Jeez, 33 hrs? I knew it was a lot, but I didn't think that much...
I guess Cartoon Network has got to fill 24hrs a day with something. And let's face it: there is A LOT of Scooby Doo out there. That, plus the regular Loony Toons stuff, probably makes the backbone of their lineup, and they plug the rest of their stuff in as needed.
Personally, I'd also like to see a lot of the mid-to-late 80's cartoons on CN. There was a lot of great stuff in those years: Galaxy High, anyone?
"Notice the little down arrow next to the back arrow...."
Yeah, I know how to do all of that, I just find this sort of problem inexcusable from a web programming stand-point. I've seen this kind of thing everywhere: even big-boys like Microsoft and Netscape will sometimes catch you a similar loop on their sites. Whether a site does this on purpose or by accident, it's bad design/sloppy coding.
Not only that, but their pages won't let you use your Back button (at least on IE 5 for me). Keeps loading the same page right away. God, do I hate that. "Silly customer, our page is the best! You don't really want to leave!"
I remember a few years back Fox (I think? not sure) brought back G-Force, IMHO the greates cartoon of all time. For the uninitiated, G-Force is a Japanimation-style cartoon that was originally dubbed for the US back in the early 80's I believe. It was about 5 teenagers with "the ability to fly like birds", and had to save the world from Galactor (sp?).
Like I said, it was an old Japanese cartoon to begin with, so I'm sure the first American incarnation changed a bunch of things. When they brought it back on Fox recently, though, they totally changed it again! All new voices, some questionable material cut out; they basically made it more PC. In some episodes they even changed the plot of the episodes, cut in some footage from other eps, etc. This was never an ultra-violent cartoon to begin with, but watching the new version was worse than watching cut Looney Toons.
I'm wondering if we'll see more of the same with D&D. Again, I don't remember D&D as being exceptionally violent, but you never can tell.
Now, if we can just get Transformers, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and Thundar, the Barbarian back on the air:) An for all you trolls out there: Yes, this post officially proves that I have no life.
You people should stick to hip-hop. You don't see any of them trying to dick napster.
Dr. Dre also sued Napster this week. Which probably means that any acts he produces (Eminem?) won't be far behind.
Re:The slashdot HTML monster claim another victim
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WinDSL Coming?
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Sorry about the messy post
The general consuming public will eat this up
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WinDSL Coming?
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This just confirms my suspicions that people will buy anything if it's cheaper than an alternative. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation: Customer: So what's the difference between the USR 56k FaxModem and this Viking 56k Winmodem? Me: (Dummy mode on)Well, the USR uses hardware on the card itself run the modem, whereas the Viking uses the Pentium to do it. This means the USR gives you much better throughput, and doesn't slow down your processor like the Viking will. Customer: (With glazed over eyes)Uh, huh. But the USR is $119, where this Viking is on sale for $19.95. There both 56k modem, right? My son said get a 56k modem. Me: Well, yes they are both 56k modems, but like I said, the USR gives much better performance, and... Customer: (Half-way out the door) Thanks for your help, I think I'll get this Viking. What a deal! Two weeks later the same guy's back in, wondering why his Win98 machine is so damn slow. The only plus I can see in this is better availability of DSL, as the phone companies keep up with the demand after Compaq and HP put these things in every computer they make.
The link goes to the Weekly World News site. For those who may not be familiar, Weekly World News is kind of like conspiricy theory for rednecks. The whole magazine is devoted to printing stories so blatently fabricated that they're funny. Stuff like, "Aliens have made me thier love slave", and the like.
So this begs the question: are we going to slowly phase out public libraries and phase in public computer labs to allow free access to all?
Why not? This is already being done to some exten. Many libraries offer free internet access terminals, which I would imagine also gives you the ability to search their library (and maybe others?) for particular titles. I don't find it difficult to imagine a "library" composed nothing but terminals with a nice fat pipe to an internet database. The technology may be lacking a little to make this feasible right now (EXTREME broadband, good OCR), but we're not far away.
