I recently bought a PS2 because the used ones were selling for $99. $99 is easy to rationalize to my wife, because it just doesn't seem to be a lot of money (especially since she can easily spend $100 on a manicure, haircut, or new pair of shoes).
Of course, the hardware isn't the sticking point. it's the software. I feel a lot guiltier when I plunk down $50 for a game than when I plunk down $200 for a new video card or hard drive. It's one of the reasons I bought a PS2 -- I can buy used games for about $10 that I would never have gotten to play otherwise (Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid, SSX, Jak/Daxter). It's much harder to find older PC games at the same price point at a local store.
I run a web site (Help2Go), and someone once ripped off all of my content, saved them as PDF, slapped their name on the cover page, and tried to sell it as an e-book! Google had indexed the PDF, and she had forgotten to take my name off of one of the articles, so I found it inadvertantly when I googled myself. I eventually found her "book" on several e-book retailers!
Intensely pissed off, since I had placed all of my content under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, I tracked down the offender. Called her home, her parent's hopme, her sister's home. I also called the offices of each retailer and threatened a law suit. She finally emailed me and gave me a lame excuse before promising to take all the books of the websites. The retailers took the e-book down immediately after hanging up with me.
I was lucky -- she was in the US and I was able to find her phone number. If they were abroad, I might still be fighting this battle.
I run a site called Help2Go -- it's all tutorials and help for newbies, including a lot of web stuff.
Best of all, it's all Creative Commons licensed, so the articles won't disappear like Webmonkey's soon will.
That's good to know -- I'm also stuck at ~page 300. The story is SO DAMN SLOW. I was mildly interested by the Waterhouse story in Part I, but this Jack Shaftoe crap is extremely boring.
Great -- there goes High Heat baseball. The franchise has suffered in years past: 3DO had a single-minded focus on getting the product out the door, and then would abandon it. The user community would release all kinds of cool add-ons, such as stadiums, uniforms, etc., but we never got so much as a patch from 3DO.
Microsoft Baseball from the late 90s was OK for the time, but it's arcade style was worlds away from the true-to-life experience that HH provided. This is a sad day for baseball sims. I'm glad EA took a step in the right direction with this year's offering, but for me, now it's the only game in town.
I played the XBox version at my friend's house on Saturday, then went out and bought the PC version for myself on Sunday.
The XBox version's controls are a bit more intuitive. Also, you don't have to worry about choppiness. Strangely, I thought that the movie clips looked better on the XBox, too. However...
On the PC the in-game graphics look much better due to the higher resolutions (I play at 1024x768). I gave up on the mouse keyboard controls because it was much easier to button-mash with my Wingman Rumblepad. I've only played the first level (post office), but I am really enjoying the game. Sure, it's very easy in parts, and maybe the graphics aren't state-of-the-art, but isn't gameplay and fun more important?
This game is FUN. I absolutely love beating the crap out of people in and out of focus mode. It's an absolute blast, and the animations for the different moves are tremendous. As I said, there's some button mashing involved, at least until you get the feel for how to create combos. They should have included a training mission so you can learn all the moves (like Splinter Cell) instead of dropping you right in.
I have an AthlonXP 1600+, geForce4 ti4200, 384MB ram. I recommend it.
I'd love to see a modular case, whereby you could add components as you see fit while at the same time EXPANDING the case. Maybe it would use Firewire or USB2 internally, as well as PCI and IDE. With a sleek, modular design, you could make it look good, and you'd never run out of expansion slots again.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next *nix guy, but this makes sense to me. If you're going to push a single account/password strategy, you need to implement it yourself first.
If you are going to use Microsoft web services, you have to get used to.NET and Passport. For myself, I'll just continue to choose not to use any Microsoft web services.
I have a Sony C1VN Picturebook, and while I've been very happy with the machine itself, the power consumption is a constant source of problems for me. With the standard battery, I get about 90 minutes of use, with most of the power consumption settings set very low, i.e. dim screen, short lcd timeout, etc.
