It was 1979.
What a great trashy show! That was the era of great trashy TV. You had (of course) Battlestar Galactica and Land of the Lost and
Ark II
and (my all-time favorite since Race Bannon,
although he may have been Dr. Benton Quest's
gay lover --
not that there's anything wrong with that -- kicked major outer-space spider ass with an
M1 garand at the drop of a hat) Johnny Quest. And not that new crap they shovel down the Nintendo generation's throats, either. They can't screw with my childhood. The real Johnny Quest had bongos and snakes and crocodiles released by madmen and.50 cal machine guns on the back of Jeeps godammit. When you heard the "Caravan" theme song, you felt like action. That new shit just makes you want to buy a toy for your kid so he'll shut up already.
Damn. Now you've made me all nostalgic. Anyone here remember "World Beyond" in Phoenix, AZ in the summers on Saturday morning? They had great trashy sci-fi movies and a ZZ Top guitar riff for intro music? Anyone remember Edmus Scary? Had AC/DC's "Back in Black" for a doorbell?
Damn again. Sometimes I miss being a kid. Then I remember how badly 9th grade sucked and I get over it.
I'm a card-carrying Libertarian and pretty much despise Bush as much as I despised Clinton, but even that "buy the President" crack was a little much for me. As if Microsoft was ever in any danger whatsoever from any government agency or lawsuit. Even if they could "buy themselves a President", they wouldn't have to.
Some people just need a soapbox to stand on I guess. I'm betting we'll hear whining about the Bush/Gore election for many years to come...
-B
Thanks, man! I'm glad you liked it (and in spite of my spelling errors; I deeply cut my right index finger with my wife's new ceramic knife Saturday night so typing as fast as I think can be hard). I'm just trying to help the young ones out -- at the risk of sounding like a badly photocopied faxed joke pinned to the wall of some old guy's bait shop. But everyone can relate top fishing, and I think the allegory holds up. I know I sure could have thrown a few back.
That said, I'm not nearly as much fisherman as I want to be (grew up in Phoenix, AZ for cryin' out loud) but living near the ocean has got me hooked. No pun intended, mind you. Yes, if Southern California is good for anything it's paintball and fishing. They're both equally good for completely different reasons. I just couldn't think of a way to relate women to paintball. Not without delving into the obvious ball/splatter material. This is a family site, after all.
Well, now... that would depend on what you dream about, wouldn't it? If you fancy a single woman who always wished she could run strace on life's problems and has a geek code, then I'd wager you'd probably find someone to your liking. If your tastes run more towards the bottle blond, lipstick lizard, clothes horse types, then I'd think a mall would be a better bet.
But while I've got you, how about a little piece of free, metaphorical advice from a old fogey: finding women is like fishing. That'sa ll you have to remember. Sounds silly, but it's very true if you examine it for a minute. You don't go fishing with a pole if you want shrimp, and a net won't get you many marlin. And while there are a lot of fish in the sea, they're pretty much concentrated in certain areas. Identifying and then placing yourself in those areas is a primary goal. You'll do better on the coast near the mouth of a river than 800 miles out over deep water maybe. And you need bait to match the fish in your area. You most certainly aren't going to catch cod with balls-o-fire.
Even still, just being where the most fish are is only half the battle. You have to remember that the volume of water to fish is enourmous. So you have to improve your your odds of hauling in the fish you want by catching lots of fish and only keeping the one(s) you want. Catch-and-release is alive in love as in fishing, trust me. This means you have better chances of hooking that lunker if you are the only boat on the water or if you can fool the fish by thinking you're only boat on the water, say by putting more/flashier/smellier bait in the water. Chum sometimes works, but it also attracts fish you don't want; too much smelt and barracuda and not enough calico bass makes for bad fishing. You also have to be careful because other boats can run off the fish, or into you even. The minute you tangle your lines with those from another guy's boat is the minute you look real long and hard at the fish on the hook. You probably don't want it.
Anyway, I could go on and on but you get the idea:
Figure out what kind of fish you want
Get the right kind of bait
Get out there where the fish are
Get there early so your alone
Hook as many as you can while only keeping the good ones
I know what the definition of "ectomorphic" is -- that's why I used the word. I intended to put a comma in between "skinny" and "ectomorphic" but it didn't make it in there for some reason. If I had known about the scrutiny paid to my post, I'd have proofread more carefully.
What about us skinny ectomorphic geeks? I came across his site a couple months ago, and the belt was what almost made me buy saber. Thne my wife came in and saw what was on my monitor. That was the end of that.
It correlates exactly with the increase of IE's functionality and the stagnation of Netscape's.
Correlation doesn't prove causation. The number of people with personal computers -- and therefore the number of people getting online -- also increased during this time. Are you saying that these new Internet users surveyed their browsing options and picked MSIE because it had a greater feature set or was more robust? That's ludicrous.
I will grant that a number of Netscape users migrated to MSIE as it matured. This is only natural. But I think it's important to realize that when one talks about Netscape's dominant market share in the early- or mid-nineties, the absolute number of users was comparatively tiny in relation to the number of overall users towards the end of the decade. Even if a significant portion of Netscape users didn't switch to MSIE, Netscape's market share -- when expressed as a percentage -- would have dramatically decreased.
My point was this: The bundling of the browser with the OS played a significant role in it's increasing popularity. That doesn't discount a better feature set as playing a part of it, albeit a relatively small one.
-B
Should? Sure. Would? Not a chance in hell.
on
Ethical Obligations
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sorry but this is not an ethical dilemma - You should always disclose to the customers that you perceive a theft to have taken place.
