OK, I was mistaken. The HIPAA problems still remain, SP3's crap is still in force, even if you install SP4 over SP2. Forget I said what I just said. Move along, nothing to see here.
Upon further examination, you're completely right! Artists get absolutely no money and the label keeps everything! How foolish of me to overlook this universal truth! I had no idea that artists were signing with major labels simply because they have no desire to get any money out of the deal. Thank you sir, I have learned much from you.
Read the article I have linked to very, very carefully. Record company "advances" are considered loans against future royalties. You have to "repay" a laundry list of expenditures made on your behalf before you make a dime of royalty off of your music.
In other businesses, those kind of expenses are considered part of doing business. In the recording industry, they are considered the employee's problem. Imagine the uproar that would happen if all the copier paper, copy toner, pens, pencils, internet bandwidth and other "cost centers" of a business' budget were charged to their employees and, as a condition of getting paid, the employee would have to pay their boss back for all of it. You would have general strikes, you would have rioting in the streets, it would not be pretty.
Because of the high-glamour nature of the recording industry, however, and the strength of the recording industry lobby in governments around the world, they have had the unique, special right to charge off almost all their expenses to the recording artists.
And the big record companies are not the only ones who use this kind of chicanery. After SST Records lost their major distributor, Jem/Greenworld, all of a sudden bands who had been in the black on royalties found themselves on the hook to SST for promotional expenses. Bands like Saccharine Trust, Paper Bag, Zoogz Rift and others basically were screwed out of being paid for their record sales by a switch to a more "industry standard" set of billing practices. I was there to see this all happen...my husband was in Zoogz Rift's band and I was very good friends with Paper Bag.
This way of doing business has been standard operating procedure with major record companies since the 1930s. It is only now, with the record companies going after their customer base for "piracy" and adding hideously restrictive measures to safeguard their ill gotten gains that the word is getting out.
Sure, some people get ahead with their record company. That's why you hear Metallica and Elton John and Madonna and all these other mega-millionaire recording stars whining about people "ripping us off". But the vast majority of recording artists, including some, like Prince and TLC and Don Henley, whom you would think would be in this Millionaires' Club, have been basically given a deal that is exactly as you describe. Yes indeed, artists get absolutely no money and the label keeps everything. That "advance" money is not really theirs...it is a loan from the biggest, nastiest loan sharks the world has ever known.
They are backing down on the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" EULA. Good. I'm impressed. This means that I can actually update my last lone Windows box. Right now, basically I have my Windows machine isolated from the Internet because of the security issues.
I still think that eventually MS will have to come out and admit that there are fundamental flaws at the heart of their security infrastructure, and basically make the same admission they made about NT4 about all their NT codebase OSes. But it's good that the patches are now available without having to bend and spread too far.
Someone mentioned the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in another post. I suspect that is the motivation behind the EULA change. With all those health insurance companies, doctors offices and hospitals screaming bloody murder about SP3 leaving them open for citation under HIPAA, they had to do this.
Certainly consumer outrage isn't the issue. That has never motivated MS before.
* Only real disappointment is the lack of an AGP slot. You're stuck with the onboard video.
You can put a PCI video card (suggestion: GeForce 4 MX 64MB PCI) in the first PCI slot and kill onboard Vampire Video.
* Wal-Mart promised a 10 GB hard drive, but it shipped with a 20 GB.
The Cajuns call that Lagniappe...a little something extra thrown in your bag, gratis.
* I got a no-OS box and installed Red Hat 9, so I can't speak about Lindows. But I can say RH9 installed easily with no driver problems.
Mandrake 9.1 would even do better, unless you really, really love GNOME. In which case RH9 will be just fine.
* 128 MB of RAM just isn't enough for RH9, X-Windows and a few apps. I spent $25 for another 128 MB (it takes PC133).
Good idea. I'd say give it even more RAM than that. It's dirt cheap now...
* The fan is a little louder than I'd like, but that's not surprising for a Duron-powered machine. But it's maybe 1.25 x as loud as your average PC, so it's not horrible.
Hell, if you can't hear the fans you might not be getting the cooling you need. I'm fine with a loud computer, actually.
...when the Big Hollywood Movie Studio who is backing such a huge undertaking comes forward and says "yes, we are the ones who will be funding and distributing this movie."
Until then, there's ADV Films, which is a small niche video/DVD company out of Texas, there's Gainax which is a small niche animation studio out of Tokyo, and there's Weta. I don't think that adds up to the hundreds of millions making a live-action Eva movie that doesn't look like Godzilla vs. Rodan will require.