I agree with a previous poster: this Library of Congress guy is just another buerocrat who thinks he needs to justify his position. From the article:
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
As opposed to pre-internet days, when we all lived in a commercial-free utopia, everyone spoke rationally and clearly, and no one would think of harming their fellow human being. Do you suppose this guy and Lieutenant Grossman shop at the same store for reactionary, short-sited quotes? With quotes like that, is it any wonder that Mr. Billington would oppose digitizing the Library of Congress' books?
There's absolutely no reason why books should not be converted to some form of digital media. Making such knowledge readily available (in any form of media) can only benefit a society.
All the solutions I've seen posted so far are either technical (requiring you/your ISP/phone company/government to regulate spam/telemarketing via technology), or time consuming (requesting that your name be taken off the list, suing companies to discourage spamming, etc). The point is that I did not ask for this advertising, I should not be forced to take action to stop it. In other forms of advertising, namely television ads, magazines ads, web sites banners, you are given a service by someone (TV show, web site content), and in exchange for lower cost of this media, you put up with ads. Telemarketing and spam mail don't offer this in any way.
Personally, I find the most effective solution is to just hang up on telemarketers, and delete spam mail.
What exactly is Half Life about? What makes it so good?
The Team Fortress Classic mod for Half-Life is great because it's not just a "kill at 100mph" Quake deathmatch style. With 7 unique character classes, it generally takes teamwork to succeed. Myself, I don't play much Quake DM, because your right, it's basically just a contest of who can move faster and get the most rockets.
I am tired of playing people who kick my ass 700 times before I fall to the ground A good example for you: Starcraft. Ok I get the shareware version...Well after several days I hadn't won a single game...wasn't enjoying it much at all (you should know how it feels to loose).
Oh yeah, I know how to get my ass kicked in Starcraft real good;) It's just like anything else though: practice makes perfect. I can remember playing Master of Magic for hours on Impossible level, only to get overrun 6 hours into it. True, the learning curve is steeper in most multiplayer games: it's harder to predict the moves of a human opponenet. This however, IMHO, is what makes success all the more rewarding.
Games don't have to be on-line only to be played online. Witness the typical PC game with a huge on-line following, like Quake, Half-Life, StarCraft, etc. Most of these games also allow you to play on-line for free, assuming you already have an ISP. Whether it will be that way in the console world remains to be seen, I suppose.
Personally, I think that on-line gameplay with other humans is much better than single player for most games. You haven't fully appreciated Half-Life until you've played Team Fortress Classic on a good server with a good team.
Can someone explain to me why I would want to purchase a piece of proprietary Linux software?
Because you might find the product (not necessarily Corel Office) useful, functional, and productive, and wish to support the programmers efforts in the hopes that they will support your new program, and perhaps one day release a new, better version.
Open source does not equal free. If you think no one should pay for Linux apps, that the freebie alternatives are sufficient, fine. This attitude will ensure that Linux never breaks into mainstream corporate and home use, and remain confined to the niche market that it is today.
Let's face it: Betty in HR isn't going to switch to Linux until she is given an easy way to convert all those old Word documents seemlessly; Uncle Bob isn't going to switch until he can walk into CompUSA and buy TurboTax/Photoshop/Falcon 5.0/whatever for Linux off the shelf. These products are created by software companies, and those companies want sales. What motivation do they have for creating new and unique native Linux applications if they are expected to give it away for free?
The one review from Linux Weekly talks about how it crashes all the time. The one from Linux today from says it's relatively stable. Anyone care to comment on stability from experience? Could it run better on some distro's (Corel's own?) and not others?
Cheaper prices at a mom-pop may be true in your area, but I would be suprised if this was the case in most places.
I used to work as a technician for CompUSA, and the retail guys were constantly telling us how they sold systems just above or at cost. Hell, walk into CompUSA on a Sunday (traditionally a big sale day, and used by managers to measure success of weekly sale ads), and you can probably talk them into selling it below cost. Obviously, they make most of their money on peripherals and software, but you have to sell a lot of that to make up the difference.
