energy independence. But I think we do ourselves a disservice by taking these things personally. If it's got flaws, it's got flaws. Let's fix them.
Yah, I know. :) But I've actually heard it before, and even the different password mnemonics (memorize a sentence, use first letter from each) are too much. When entire pages can be written on "password strategy", it's gotten out of control.
Computing's biggest hurdle in the coming years is going to be disappearing entirely. By which I mean, if computers really are a magical black box that makes our lives easier, then things like security shouldn't be taking up chunks of my life. They should take care of themselves. Just, nobody's sure how to do it yet.
Is seven different 8 character passwords (with numbers and mixed cases) really too much to ask?
Absolutely it is. This is one of those examples of culture clash: the tech-inclined, and not. Absolutely it's too much to ask, just like asking mom or dad to "just open the command line.. it's so easy!" Yeah, it is too much.
The (rough) order is like this, not entirely chronological, but you get a feel for the scheme:
8 ...
4004
4040
8008
8080
8085
8086
80186
8018
80286
80386
80486
Pentium
Pentium Pro
Pentium II
If you're wondering why we're still using a line of naming from 1971, just think about how Intel makes chips -- just add voltage!
It's a good question. There have been any number of movies and papers that deal with the topic of 'what if we found a way to make more clean energy than we could ever use in a thousand years out of $1.25 in beer cans?' The conclusion most come up with is that it would be a new era in human endeavor, but not before the economies of the world crashed overnight. I agree.
:) Of course, the answer might invalidate that idea entirely.
Today, it's a similar thing. Previously, it took large conglomerates and hundreds of workers to create a newspaper or deliver the news on TV or publish an album. Now, it takes anybody with some free time and $3 a month in hosting fees. We haven't even begun to see the revolution that's coming with this kind of thing; the current backlash against it are the birth pangs of something great that nobody can think of yet.
As for the answer, I don't claim I have it either, but I'd bet a billion dollar check or two for anybody that comes up with it.
I won't. Subscription only sites will only survive if people consider the site to be worth it. For example why would I ever subscribe to NYT when I can get the same news from news.google.com and get multiple sources to boot?
I liked your points, but let's keep in mind that Google News is pretty much lifting headlines right now, a fact that major news sites are aware of and none too pleased about. But, it's an arguable point because Google News is like a giant RSS aggregator, driving some traffic to the site, for those that want to read more than the headlines. Traffic is good, because that's ad revenue.
A pay model that swept across the web would mean that news (and other pay sites) will be more aggressive in protecting their headlines. Google News will become a blogs aggregator -- it could offer headlines, only to find that clickthroughs want you to put up or shut up. Moving to pay models pretty much does exactly the opposite of what you propose.
And moreover, how are people without a CC supposed to get their news on the internet? I think the great electronic utopia and medium of change we all envision as being the internet would be less rich if every time you wanted more sources, you had to pay $4.95/mo. That doesn't encourage a spectrum of opinions and sources, that encourages CNN.com and Abcnews.com to sweep the market, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that.
Let's take this a step further -- if people don't have the internet as it once was, those that choose not to pay will go to their previous sources: TV and radio; all owned by the same company, giving the same opinions. Is this really the way we want the press to work in this country?
Just some thoughts.
Even better.
My fellow Slashdotters:
I found pr0n and prototype schematics for a $25 Linux-based Xbox while surfing the inter-net! Find it here!.
Damage done.
Then you can store Chicken of the Sea brand Tuna in your Tivo brand refrigerator.