I want to hear which of the biggies will do it. News Corp/Fox? Paramount/Viacom? AOL Time Warner? Columbia/Tri-Star/Sony? MGM? Disney? Universal? Out with it, dammit! If there isn't a Big Frickin' Movie Studio in this picture, this is going to be in the Vapor Queue with Duke Nukem Forever and the rebirth of the Amiga.
Actually Konqui for Win32 would be the best gift that open source developers could give to the people using "down-level" Windows who will be out in the cold after IE 6.1.
Hell, I'd like to see a 98-Lite style setup where you can replace the IE rendering crap in Windows 9x with a trimmer, lighter, more standards-compliant khtml.dll. It would be nice to be able to do that in Windows 2000 too but after SP2 they added the wrong kind of Borg parts to allow it to happen. Too bad.
I don't think that Apple has the numbers of developers necessary to create an Apple office suite from the ground up. I suppose an alternate possibility would be to beef up AppleWorks into an industrial-strength office suite, incorporating Keynote and re-assimilating FileMaker Pro.
However, Steve has opted to take a best-of-breed Open Source solution (KHTML *is* best-of-breed when compared to Gecko, the solid, time tested *BSD *is* best-of-breed compared to the still-evolving Linux) and build Apple software around it. MacOS X is the result of uniting NextStep and *BSD open-source code, Safari is the result of uniting the GPLed KHTML browser engine with in-house code.
An Open Office completely tuned to use Quartz, Quartz Extreme, Display PDF and all the other goodies available to MacOS X developers would rock the house. It would have full compatibility with MS Office from Office 97 to Office XP, something AppleWorks never had. And Apple could give back a nice polishing job that nobody at Sun has the time, inclination or will to do.
As far as an Outlook-killer goes...I could definitely see Apple taking Evolution and running with it in a similar fashion to what I am suggesting they might do with Open Office. They might even hire some of the people who worked on Entourage back to make it happen.
The take-home message here is this: Apple does not need Microsoft anymore. Apple is no longer the teetering, smoking hulk that needed Bill Gates' checkbook to shore up while Steve Jobs did all the things he had to do to revitalize the Apple brand. Apple is now very content to have its niche. The comparisons to BMW and other luxury car makes is very apropos. Neither BMW nor Mercedes nor Rolls Royce nor Jaguar nor Ferrari nor Acura nor Infiniti nor Lexus have a very large chunk of the automotive market. But all do just fine for themselves.
I'm definitely not a Ricer when it comes to my computers. I build solid, sane boxes. I don't overclock, I don't cut portholes in the side of my case to show off the guts, I don't do anything vaguely resembling the kind of atrocities Ricers inflict on perfectly good Hondas and Toyotas and Acuras.
I'm the kind of person who would buy a Toyota for basic transportation, never race it, buy it in a nondescript color, and just keep it tuned and maintained and drive it for literally decades. My husband and I have an '86 Chevy Nova, (basically a Toyota Corolla in all but badge) it's a nondescript beige, and it still gets the kind of gas mileage described on its showroom sticker.
Basically what I was objecting to was the fact that basically the "Great Quality" Chinese-made Fry's PCs are more like the Trabants and Yugos of the PC world. They are made with the cheapest possible parts and are doomed to fail spectacularly. All I am saying is that if you build something with a little better grade of parts, you have the possibility of something that will serve you longer and work better for you.
I mean, Mark got it...he responded to my post and understood exactly what I meant.
Ugh...Fry's hax0r3d by Ch1n353 $199 specials...
on
Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 2, Informative
While I have always liked Sun hardware, they are having their lunch eaten on the low end. For example: I just had to replace a server - I went to Frye's [sic] and bought a Chineese [sic] built Linux PC for $199; after reinstalling my prefered SuSE distro, I have what appears to be a reliable (and very low power use) server - close to free.
Just remember Mark...you get what you pay for. That Fry's "Great Quality" special will probably last for about 6 months, when something will undoubtedly fail. Maybe it will be the crappy Samsung HD. Maybe it will be something on the crappy PC Chips/Not-so-EliteGroup motherboard. Maybe it will be the bottom of the bargain barrel RAM. But something will happen. Let's hope, for the sake of your job, that there is nothing mission-critical on that "close to free" server.