Come on now. Microsoft isn't the first company to try and screw their employees, and they certainly won't be the last. For every disgruntled MS employee posting their horror stories on web sites, I'm sure you could find a (gasp!) happy MS employee, who enjoys his/her job and the company they work for. Their not running a slave camp up there in Redmond.
I'm sure the moderators are already reaching for their flamebait tag, but IMHO we need a little perspective here. My NT machine here at work crashes about 2-3 times a week, and my 98 game machine at home needs rebooted about once every 3 days to reclaim lost memory. Yeah, it ticks me off, but I don't consider them the "Evil Empire" because of it. They're simply an incredibly successful company that made their billions with adequate software and genius marketing.
Has history taught us nothing? I guarantee that Microsoft is already working on their new and improved, 5 Gig install of Office 2005. To say nothing about the 10 Gigs needed for Windows 2001 (due out 1st quarter 2006).
Every time I see an article talking about "All the storage space/processor speed/RAM you'll ever need, I think back to the 20 meg drive in my first 386 computer and laugh. Hard drive manufacturers make bigger drives because they can, or to keep up with the demands of bloated software. Software manufacturers see all these huge drive, and figure they can use all that space to throw in a bunch of cool new features. Granted this is a not as much a problem in the Linux world, but I'll bet that in 5 years, we'll all wonder how we managed to live with less than 100Gig, and will be eagerly looking forward to the new terrabyte drives just around the corner.
If one has the skill and expertise to create a "honeypot" capable of fooling, say, 60% of hackers/crackers/script kiddies/whatever, wouldn't that persons time and effort be better spent properly securing a network? Something like this might be interesting from a purely academic standpoint, but in practice not worth it. Especially when you consider how quickly tools and techniques change; any information would be outdated very quickly.
Is it just me, or does StarOffice seem to be suffering from a MS Office case of bloatware. I realize a majority of the new features listed are there simply for MS Office compatibility (which is a good thing), but it seems like Sun is making StarOffice into a MS Office "Me too" package, adding new features just because they can.
"With uptime measured in the hours, hundreds of millions being spent in technical support for NT servers" We're not talking about NT here, we're talking about Win9x. I don't think anyone will accuse NT of having an unfair advantage in the mission-critical server market.
"It's a whole lot easier to set up and use "out of the box" than Linux. Maybe for you. " And maybe for 80% of the general computer-using public. The average computer user doesn't care if he can get 2 months of uptime, he wants to be able to install and run programs easily. Windows gives him that.
"Microsoft shouldn't be punished for having a better product. You're right. It should be punished for so completely oblitherating competition that no other products existed to compare it to. " Microsoft has used strong-arm tactics to be sure, but what kind of competition did they have during their reign? OS2/Warp? MacOS? Two perfectly good consumer OS's created by companies who had their collective heads up their asses throughout the previous decade. Either one might have had a chance at competing with Win9x if they had been managed/marketed properly. Don't blame Microsoft for other companies failures.
"Why do I play PC games? BECAUSE THEY ARE CHEAPER, so much cheaper that many people prefer bying a budget PC to run them, even though even a budget PC costs three times the price of a modern console"
Where are you buying your PC games? I just spent $50 at my local BestBuy the other day for Might and Magic 8 (which, BTW, is crap). Granted, I probably could have found it cheaper had I shopped around, (other stores, Internet, whatever), but I don't see PC games being any cheaper than console ones.
I also agree with another posters take that Microsoft is running this like it did IEvNetscape. Of course Microsoft will price this baby dirt cheap with the intention of bankrupting the competition. Will it work? Nintendo and Sega will probably be worst hit, but they also have a lot going for them, like experience, cosumer loyalty, and recognizable characters (Mario, Sonic). Sony, since it is diversified into other fields, could afford to loose money on Playstation, but not as much as Microsoft. When this thing eventually comes out, it wouldn't suprise me to see a sub-$100 price tag for the console.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, 33 hrs? I knew it was a lot, but I didn't think that much...