Sure, I could buy a quad battery, but they go for about $450, and they add significant bulk. The biggest reason for getting a Picturebook is the size factor -- bulking it up for a lot of money doesn't appeal to me.
Basically, I chalk it up to "what can I expect from such a small machine & battery", but my expectations from reading the literature put out by Sony and Transmeta were definitely much higher than what I got.
Caveat: when the machine is plugged in, it's the greatest little gadget in the world.
I too pay for every game I play, but I don't feel bad about downloading a warez version to try it out first. Simply put, I've been burned too many times.
I've been burned by games that were basically beta releases in disguise.
I've been burned by games that don't work on my hardware, or have horrific framerates.
I've been burned by spending $50, a not so small expenditure for a guy with a house payment and a family, and getting nothing usable in return.
Ever try to return a game to the store for something else? Sorry, pal.
And "tech-support" is often a very sorry excuse for help.
So I'll download the game, try it, and if it actually works and is usable, I'll go out and get it. Until game companies get their act together, this will continue, not just for me, but for everyone.
If they can guarantee that they'll give you a working product, one that you don't have to download a patch every week in order to get it to work, THEN the warez scene will start to disappear. Until then, I'll try before I buy. And when I buy, I'll download a crack to get rid of the copy protection.
The software companies keep the Warez guys alive.
Communities & Sweating
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's about the communities, not the cities. People drive less than a mile to go to the grocery store, mall, etc. All these new developments are basically built that way, at least here in Maryland. With a Segway, I can ride to the grocery store.
As for a bike, I find it hard to
a) carry a lot of packages -- a self propelled machine like the Segway could probably carry a lot more.
b) SWEAT! How can I ride to work on a bicycle, in a suit, and not be covered in sweat when I arrive?
I think Segway will have a profound impact in places like NYC (where I grew up) and in small communities built around a town center.
The reason that I've stuck with my PC is the feeling that if I bought a console, I'd be getting ripped off at every turn. It's like the razors vs. razor blades theorem that every business class teaches ad nauseum. I can get a console for $200-300 -- great! But then I'm stuck spending $60 on each additional game I want to play. That's where the console people make their momey, and that's where I'd feel like I was getting ripped off.
A PC requires a larger initial investment, but most people already have one for Internet access. For $300, you can add in: a GeForce 2 MX, two force feedback game pads, a high-end steering wheel, and a good FF joystick. You'd probably have some money left over for games, too!
The downside is that you have to deal with drivers, incompatibilities, patches, etc. The upside is that you have access to online play, *mods*, and patches that redefine the game, thereby adding many hours of gameplay to a game you already paid for.
I also find that the hard drive allows for deeper, more intense gaming experiences. Career mode is standard in PC games. Between broadband access and hard drives, I think that consoles are just playing catch-up right now.
Also, let's not forget an important point. If you ever spent money on a Dreamcast, Jaguar, Saturn, or 3DO system, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's NO chance that the PC will bust. 18 months ago, who would have thought that Dreamcast would be dead right now? Who's to say that in 18 months from now, we won't be joking about the great Microsoft X-failure?!
For these reasons, the PC is the best gaming machine available.
The problem is that as corporations merge, the web becomes more homogenous. For example, I used to frequent the ESPN.com site.
Initially it was espn.starwave.com. Then Disney bought it, and the "go" network was born, thus: espn.go.com. Somehow, MSN has now partnered with Disney, and it has become espn.msn.com, complete with an MSN banner at the top (much like Slashdot's OSDN banner, but much larger).
What happens when sites like ESPN block users, because MSN told them to? On Friday, I visited ESPN site and found a pop-up window stating that my browser (Mozilla0.9.5/Solaris) would not display the page correctly, even though it obviously displayed it perfectly. The worry is that Microsoft will section off a part of the web and make it Microsoft-only, just as it tried to separate Java into running only on Microsoft browsers/OSes.
The solution is to stop visiting these sites (after 5 years of daily ESPN visits, I now visit CNNSI instead), but the word must get out, or the future of the web will indeed be bleak as Berners-Lee mentioned.