It really doesn't take much more to make a sane x86 machine. Build the box yourself. Put in a nice, solid ASUS motherboard. Get a retail boxed chip, complete with chip fan. I don't know where to steer you as far as hard drives go, but maybe run Linux software RAID 5 with drives that still have 3-year warranties. That way if one of the drives fail you can reconstruct their contents using the parity info. Make sure the case you buy has a decent power supply...Antec, Sparkle and Powerman are good brands to look for. Get Crucial or Kingston or Mushnik or Corsair RAM. It's really not too much more expensive than the Fry's no-name crap special.
Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server. It will certainly cost you less than a Sun, that's for sure. Or an IBM, for that matter. Spending a little more money to save in the long term is a Very Good Thing (tm).
The.la domain has been on sale for two years now. And they have been charging that buttreamious $100/yr price for all that time. I wanted msgeek.la right when it was announced that the domains would be available. Then I found out the cost.:P
I got msgeek-la-ca.us instead. Not sure what I will do with it, but it's mine, all mine.
BTW they were marketing the.la tld at Louisiana too. Like neworleans.la and hotjazz.la and cajun.la and mardigras.la and so on. I wonder if they gave up on that.
Neon Genesis Evangelion was an animated TV series broadcast on TV Tokyo between October 1995 and March 1996. It was made by Gainax, the legendary "by fans, for fans" Japanese animation studio which also produced such efforts as "The Wings Of Honneamise" and "Nadia".
If you are not afraid of spoilers, here is a very good summation of the whole original series.
There was a great deal of fan consternation about the "anticlimax" nature of the series, so when Gainax got enough of a budget together, they did not one, but (again, beware spoilers) twomovies to further explore the concepts originally put across in the series. (I don't know why I wound up with three Australian sites for this info...I'm not Australian.)
In any event, "Death and Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion" were a wrapup of the narrative in the series. However, no matter how neatly Evangelion creator Anno Hideaki had wrapped things up, the true meaning of the Evangelion universe continues to be a huge topic of debate. Sort of like how the true meaning of The Matrix movies are becoming a huge topic of debate...there, I brought this back on-topic.
Anyway, it has been announced that a live-action Evangelion movie (the series and the two movies were all animated) has gone into pre-production. Gainax, ADV Films and Peter Jackson's Weta Digital effects studio are all part of this effort. For a movie which will, by necessity, have to have quite an epic sweep, the resources of these three partners which have been revealed so far seem far too limited to execute the plans. Perhaps one of the Seven Families of the Movie Industry is a part of this plan. Perhaps more than one. But the big financing has yet to be revealed. So take this all with a grain of salt.
It was this possible live-action movie to which I was referring to. If they are true to the original series and the two animated movies, they will piss off a lot of religious people in all "three great monotheisms." Just like Matrix Reloaded seems to have done in Egypt.
Imagine what will happen when the live-action version of Neon Genesis Evangelion comes out. They play too fast-and-loose with biblical themes, angels trying to destroy instead of protect humanity, naked crucified angels in NERV's basement, etc. etc...
Certainly Egypt wouldn't cotton to such a thing. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Homeland Security Department bans it as an affront to "the Christian foundations of the United States."
OK, I know there have been recent bugs and 'sploits found. Guess what? I fired up Mandrake Update today, and fixed EVERYTHING. I check Mandrake Update every few days, read up on the patches it's offering me, then apply the ones I feel are of merit. Usually it's the whole lot of them.
Mandrake's update service works for ALL copies of Mandrake, whether downloaded from their FTP site or bought from MandrakeSoft or any third party that sells Mandrake. This is not the case with Red Hat's Up2Date. This is why I support Mandrake and recommend it to Linux newbies. It is EFFORTLESS to keep a Mandrake desktop patched, provided it's a sane desktop system in the first place. (no unnecessary daemons, etc.)
Actually Robert Englund's role as a "Commander Data"-like lizard person who joins the resistance was quite good and quite nuanced. The guy basically is the modern-day Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff...both actors were quite skilled and desperately wanted to break out of their typecasting.
The difference between Lugosi and Karloff is that Lugosi became a Heroin addict to soothe his frustration at his not being considered for anything other than horror roles. Karloff made peace with his horror stardom and died knowing he had literally millions of fans who loved him for his ability to make monsters multi-dimensional.
I don't know where Englund is in that continuum. I would like to see him do something other than Freddy Krueger and Freddy Krueger-like characters (Erik in a Phantom of the Opera remake, for instance) but alas, he's a horror star and horror is what he does. A quick look at IMDB shows that he's getting more work abroad (Italy, Croatia) than what he's getting here, which is basically grade-Z horror flicks every so often.