I guess Cartoon Network has got to fill 24hrs a day with something. And let's face it: there is A LOT of Scooby Doo out there. That, plus the regular Loony Toons stuff, probably makes the backbone of their lineup, and they plug the rest of their stuff in as needed.
Personally, I'd also like to see a lot of the mid-to-late 80's cartoons on CN. There was a lot of great stuff in those years: Galaxy High, anyone?
"Notice the little down arrow next to the back arrow...."
Yeah, I know how to do all of that, I just find this sort of problem inexcusable from a web programming stand-point. I've seen this kind of thing everywhere: even big-boys like Microsoft and Netscape will sometimes catch you a similar loop on their sites. Whether a site does this on purpose or by accident, it's bad design/sloppy coding.
Not only that, but their pages won't let you use your Back button (at least on IE 5 for me). Keeps loading the same page right away. God, do I hate that. "Silly customer, our page is the best! You don't really want to leave!"
I remember a few years back Fox (I think? not sure) brought back G-Force, IMHO the greates cartoon of all time. For the uninitiated, G-Force is a Japanimation-style cartoon that was originally dubbed for the US back in the early 80's I believe. It was about 5 teenagers with "the ability to fly like birds", and had to save the world from Galactor (sp?).
:) An for all you trolls out there: Yes, this post officially proves that I have no life.
Like I said, it was an old Japanese cartoon to begin with, so I'm sure the first American incarnation changed a bunch of things. When they brought it back on Fox recently, though, they totally changed it again! All new voices, some questionable material cut out; they basically made it more PC. In some episodes they even changed the plot of the episodes, cut in some footage from other eps, etc. This was never an ultra-violent cartoon to begin with, but watching the new version was worse than watching cut Looney Toons.
I'm wondering if we'll see more of the same with D&D. Again, I don't remember D&D as being exceptionally violent, but you never can tell.
Now, if we can just get Transformers, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and Thundar, the Barbarian back on the air
You people should stick to hip-hop. You don't see any of them trying to dick napster.
Dr. Dre also sued Napster this week. Which probably means that any acts he produces (Eminem?) won't be far behind.
Sorry about the messy post
This just confirms my suspicions that people will buy anything if it's cheaper than an alternative. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation: Customer: So what's the difference between the USR 56k FaxModem and this Viking 56k Winmodem? Me: (Dummy mode on)Well, the USR uses hardware on the card itself run the modem, whereas the Viking uses the Pentium to do it. This means the USR gives you much better throughput, and doesn't slow down your processor like the Viking will. Customer: (With glazed over eyes)Uh, huh. But the USR is $119, where this Viking is on sale for $19.95. There both 56k modem, right? My son said get a 56k modem. Me: Well, yes they are both 56k modems, but like I said, the USR gives much better performance, and... Customer: (Half-way out the door) Thanks for your help, I think I'll get this Viking. What a deal! Two weeks later the same guy's back in, wondering why his Win98 machine is so damn slow. The only plus I can see in this is better availability of DSL, as the phone companies keep up with the demand after Compaq and HP put these things in every computer they make.
The link goes to the Weekly World News site. For those who may not be familiar, Weekly World News is kind of like conspiricy theory for rednecks. The whole magazine is devoted to printing stories so blatently fabricated that they're funny. Stuff like, "Aliens have made me thier love slave", and the like.
So this begs the question: are we going to slowly phase out public libraries and phase in public computer labs to allow free access to all?
Why not? This is already being done to some exten. Many libraries offer free internet access terminals, which I would imagine also gives you the ability to search their library (and maybe others?) for particular titles. I don't find it difficult to imagine a "library" composed nothing but terminals with a nice fat pipe to an internet database. The technology may be lacking a little to make this feasible right now (EXTREME broadband, good OCR), but we're not far away.