You work for the federal government, in *their* lab, not yours. I live just a few miles away from NIH, and I personally am quite glad that they are instituting tough security measures.
If you worked for a corporation, you would most likely be searched in case you were trying to steal intellectual property. But in this case, you work for a government *at war*, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be. Downtown Washington DC is just a 10 minute drive from NIH, and people are dying from anthrax in DC. You being searched is a small price to pay for the increased security of my loved ones.
The browser wars were competing using MORE than just the W3C standards; Netscape and Microsoft were able to skew the standards through how accepted their proprietary features became.
MS and Netscape used all kinds of tags that would only work in their browser, and let's not forget JScript vs. Javascript/Livescript. By bundling their browser, MS BECAME the standard. And by bundling Windows Media Player, WMA will BECOME the standard -- make no mistake about it.
I am extremely happy with the Orinoco (Lucent) Residential Gateway. It's 11Mbs, 802.11b compliant, WiFi compliant, provides NAT, and has drivers for Win and Linux. I use 2 Orinoco Silver PCMCIA cards -- one in my Sony VAIO Picturebook (Linux and Win2K dual boot) and another plugged into a PCI adapter in my wife's eMachine (Win98).
When their Linux driver wouldn't compile with the newest pcmcia-cs package and kernel 2.4.2 (the driver was meant for 2.2.x), I emailed the generic email address listed on their web page. I was SHOCKED when I received a reply 12 hours later from an actual programmer (!) with a beta 2.4.x based driver attached.
It's an expensive solution, but it works great. Probably spent around $600 for the RG and the two cards. BUT: Nothing's better than surfing the web from a hammock in my backyard!
I moved to Washington DC from New York City in 1994 to attend college as an idealistic, enthusiastic political science major. It took a mere 18 months before I gave up on politics, having seen first hand how Washington operates. After being a voting zealot for my first 22 years on the planet, I did not vote in the 1996 elections. Why? Because my vote does not count.
There are two reasons for this:
1) The Stamp Act in 1765 brought about the issue of "No Taxation without Representation". It was the cornerstone idea of the American Revolution. Yet those of us who live in the American capital are not represented by a voting member in Congress. We have a non-voting "delegate" who has no real power to cause positive change for her constituents.
2) We have an electoral vote in Washington DC, so surely I can vote for president, right? Wrong. You see, I am a Republican, and Republicans make up 6% of the voting population of this city. Democrats consistently win not only the electoral vote, but all public offices as well. I cannot complain about the fairly held local elections: the majority should rule and I fully support that idea, even though the Democrats re-elected a convicted felon for mayor several times (Marion Barry). My complaint is with the electoral process in presidential elections that affords votes according to state, rather than according to person. One who lives in a hopelessly liberal or conservative state does not have any say in the election -- the outcomes of those states have been pre-determined.
I am almost hoping for Bush to win the popular vote, and Gore to win the electoral vote. I am hoping that the electoral college will come crashing down in this election's wake. Most citizens have forgotten completely about the electoral college since the day they learned about it in the fourth grade. The media barely helps, touting public opinion polls that do not reflect the true process -- the only polls that matter are within states that "count" -- those that are hedging on their vote.
Some of you who live in "battleground" states may be surprised to hear that I have not seen a *single* commercial for one presidential candidate or the other. After all, why should they spend money to convince undecided voters in a state whose outcome is already decided?
Maybe I shouldn't complain -- maybe I'm lucky that I don't have to see the dark side of these campaigns in sleazy television ads.
And maybe I shouldn't complain -- if Washington DC had a voting member in Congress, that vote would certainly belong to a Democrat, thereby undermining many of the programs I believe in as a Republican.
But I AM complaining, because this country was founded on fairness and equality, and those ideals have been lost in the political process. One voice, one vote.
By the way, I'm moving to Maryland next month.:)
For more info on Taxation without Representation, see the DC Votes site.
On my P2-350/256 MB RAM running RedHat 6.1, M16 uses 90% of my CPU time, even when minimized for long periods of time. It makes running anything else on my box a waste of time and patience.