I'm 39 and I don't want to see that shit in my mailbox. I look forward to seeing some of these assholes shut down. There is a rule of thumb I have with email I send out...I don't write anything I wouldn't be uncomfortable writing on a postcard. If that crap was sent out as postcards the perpetrator would be tracked down and busted.
And mom and pop users? You know, I'm all for linux on the desktop, but some people just should not have computers. The "Mom and Pop" users running Windows 98 on cable connections are the vector for the internet's worst diseases... the dumbasses wind up with zombie machines doing DOS attacks over cable modems, firing off viruses at random, and then calling YOU when they can't download the pictures of the grandkids fast enough.
It is for these people that MacOS 9 was created.
Not MacOS X, mind you...there are just enough unixisms to allow a random luser to make a complete mess of it. MacOS 9 has no daemons running by default (ditch Web Sharing to make sure) and no way to remotely login unless you install third-party programs like VNC or RumpusFTP. (For godsake keep 'em away from P2P programs!)
Aside from the occasional Word Macro Virus (easily avoided by keeping Ma and Pa away from Office 2001 or Office98) and a few random worms like HK Autostart and Sevendust (Freeware proggies like WormScanner and Agax will get them) they are virus-free. I don't think even the Mac version of Lookout Excess is prone to the kind of trojan horses the Windows version is prone to.
Just find a used iMac (CRT kind, not LCD kind...they are going cheap on eBay) and if you're lucky, it will come with a MacOS "system restore" disk. Before you start up, buy a low-priced USB mouse or trackball to replace the ergonomic nightmare that is the "hockey puck" mouse. Boot the iMac with one of those puppies, open up Drive Setup, and initialize that HD. Then do a reinstall of the system. Put Eudora on it for mail, Mozilla for the web* (IE for Mac is a POS) and then put the machine behind a Linksys and have the Linksys handle the DHCP authentication for the cable modem. Don't activate the DHCP server in the Linksys, just give the iMac a static IP in the range of the Linksys and give it the Linksys' LAN IP as its gateway.
You do that, Bob's your uncle, and your parents can surf 'til the cows come home. And they won't come home with back doors, trojans or viruses.
*Even easier: AOHell BYO Access program. $10 over and above their cable bill each month, unless they are on Time Warner Cable and if memory serves me right it is included. A "Walled Garden" designed for n00bz.
Well, most carpenters and handymen I know of are too poor for that, and certainly the Carpenter of Nazareth would be similarly tapped out. Most have aging light trucks or panel vans. What would Jesus drive? Probably something like this. (No, I don't think Mike Watt is God, but I think they jam together on occasion.)
I want to see that. If you have ever seen the "Daria" episode "The Daria Hunter" it could lend itself beautifully to a CTF game. Actually there could be a whole bunch of "Daria" related maps, all in various parts of Lawndale. You would play with various paintball-shooting guns and you would be "out" and "respawn" when hit by a ball of paint. Non-player "casualties" and "friendly fire" would be punished ala America's Army. Since one of the running gags about Daria Morgendorffer was that she was an enthusiastic player of First Person Shooters (one mentioned was called "Cannibal Fragfest" and another was called "Cyber-Kron") it would be great.
Too bad Viacom would prolly have kittens over that.
Oh yeah, shouts out to Clan B0rg, Santa Barbara, CA.
Yes, but does it have broom robots that chase you around the room, and does the DVD player hurl DVDs at you? It wouldn't be the Hotel Room of the Future without that! And does the muzak always play Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse?"
(note for the non-cartoon damaged, this is all a reference to two classic Warner Bros. shorts, one a remake of the other)
I beg to differ about early '90s Macs being closed. The LC series were designed to be easily opened and easily tweaked with. Just like the Apple][ machines they were designed to replace in academia. Undo one screw, flip up the two snap catches, then flip open the "pizza box" top. Voila.
They were also very beautifully designed. Sleek and low slung. Gorgeous. Unfortunately they were crippled machines up until the LCIII. But the LCIII, LCIII+ and the LC475 (aka the Quadra 610) were rockin' machines. Replace the 68lc040 in the LC475 with a real 68040, and you have a mean little LC indeed.
The big mistake made during this period was taking the old LC475 motherboard design and grafting it, Frankenstein-style, to a PPC 603 chip. Ugh! Nassssty Performaaaas! We hatesss! We hatesss!