I agree with a previous poster: this Library of Congress guy is just another buerocrat who thinks he needs to justify his position. From the article:
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
As opposed to pre-internet days, when we all lived in a commercial-free utopia, everyone spoke rationally and clearly, and no one would think of harming their fellow human being. Do you suppose this guy and Lieutenant Grossman shop at the same store for reactionary, short-sited quotes? With quotes like that, is it any wonder that Mr. Billington would oppose digitizing the Library of Congress' books?
There's absolutely no reason why books should not be converted to some form of digital media. Making such knowledge readily available (in any form of media) can only benefit a society.
Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.
All the solutions I've seen posted so far are either technical (requiring you/your ISP/phone company/government to regulate spam/telemarketing via technology), or time consuming (requesting that your name be taken off the list, suing companies to discourage spamming, etc). The point is that I did not ask for this advertising, I should not be forced to take action to stop it. In other forms of advertising, namely television ads, magazines ads, web sites banners, you are given a service by someone (TV show, web site content), and in exchange for lower cost of this media, you put up with ads. Telemarketing and spam mail don't offer this in any way.
Personally, I find the most effective solution is to just hang up on telemarketers, and delete spam mail.
What exactly is Half Life about? What makes it so good?
...Well after several days I hadn't won a single game...wasn't enjoying it much at all (you should know how it feels to loose).
;) It's just like anything else though: practice makes perfect. I can remember playing Master of Magic for hours on Impossible level, only to get overrun 6 hours into it. True, the learning curve is steeper in most multiplayer games: it's harder to predict the moves of a human opponenet. This however, IMHO, is what makes success all the more rewarding.
The Team Fortress Classic mod for Half-Life is great because it's not just a "kill at 100mph" Quake deathmatch style. With 7 unique character classes, it generally takes teamwork to succeed. Myself, I don't play much Quake DM, because your right, it's basically just a contest of who can move faster and get the most rockets.
I am tired of playing people who kick my ass 700 times before I fall to the ground
A good example for you: Starcraft. Ok I get the shareware version
Oh yeah, I know how to get my ass kicked in Starcraft real good
Games don't have to be on-line only to be played online. Witness the typical PC game with a huge on-line following, like Quake, Half-Life, StarCraft, etc. Most of these games also allow you to play on-line for free, assuming you already have an ISP. Whether it will be that way in the console world remains to be seen, I suppose.
Personally, I think that on-line gameplay with other humans is much better than single player for most games. You haven't fully appreciated Half-Life until you've played Team Fortress Classic on a good server with a good team.
Can someone explain to me why I would want to purchase a piece of proprietary Linux software?
Because you might find the product (not necessarily Corel Office) useful, functional, and productive, and wish to support the programmers efforts in the hopes that they will support your new program, and perhaps one day release a new, better version.
Open source does not equal free. If you think no one should pay for Linux apps, that the freebie alternatives are sufficient, fine. This attitude will ensure that Linux never breaks into mainstream corporate and home use, and remain confined to the niche market that it is today.
Let's face it: Betty in HR isn't going to switch to Linux until she is given an easy way to convert all those old Word documents seemlessly; Uncle Bob isn't going to switch until he can walk into CompUSA and buy TurboTax/Photoshop/Falcon 5.0/whatever for Linux off the shelf. These products are created by software companies, and those companies want sales. What motivation do they have for creating new and unique native Linux applications if they are expected to give it away for free?
Hehe, Wordstar. Making vi seem user friendly since 1986 :)
The one review from Linux Weekly talks about how it crashes all the time. The one from Linux today from says it's relatively stable. Anyone care to comment on stability from experience? Could it run better on some distro's (Corel's own?) and not others?
Cheaper prices at a mom-pop may be true in your area, but I would be suprised if this was the case in most places.
I used to work as a technician for CompUSA, and the retail guys were constantly telling us how they sold systems just above or at cost. Hell, walk into CompUSA on a Sunday (traditionally a big sale day, and used by managers to measure success of weekly sale ads), and you can probably talk them into selling it below cost. Obviously, they make most of their money on peripherals and software, but you have to sell a lot of that to make up the difference.