That said, I LOVE M16's stability, feature-set, and look/feel. When they optimize this code, IE is a dead duck.
As I understand the law, and as was written on Slashdot when this suit was first announced, it seems that MP3.com DID in fact break the law. Only a consumer can make a copy of their music -- the fact that MP3.com was the one making the copies opened it up to this lawsuit.
I don't understand why they risked the future of their company (which was doing quite well and has one of the best domain names on the 'net) without thoroughly researching how this would affect them in the future. Heads are going to roll at MP3.com: their entire legal counsel team should be fired, not for losing the case, but for allowing the company to get in this mess in the first place.
Maybe if MP3.com has gotten themselves licensed by the recording companies first...
I work at a university, and we have hundreds of older PCs that we'd like to make useful. QNX runs brilliantly on these older machines, giving them years of new life. Unfortunately, because of the cost, we never seriously considered QNX. Instead, I spent a couple of weeks creating a secure Linux distro whose only function was web browsing.
With QNX now free, we can remove the hard drives from those old PCs and create an army of floppy-disk driven web devices. And spend our students' tuition money on a new Sun enterprise server for me!!!
I bought an Olympus C2020 last month and have been extremely happy with it. It takes pics at 1600x1200, has a 3x Optical Zoom, and has all the settings (aperture control, white balance, manual focus) that a real shutterbug (not a poser like me) would want in a camera.
It uses SmartMedia, which is a tiny plastic card with a smart chip on it. The camera only comes with an 8MB card, but I bought an additional 32MB card for less than $50. I also bought a USB SanDisk SmartMedia reader for $25.
All in all, you can't go wrong with this camera. It's small and light, and my Renewal rechargable batteries last for 100s of pictures. The price may be a bit high for some people, but I easily found some coupons for Accompany.com that gave me 20% off, lowering the price to under $500. A friend just recently bought the same camera from mobshop.com with a 20% off coupon. It also was under $500.
My phone company allows me to turn off "Anonymous" calls based on my CallerID service. However, most telemarketers' calls show up as "Unavailable" and are unaffected by the filter.
What I need is a smart phone: one that rings based on a programmable pattern. A high, loud ring if the call is from my Mom. A normal ring if it is from a known friend. A soft ring if it is from an identifiable party. No ring -- it goes straight to the answering machine if it is from "Anonymous", "Unavailable", or something else.
Are there any hacks out there that can use my modem and CallerID service to filter my calls based on these criteria? If there are, I would jump on it! My phone rings so often from telemarketers that my phone is quickly becoming an annoyance rather than a tool.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently bought a PS2 because the used ones were selling for $99. $99 is easy to rationalize to my wife, because it just doesn't seem to be a lot of money (especially since she can easily spend $100 on a manicure, haircut, or new pair of shoes).
Of course, the hardware isn't the sticking point. it's the software. I feel a lot guiltier when I plunk down $50 for a game than when I plunk down $200 for a new video card or hard drive. It's one of the reasons I bought a PS2 -- I can buy used games for about $10 that I would never have gotten to play otherwise (Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid, SSX, Jak/Daxter). It's much harder to find older PC games at the same price point at a local store.
I run a web site (Help2Go), and someone once ripped off all of my content, saved them as PDF, slapped their name on the cover page, and tried to sell it as an e-book! Google had indexed the PDF, and she had forgotten to take my name off of one of the articles, so I found it inadvertantly when I googled myself. I eventually found her "book" on several e-book retailers!
Intensely pissed off, since I had placed all of my content under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, I tracked down the offender. Called her home, her parent's hopme, her sister's home. I also called the offices of each retailer and threatened a law suit. She finally emailed me and gave me a lame excuse before promising to take all the books of the websites. The retailers took the e-book down immediately after hanging up with me.
I was lucky -- she was in the US and I was able to find her phone number. If they were abroad, I might still be fighting this battle.
Ditto here -- never buying from them again. This kind of attitude is disgraceful.