Next week, Unreal Tournament 2K3 is supposed to be coming out for MacOS X. This is several months ahead of schedule. At Mac Gathering a couple of months ago, the best guesstimate for UT2K3 coming out for Mac was Christmas.
My G3 Blue-And-White doesn't have the cojones for it, alas...
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I was mistaken. The HIPAA problems still remain, SP3's crap is still in force, even if you install SP4 over SP2. Forget I said what I just said. Move along, nothing to see here.
Read the article I have linked to very, very carefully. Record company "advances" are considered loans against future royalties. You have to "repay" a laundry list of expenditures made on your behalf before you make a dime of royalty off of your music.
In other businesses, those kind of expenses are considered part of doing business. In the recording industry, they are considered the employee's problem. Imagine the uproar that would happen if all the copier paper, copy toner, pens, pencils, internet bandwidth and other "cost centers" of a business' budget were charged to their employees and, as a condition of getting paid, the employee would have to pay their boss back for all of it. You would have general strikes, you would have rioting in the streets, it would not be pretty.
Because of the high-glamour nature of the recording industry, however, and the strength of the recording industry lobby in governments around the world, they have had the unique, special right to charge off almost all their expenses to the recording artists.
And the big record companies are not the only ones who use this kind of chicanery. After SST Records lost their major distributor, Jem/Greenworld, all of a sudden bands who had been in the black on royalties found themselves on the hook to SST for promotional expenses. Bands like Saccharine Trust, Paper Bag, Zoogz Rift and others basically were screwed out of being paid for their record sales by a switch to a more "industry standard" set of billing practices. I was there to see this all happen...my husband was in Zoogz Rift's band and I was very good friends with Paper Bag.
This way of doing business has been standard operating procedure with major record companies since the 1930s. It is only now, with the record companies going after their customer base for "piracy" and adding hideously restrictive measures to safeguard their ill gotten gains that the word is getting out.
Sure, some people get ahead with their record company. That's why you hear Metallica and Elton John and Madonna and all these other mega-millionaire recording stars whining about people "ripping us off". But the vast majority of recording artists, including some, like Prince and TLC and Don Henley, whom you would think would be in this Millionaires' Club, have been basically given a deal that is exactly as you describe. Yes indeed, artists get absolutely no money and the label keeps everything. That "advance" money is not really theirs...it is a loan from the biggest, nastiest loan sharks the world has ever known.
They are backing down on the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" EULA. Good. I'm impressed. This means that I can actually update my last lone Windows box. Right now, basically I have my Windows machine isolated from the Internet because of the security issues.
I still think that eventually MS will have to come out and admit that there are fundamental flaws at the heart of their security infrastructure, and basically make the same admission they made about NT4 about all their NT codebase OSes. But it's good that the patches are now available without having to bend and spread too far.
Someone mentioned the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in another post. I suspect that is the motivation behind the EULA change. With all those health insurance companies, doctors offices and hospitals screaming bloody murder about SP3 leaving them open for citation under HIPAA, they had to do this.
Certainly consumer outrage isn't the issue. That has never motivated MS before.
* Only real disappointment is the lack of an AGP slot. You're stuck with the onboard video.
You can put a PCI video card (suggestion: GeForce 4 MX 64MB PCI) in the first PCI slot and kill onboard Vampire Video.
* Wal-Mart promised a 10 GB hard drive, but it shipped with a 20 GB.
The Cajuns call that Lagniappe...a little something extra thrown in your bag, gratis.
* I got a no-OS box and installed Red Hat 9, so I can't speak about Lindows. But I can say RH9 installed easily with no driver problems.
Mandrake 9.1 would even do better, unless you really, really love GNOME. In which case RH9 will be just fine.
* 128 MB of RAM just isn't enough for RH9, X-Windows and a few apps. I spent $25 for another 128 MB (it takes PC133).
Good idea. I'd say give it even more RAM than that. It's dirt cheap now...
* The fan is a little louder than I'd like, but that's not surprising for a Duron-powered machine. But it's maybe 1.25 x as loud as your average PC, so it's not horrible.
Hell, if you can't hear the fans you might not be getting the cooling you need. I'm fine with a loud computer, actually.
There are PCI versions of the GeForce 4MX. Actually, they are quite good for machines like this that need a PCI video card to replace Vampire Video.