Come on now. Microsoft isn't the first company to try and screw their employees, and they certainly won't be the last. For every disgruntled MS employee posting their horror stories on web sites, I'm sure you could find a (gasp!) happy MS employee, who enjoys his/her job and the company they work for. Their not running a slave camp up there in Redmond.
I'm sure the moderators are already reaching for their flamebait tag, but IMHO we need a little perspective here. My NT machine here at work crashes about 2-3 times a week, and my 98 game machine at home needs rebooted about once every 3 days to reclaim lost memory. Yeah, it ticks me off, but I don't consider them the "Evil Empire" because of it. They're simply an incredibly successful company that made their billions with adequate software and genius marketing.
Has history taught us nothing? I guarantee that Microsoft is already working on their new and improved, 5 Gig install of Office 2005. To say nothing about the 10 Gigs needed for Windows 2001 (due out 1st quarter 2006).
Every time I see an article talking about "All the storage space/processor speed/RAM you'll ever need, I think back to the 20 meg drive in my first 386 computer and laugh. Hard drive manufacturers make bigger drives because they can, or to keep up with the demands of bloated software. Software manufacturers see all these huge drive, and figure they can use all that space to throw in a bunch of cool new features. Granted this is a not as much a problem in the Linux world, but I'll bet that in 5 years, we'll all wonder how we managed to live with less than 100Gig, and will be eagerly looking forward to the new terrabyte drives just around the corner.
If one has the skill and expertise to create a "honeypot" capable of fooling, say, 60% of hackers/crackers/script kiddies/whatever, wouldn't that persons time and effort be better spent properly securing a network? Something like this might be interesting from a purely academic standpoint, but in practice not worth it. Especially when you consider how quickly tools and techniques change; any information would be outdated very quickly.
Is it just me, or does StarOffice seem to be suffering from a MS Office case of bloatware. I realize a majority of the new features listed are there simply for MS Office compatibility (which is a good thing), but it seems like Sun is making StarOffice into a MS Office "Me too" package, adding new features just because they can.
Do you suppose this guy plays as a Troll on Everquest as well? ;)
"With uptime measured in the hours, hundreds of millions being spent in technical support for NT servers"
We're not talking about NT here, we're talking about Win9x. I don't think anyone will accuse NT of having an unfair advantage in the mission-critical server market.
"It's a whole lot easier to set up and use "out of the box" than Linux.
Maybe for you. "
And maybe for 80% of the general computer-using public. The average computer user doesn't care if he can get 2 months of uptime, he wants to be able to install and run programs easily. Windows gives him that.
"Microsoft shouldn't be punished for having a better product.
You're right. It should be punished for so completely oblitherating competition that no other products existed to compare it to. "
Microsoft has used strong-arm tactics to be sure, but what kind of competition did they have during their reign? OS2/Warp? MacOS? Two perfectly good consumer OS's created by companies who had their collective heads up their asses throughout the previous decade. Either one might have had a chance at competing with Win9x if they had been managed/marketed properly. Don't blame Microsoft for other companies failures.
"Why do I play PC games? BECAUSE THEY ARE CHEAPER, so much cheaper that many people prefer bying a budget PC to run them, even though even a budget PC costs three times the price of a modern console"
Where are you buying your PC games? I just spent $50 at my local BestBuy the other day for Might and Magic 8 (which, BTW, is crap). Granted, I probably could have found it cheaper had I shopped around, (other stores, Internet, whatever), but I don't see PC games being any cheaper than console ones.
I also agree with another posters take that Microsoft is running this like it did IEvNetscape. Of course Microsoft will price this baby dirt cheap with the intention of bankrupting the competition. Will it work? Nintendo and Sega will probably be worst hit, but they also have a lot going for them, like experience, cosumer loyalty, and recognizable characters (Mario, Sonic). Sony, since it is diversified into other fields, could afford to loose money on Playstation, but not as much as Microsoft. When this thing eventually comes out, it wouldn't suprise me to see a sub-$100 price tag for the console.