I run a site called Help2Go -- it's all tutorials and help for newbies, including a lot of web stuff.
Best of all, it's all Creative Commons licensed, so the articles won't disappear like Webmonkey's soon will.
http://www.help2go.com/
That's good to know -- I'm also stuck at ~page 300. The story is SO DAMN SLOW. I was mildly interested by the Waterhouse story in Part I, but this Jack Shaftoe crap is extremely boring.
Great -- there goes High Heat baseball. The franchise has suffered in years past: 3DO had a single-minded focus on getting the product out the door, and then would abandon it. The user community would release all kinds of cool add-ons, such as stadiums, uniforms, etc., but we never got so much as a patch from 3DO.
Microsoft Baseball from the late 90s was OK for the time, but it's arcade style was worlds away from the true-to-life experience that HH provided. This is a sad day for baseball sims. I'm glad EA took a step in the right direction with this year's offering, but for me, now it's the only game in town.
Excellent insightful post, Dan. Someone mod this up!
I played the XBox version at my friend's house on Saturday, then went out and bought the PC version for myself on Sunday.
The XBox version's controls are a bit more intuitive. Also, you don't have to worry about choppiness. Strangely, I thought that the movie clips looked better on the XBox, too. However...
On the PC the in-game graphics look much better due to the higher resolutions (I play at 1024x768). I gave up on the mouse keyboard controls because it was much easier to button-mash with my Wingman Rumblepad. I've only played the first level (post office), but I am really enjoying the game. Sure, it's very easy in parts, and maybe the graphics aren't state-of-the-art, but isn't gameplay and fun more important?
This game is FUN. I absolutely love beating the crap out of people in and out of focus mode. It's an absolute blast, and the animations for the different moves are tremendous. As I said, there's some button mashing involved, at least until you get the feel for how to create combos. They should have included a training mission so you can learn all the moves (like Splinter Cell) instead of dropping you right in.
I have an AthlonXP 1600+, geForce4 ti4200, 384MB ram. I recommend it.
I'd love to see a modular case, whereby you could add components as you see fit while at the same time EXPANDING the case. Maybe it would use Firewire or USB2 internally, as well as PCI and IDE. With a sleek, modular design, you could make it look good, and you'd never run out of expansion slots again.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next *nix guy, but this makes sense to me. If you're going to push a single account/password strategy, you need to implement it yourself first.
.NET and Passport. For myself, I'll just continue to choose not to use any Microsoft web services.
If you are going to use Microsoft web services, you have to get used to
I have a Sony C1VN Picturebook, and while I've been very happy with the machine itself, the power consumption is a constant source of problems for me. With the standard battery, I get about 90 minutes of use, with most of the power consumption settings set very low, i.e. dim screen, short lcd timeout, etc.
Sure, I could buy a quad battery, but they go for about $450, and they add significant bulk. The biggest reason for getting a Picturebook is the size factor -- bulking it up for a lot of money doesn't appeal to me.
Basically, I chalk it up to "what can I expect from such a small machine & battery", but my expectations from reading the literature put out by Sony and Transmeta were definitely much higher than what I got.
Caveat: when the machine is plugged in, it's the greatest little gadget in the world.
I too pay for every game I play, but I don't feel bad about downloading a warez version to try it out first. Simply put, I've been burned too many times.
I've been burned by games that were basically beta releases in disguise.
I've been burned by games that don't work on my hardware, or have horrific framerates.
I've been burned by spending $50, a not so small expenditure for a guy with a house payment and a family, and getting nothing usable in return.
Ever try to return a game to the store for something else? Sorry, pal.
And "tech-support" is often a very sorry excuse for help.
So I'll download the game, try it, and if it actually works and is usable, I'll go out and get it. Until game companies get their act together, this will continue, not just for me, but for everyone.
If they can guarantee that they'll give you a working product, one that you don't have to download a patch every week in order to get it to work, THEN the warez scene will start to disappear. Until then, I'll try before I buy. And when I buy, I'll download a crack to get rid of the copy protection.
The software companies keep the Warez guys alive.