...when the Big Hollywood Movie Studio who is backing such a huge undertaking comes forward and says "yes, we are the ones who will be funding and distributing this movie."
Until then, there's ADV Films, which is a small niche video/DVD company out of Texas, there's Gainax which is a small niche animation studio out of Tokyo, and there's Weta. I don't think that adds up to the hundreds of millions making a live-action Eva movie that doesn't look like Godzilla vs. Rodan will require.
I want to hear which of the biggies will do it. News Corp/Fox? Paramount/Viacom? AOL Time Warner? Columbia/Tri-Star/Sony? MGM? Disney? Universal? Out with it, dammit! If there isn't a Big Frickin' Movie Studio in this picture, this is going to be in the Vapor Queue with Duke Nukem Forever and the rebirth of the Amiga.
I'm from Hollywood. I know these things.
Actually Konqui for Win32 would be the best gift that open source developers could give to the people using "down-level" Windows who will be out in the cold after IE 6.1.
Hell, I'd like to see a 98-Lite style setup where you can replace the IE rendering crap in Windows 9x with a trimmer, lighter, more standards-compliant khtml.dll. It would be nice to be able to do that in Windows 2000 too but after SP2 they added the wrong kind of Borg parts to allow it to happen. Too bad.
I'm thinking you're right.
I don't think that Apple has the numbers of developers necessary to create an Apple office suite from the ground up. I suppose an alternate possibility would be to beef up AppleWorks into an industrial-strength office suite, incorporating Keynote and re-assimilating FileMaker Pro.
However, Steve has opted to take a best-of-breed Open Source solution (KHTML *is* best-of-breed when compared to Gecko, the solid, time tested *BSD *is* best-of-breed compared to the still-evolving Linux) and build Apple software around it. MacOS X is the result of uniting NextStep and *BSD open-source code, Safari is the result of uniting the GPLed KHTML browser engine with in-house code.
An Open Office completely tuned to use Quartz, Quartz Extreme, Display PDF and all the other goodies available to MacOS X developers would rock the house. It would have full compatibility with MS Office from Office 97 to Office XP, something AppleWorks never had. And Apple could give back a nice polishing job that nobody at Sun has the time, inclination or will to do.
As far as an Outlook-killer goes...I could definitely see Apple taking Evolution and running with it in a similar fashion to what I am suggesting they might do with Open Office. They might even hire some of the people who worked on Entourage back to make it happen.
The take-home message here is this: Apple does not need Microsoft anymore. Apple is no longer the teetering, smoking hulk that needed Bill Gates' checkbook to shore up while Steve Jobs did all the things he had to do to revitalize the Apple brand. Apple is now very content to have its niche. The comparisons to BMW and other luxury car makes is very apropos. Neither BMW nor Mercedes nor Rolls Royce nor Jaguar nor Ferrari nor Acura nor Infiniti nor Lexus have a very large chunk of the automotive market. But all do just fine for themselves.
Bill Gates is going to have to just suck it down.
I'm definitely not a Ricer when it comes to my computers. I build solid, sane boxes. I don't overclock, I don't cut portholes in the side of my case to show off the guts, I don't do anything vaguely resembling the kind of atrocities Ricers inflict on perfectly good Hondas and Toyotas and Acuras.
I'm the kind of person who would buy a Toyota for basic transportation, never race it, buy it in a nondescript color, and just keep it tuned and maintained and drive it for literally decades. My husband and I have an '86 Chevy Nova, (basically a Toyota Corolla in all but badge) it's a nondescript beige, and it still gets the kind of gas mileage described on its showroom sticker.
Basically what I was objecting to was the fact that basically the "Great Quality" Chinese-made Fry's PCs are more like the Trabants and Yugos of the PC world. They are made with the cheapest possible parts and are doomed to fail spectacularly. All I am saying is that if you build something with a little better grade of parts, you have the possibility of something that will serve you longer and work better for you.
I mean, Mark got it...he responded to my post and understood exactly what I meant.
Just remember Mark...you get what you pay for. That Fry's "Great Quality" special will probably last for about 6 months, when something will undoubtedly fail. Maybe it will be the crappy Samsung HD. Maybe it will be something on the crappy PC Chips/Not-so-EliteGroup motherboard. Maybe it will be the bottom of the bargain barrel RAM. But something will happen. Let's hope, for the sake of your job, that there is nothing mission-critical on that "close to free" server.