It's about the communities, not the cities. People drive less than a mile to go to the grocery store, mall, etc. All these new developments are basically built that way, at least here in Maryland. With a Segway, I can ride to the grocery store.
As for a bike, I find it hard to
a) carry a lot of packages -- a self propelled machine like the Segway could probably carry a lot more.
b) SWEAT! How can I ride to work on a bicycle, in a suit, and not be covered in sweat when I arrive?
I think Segway will have a profound impact in places like NYC (where I grew up) and in small communities built around a town center.
The reason that I've stuck with my PC is the feeling that if I bought a console, I'd be getting ripped off at every turn. It's like the razors vs. razor blades theorem that every business class teaches ad nauseum. I can get a console for $200-300 -- great! But then I'm stuck spending $60 on each additional game I want to play. That's where the console people make their momey, and that's where I'd feel like I was getting ripped off.
A PC requires a larger initial investment, but most people already have one for Internet access. For $300, you can add in: a GeForce 2 MX, two force feedback game pads, a high-end steering wheel, and a good FF joystick. You'd probably have some money left over for games, too!
The downside is that you have to deal with drivers, incompatibilities, patches, etc. The upside is that you have access to online play, *mods*, and patches that redefine the game, thereby adding many hours of gameplay to a game you already paid for.
I also find that the hard drive allows for deeper, more intense gaming experiences. Career mode is standard in PC games. Between broadband access and hard drives, I think that consoles are just playing catch-up right now.
Also, let's not forget an important point. If you ever spent money on a Dreamcast, Jaguar, Saturn, or 3DO system, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's NO chance that the PC will bust. 18 months ago, who would have thought that Dreamcast would be dead right now? Who's to say that in 18 months from now, we won't be joking about the great Microsoft X-failure?!
For these reasons, the PC is the best gaming machine available.
Initially it was espn.starwave.com. Then Disney bought it, and the "go" network was born, thus: espn.go.com. Somehow, MSN has now partnered with Disney, and it has become espn.msn.com, complete with an MSN banner at the top (much like Slashdot's OSDN banner, but much larger).
What happens when sites like ESPN block users, because MSN told them to? On Friday, I visited ESPN site and found a pop-up window stating that my browser (Mozilla0.9.5/Solaris) would not display the page correctly, even though it obviously displayed it perfectly. The worry is that Microsoft will section off a part of the web and make it Microsoft-only, just as it tried to separate Java into running only on Microsoft browsers/OSes.
The solution is to stop visiting these sites (after 5 years of daily ESPN visits, I now visit CNNSI instead), but the word must get out, or the future of the web will indeed be bleak as Berners-Lee mentioned.
If you worked for a corporation, you would most likely be searched in case you were trying to steal intellectual property. But in this case, you work for a government *at war*, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be. Downtown Washington DC is just a 10 minute drive from NIH, and people are dying from anthrax in DC. You being searched is a small price to pay for the increased security of my loved ones.
MS and Netscape used all kinds of tags that would only work in their browser, and let's not forget JScript vs. Javascript/Livescript. By bundling their browser, MS BECAME the standard. And by bundling Windows Media Player, WMA will BECOME the standard -- make no mistake about it.
When their Linux driver wouldn't compile with the newest pcmcia-cs package and kernel 2.4.2 (the driver was meant for 2.2.x), I emailed the generic email address listed on their web page. I was SHOCKED when I received a reply 12 hours later from an actual programmer (!) with a beta 2.4.x based driver attached.
It's an expensive solution, but it works great. Probably spent around $600 for the RG and the two cards. BUT: Nothing's better than surfing the web from a hammock in my backyard!
After being a voting zealot for my first 22 years on the planet, I did not vote in the 1996 elections. Why? Because my vote does not count.
There are two reasons for this:
1) The Stamp Act in 1765 brought about the issue of "No Taxation without Representation". It was the cornerstone idea of the American Revolution. Yet those of us who live in the American capital are not represented by a voting member in Congress. We have a non-voting "delegate" who has no real power to cause positive change for her constituents.