It really doesn't take much more to make a sane x86 machine. Build the box yourself. Put in a nice, solid ASUS motherboard. Get a retail boxed chip, complete with chip fan. I don't know where to steer you as far as hard drives go, but maybe run Linux software RAID 5 with drives that still have 3-year warranties. That way if one of the drives fail you can reconstruct their contents using the parity info. Make sure the case you buy has a decent power supply...Antec, Sparkle and Powerman are good brands to look for. Get Crucial or Kingston or Mushnik or Corsair RAM. It's really not too much more expensive than the Fry's no-name crap special.
Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server. It will certainly cost you less than a Sun, that's for sure. Or an IBM, for that matter. Spending a little more money to save in the long term is a Very Good Thing (tm).
The .la domain has been on sale for two years now. And they have been charging that buttreamious $100/yr price for all that time. I wanted msgeek.la right when it was announced that the domains would be available. Then I found out the cost. :P
.la tld at Louisiana too. Like neworleans.la and hotjazz.la and cajun.la and mardigras.la and so on. I wonder if they gave up on that.
I got msgeek-la-ca.us instead. Not sure what I will do with it, but it's mine, all mine.
BTW they were marketing the
If you are not afraid of spoilers, here is a very good summation of the whole original series.
There was a great deal of fan consternation about the "anticlimax" nature of the series, so when Gainax got enough of a budget together, they did not one, but (again, beware spoilers) two movies to further explore the concepts originally put across in the series. (I don't know why I wound up with three Australian sites for this info...I'm not Australian.)
In any event, "Death and Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion" were a wrapup of the narrative in the series. However, no matter how neatly Evangelion creator Anno Hideaki had wrapped things up, the true meaning of the Evangelion universe continues to be a huge topic of debate. Sort of like how the true meaning of The Matrix movies are becoming a huge topic of debate...there, I brought this back on-topic.
Anyway, it has been announced that a live-action Evangelion movie (the series and the two movies were all animated) has gone into pre-production. Gainax, ADV Films and Peter Jackson's Weta Digital effects studio are all part of this effort. For a movie which will, by necessity, have to have quite an epic sweep, the resources of these three partners which have been revealed so far seem far too limited to execute the plans. Perhaps one of the Seven Families of the Movie Industry is a part of this plan. Perhaps more than one. But the big financing has yet to be revealed. So take this all with a grain of salt.
It was this possible live-action movie to which I was referring to. If they are true to the original series and the two animated movies, they will piss off a lot of religious people in all "three great monotheisms." Just like Matrix Reloaded seems to have done in Egypt.
Imagine what will happen when the live-action version of Neon Genesis Evangelion comes out. They play too fast-and-loose with biblical themes, angels trying to destroy instead of protect humanity, naked crucified angels in NERV's basement, etc. etc...
Certainly Egypt wouldn't cotton to such a thing. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Homeland Security Department bans it as an affront to "the Christian foundations of the United States."
Guess what, a PC manufacturer just did.
Are you now going to walk around saying "Gateway is teh gay" now? Because according to your logic, Gateway deserves the tag now.
OK, I know there have been recent bugs and 'sploits found. Guess what? I fired up Mandrake Update today, and fixed EVERYTHING. I check Mandrake Update every few days, read up on the patches it's offering me, then apply the ones I feel are of merit. Usually it's the whole lot of them.
Mandrake's update service works for ALL copies of Mandrake, whether downloaded from their FTP site or bought from MandrakeSoft or any third party that sells Mandrake. This is not the case with Red Hat's Up2Date. This is why I support Mandrake and recommend it to Linux newbies. It is EFFORTLESS to keep a Mandrake desktop patched, provided it's a sane desktop system in the first place. (no unnecessary daemons, etc.)
Actually Robert Englund's role as a "Commander Data"-like lizard person who joins the resistance was quite good and quite nuanced. The guy basically is the modern-day Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff...both actors were quite skilled and desperately wanted to break out of their typecasting.
The difference between Lugosi and Karloff is that Lugosi became a Heroin addict to soothe his frustration at his not being considered for anything other than horror roles. Karloff made peace with his horror stardom and died knowing he had literally millions of fans who loved him for his ability to make monsters multi-dimensional.
I don't know where Englund is in that continuum. I would like to see him do something other than Freddy Krueger and Freddy Krueger-like characters (Erik in a Phantom of the Opera remake, for instance) but alas, he's a horror star and horror is what he does. A quick look at IMDB shows that he's getting more work abroad (Italy, Croatia) than what he's getting here, which is basically grade-Z horror flicks every so often.