2) We have an electoral vote in Washington DC, so surely I can vote for president, right? Wrong. You see, I am a Republican, and Republicans make up 6% of the voting population of this city. Democrats consistently win not only the electoral vote, but all public offices as well. I cannot complain about the fairly held local elections: the majority should rule and I fully support that idea, even though the Democrats re-elected a convicted felon for mayor several times (Marion Barry). My complaint is with the electoral process in presidential elections that affords votes according to state, rather than according to person. One who lives in a hopelessly liberal or conservative state does not have any say in the election -- the outcomes of those states have been pre-determined.
I am almost hoping for Bush to win the popular vote, and Gore to win the electoral vote. I am hoping that the electoral college will come crashing down in this election's wake. Most citizens have forgotten completely about the electoral college since the day they learned about it in the fourth grade. The media barely helps, touting public opinion polls that do not reflect the true process -- the only polls that matter are within states that "count" -- those that are hedging on their vote.
Some of you who live in "battleground" states may be surprised to hear that I have not seen a *single* commercial for one presidential candidate or the other. After all, why should they spend money to convince undecided voters in a state whose outcome is already decided?
Maybe I shouldn't complain -- maybe I'm lucky that I don't have to see the dark side of these campaigns in sleazy television ads.
And maybe I shouldn't complain -- if Washington DC had a voting member in Congress, that vote would certainly belong to a Democrat, thereby undermining many of the programs I believe in as a Republican.
But I AM complaining, because this country was founded on fairness and equality, and those ideals have been lost in the political process. One voice, one vote.
By the way, I'm moving to Maryland next month. :)
For more info on Taxation without Representation, see the DC Votes site.
On my P2-350/256 MB RAM running RedHat 6.1, M16 uses 90% of my CPU time, even when minimized for long periods of time. It makes running anything else on my box a waste of time and patience.
That said, I LOVE M16's stability, feature-set, and look/feel. When they optimize this code, IE is a dead duck.
I don't understand why they risked the future of their company (which was doing quite well and has one of the best domain names on the 'net) without thoroughly researching how this would affect them in the future. Heads are going to roll at MP3.com: their entire legal counsel team should be fired, not for losing the case, but for allowing the company to get in this mess in the first place.
Maybe if MP3.com has gotten themselves licensed by the recording companies first...
I work at a university, and we have hundreds of older PCs that we'd like to make useful. QNX runs brilliantly on these older machines, giving them years of new life. Unfortunately, because of the cost, we never seriously considered QNX. Instead, I spent a couple of weeks creating a secure Linux distro whose only function was web browsing.
With QNX now free, we can remove the hard drives from those old PCs and create an army of floppy-disk driven web devices. And spend our students' tuition money on a new Sun enterprise server for me!!!
It uses SmartMedia, which is a tiny plastic card with a smart chip on it. The camera only comes with an 8MB card, but I bought an additional 32MB card for less than $50. I also bought a USB SanDisk SmartMedia reader for $25.
All in all, you can't go wrong with this camera. It's small and light, and my Renewal rechargable batteries last for 100s of pictures. The price may be a bit high for some people, but I easily found some coupons for Accompany.com that gave me 20% off, lowering the price to under $500. A friend just recently bought the same camera from mobshop.com with a 20% off coupon. It also was under $500.
Olympus C2020 Zoom Page
C Net Review
My phone company allows me to turn off "Anonymous" calls based on my CallerID service. However, most telemarketers' calls show up as "Unavailable" and are unaffected by the filter.
What I need is a smart phone: one that rings based on a programmable pattern.
A high, loud ring if the call is from my Mom.
A normal ring if it is from a known friend.
A soft ring if it is from an identifiable party.
No ring -- it goes straight to the answering machine if it is from "Anonymous", "Unavailable", or something else.
Are there any hacks out there that can use my modem and CallerID service to filter my calls based on these criteria? If there are, I would jump on it! My phone rings so often from telemarketers that my phone is quickly becoming an annoyance rather than a tool.