I'm 39 and I don't want to see that shit in my mailbox. I look forward to seeing some of these assholes shut down. There is a rule of thumb I have with email I send out...I don't write anything I wouldn't be uncomfortable writing on a postcard. If that crap was sent out as postcards the perpetrator would be tracked down and busted.
It is for these people that MacOS 9 was created.
Not MacOS X, mind you...there are just enough unixisms to allow a random luser to make a complete mess of it. MacOS 9 has no daemons running by default (ditch Web Sharing to make sure) and no way to remotely login unless you install third-party programs like VNC or RumpusFTP. (For godsake keep 'em away from P2P programs!)
Aside from the occasional Word Macro Virus (easily avoided by keeping Ma and Pa away from Office 2001 or Office98) and a few random worms like HK Autostart and Sevendust (Freeware proggies like WormScanner and Agax will get them) they are virus-free. I don't think even the Mac version of Lookout Excess is prone to the kind of trojan horses the Windows version is prone to.
Just find a used iMac (CRT kind, not LCD kind...they are going cheap on eBay) and if you're lucky, it will come with a MacOS "system restore" disk. Before you start up, buy a low-priced USB mouse or trackball to replace the ergonomic nightmare that is the "hockey puck" mouse. Boot the iMac with one of those puppies, open up Drive Setup, and initialize that HD. Then do a reinstall of the system. Put Eudora on it for mail, Mozilla for the web* (IE for Mac is a POS) and then put the machine behind a Linksys and have the Linksys handle the DHCP authentication for the cable modem. Don't activate the DHCP server in the Linksys, just give the iMac a static IP in the range of the Linksys and give it the Linksys' LAN IP as its gateway.
You do that, Bob's your uncle, and your parents can surf 'til the cows come home. And they won't come home with back doors, trojans or viruses.
*Even easier: AOHell BYO Access program. $10 over and above their cable bill each month, unless they are on Time Warner Cable and if memory serves me right it is included. A "Walled Garden" designed for n00bz.
...of Macintosh envy.
Well, most carpenters and handymen I know of are too poor for that, and certainly the Carpenter of Nazareth would be similarly tapped out. Most have aging light trucks or panel vans. What would Jesus drive? Probably something like this. (No, I don't think Mike Watt is God, but I think they jam together on occasion.)
There are also "Stargate" influenced characters in UT2K3 as it is. Look at some of the "Egyptian" skins.
I want to see that. If you have ever seen the "Daria" episode "The Daria Hunter" it could lend itself beautifully to a CTF game. Actually there could be a whole bunch of "Daria" related maps, all in various parts of Lawndale. You would play with various paintball-shooting guns and you would be "out" and "respawn" when hit by a ball of paint. Non-player "casualties" and "friendly fire" would be punished ala America's Army. Since one of the running gags about Daria Morgendorffer was that she was an enthusiastic player of First Person Shooters (one mentioned was called "Cannibal Fragfest" and another was called "Cyber-Kron") it would be great.
Too bad Viacom would prolly have kittens over that.
Oh yeah, shouts out to Clan B0rg, Santa Barbara, CA.
Yes, but does it have broom robots that chase you around the room, and does the DVD player hurl DVDs at you? It wouldn't be the Hotel Room of the Future without that! And does the muzak always play Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse?"
(note for the non-cartoon damaged, this is all a reference to two classic Warner Bros. shorts, one a remake of the other)
I beg to differ about early '90s Macs being closed. The LC series were designed to be easily opened and easily tweaked with. Just like the Apple][ machines they were designed to replace in academia. Undo one screw, flip up the two snap catches, then flip open the "pizza box" top. Voila.
They were also very beautifully designed. Sleek and low slung. Gorgeous. Unfortunately they were crippled machines up until the LCIII. But the LCIII, LCIII+ and the LC475 (aka the Quadra 610) were rockin' machines. Replace the 68lc040 in the LC475 with a real 68040, and you have a mean little LC indeed.
The big mistake made during this period was taking the old LC475 motherboard design and grafting it, Frankenstein-style, to a PPC 603 chip. Ugh! Nassssty Performaaaas! We hatesss! We hatesss!
Next week, Unreal Tournament 2K3 is supposed to be coming out for MacOS X. This is several months ahead of schedule. At Mac Gathering a couple of months ago, the best guesstimate for UT2K3 coming out for Mac was Christmas.
My G3 Blue-And-White doesn't have the cojones for it, alas...