...
Also, if everybody knows about an insecurity then the company will HAVE to take remedial action.
That magic word "should". I should floss more often. I also should get on the treadmill (and off the PC) more often. I should do the dishes every night, should save more money for retirement, should take classes to finish my cert, should thank a veteran on Veteran's Day, should clean my garage, should mail Dad a gift, and should eat out less. A perfect world would be a busy world, to be sure.
That said, there's about a 1 in 6.02x10^23 chance that corporations will voluntarily disclose theft of sensitive data. If everyone knows about Company A's insecurity, the customers will go to Company B which doesn't disclose such information. Press releases are sent out about getting pantsed, competitors create disparaging ads, customers leave, investors get nervous, stock prices drop. And then companies learn it pays to keep your mouth shut.
In fact, I'd wager a company is more likely to pay other people to keep their mouths shut as well than it is to be open and honest and forthcoming. Remember, a public company has one -- and only one -- duty: increase or maintain shareholder value. If they don't do that, then the board can be sued, the chairman ousted, etc, etc. Yeah, I'd bet that not getting thrown off the board is worth some hush-up money in the right places. If I were The Chairman, for instance, I'd make damn sure my sysadmins and IT group had fairly hefty NDAs/non-competes as well as hefty bonuses for "resolving" security issues in a discreet way.
Here's a hypothetical example: Datek gets broken into every once in a great while, has an insecure setup, whatever. Confidential data gets lost or intercepted easily maybe, who knows. But it decides to be honest with everyone. It gets a web page going of all the recent compromises, sends email to people whose info was pinched, fixes the problems via the aforementioned remedial actions. E*trade keeps quiet, Datek starts looking sloppy and has a "history" of being insecure, E*trade gets more business even if they don't decide to smear Datek. Datek is soon a fading memory with secure business systems.
Disabuse yourself of the notion that you will know who got what and when. It is not in a company's best interest to let you know your privacy and financial security was compromised, no matter how much grandstanding they do over security and trust. Just don't use a Visa/Mastercard debit card or your SSN online and everything will be fine.
If you think that there's a correlation between MSIE's quality and its popularity increasing over time, you're deluding yourself. MSIE got popular because MS said "Make everything we do exist in the context of the Internet." Shortly thereafter, a TCP/IP stack was shoehorned into an operating system, some Spyglass code was licensed, Word could save HTML docs, Outlook could send mail, FrontPage was cabbaged together, and PWS/IIS was foisted upon an unsuspecting public.
As the number of people getting computers rose, so did the number of MSIE users. They saw an icon that said "Internet", they clicked, the modem dialed and they were placing orders in Beanie Baby auctions and finding naked pictures of David Hasselhoff in short order. But quality had nothing to do with it. They could have been running batch files which were telnetting to port 80 and piping to more for all their web browsing -- most of them wouldn't have known any better nor cared one way or the other.
MSIE was a truly horrible browser for a long time. In many ways it still is (holy wars aside, I doubt that merely viewing web pages with a browser besides MSIE will get you infected with the trojan du mois). It could have been the zenith or the nadir of browser technology and it still would have been just as popular.
Anyway, long story short: Don't attribute to thoughtful engineering and careful testing that which can be adequately explained by anti-competitive acts of market aggression in search of an abusive monopoly.
...far more sheltered from the types of virii that affect your average Microsoft OS
That's a lot of i's for the end of a word that looks a lot like
cactus
or
octopus
or
rebus or syllabus
in it's singular form. Oddly enough, like those others, the plural of virus doesn't have all those i's at the end. It's just plain "viruses", man.
I could see where it might be "viri", maybe; catci and octopi both set that precedent. But not "virii". That's just nasty. Can you imagine someone using "rebii" or "cactii"? Or maybe even "trojii" and "worii", while we're adding i's to everything that can infect your PC.
Anyway, I don't mean to harp on you, necessarily. It's just that "virii" is the literary equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. I'm not the only one with this hangup either, although I have mixed feelings about being in the same boat as Tom Christiansen on any issue...
I can archive their program and all of the pictures I download and use it forever, even if they disappear later down the road. The same should apply to music.
Like the title says. Forever is a long time. Got any pre-System7 Mac software laying around? Tried to run it recently? I have more than a little old software from my DOS days that I would have a hard time running without jumping through hoops. However, I have old data from back then which is easy to look at (if I cared to).
I get your point, and it's a good one, but why should I have to tote a binary around with my data? Wouldn't you rather have all those Webshots images in TIFF (or whatever) so that when you want to print five years from now you can? Who knows if their software will work on Windows2008, with the printer driver you have, etc. It's orders of magnitude more convenient/elegant/etc to have data which requires no special software. I'd almost say it's a requirement.
Here's a real-world example: I had to deal with an old DOS 6.22 era Clarion-based database software installation last year. They were upgrading (because of 2K bugs, oddly enough) to Windows 2000. They got Windows installed, but the old DB software wouldn't run under Win2K. Fine, they said, just get our data out of the old database and into the new one. Guess what? No tool to do that. No way to know what their file format was, either, so forget abotu writing a filter. What are they doing? They are running the old software on a Windows 3.11 machine and the new stuff on their Win2K box. They figure it'll be a couple years before all their customers have been serviced and are integrated into their new system. Then they'll no longer need their old data files -- and the proprietary viewer needed to get at their old data.
No, I think I'll take data -- especially if I purchase it -- as independant from any specific binaries (and their operating systems) as possible, thank you very much. I'll decide what vewier I need.
And do you know what? This will flop. Terribly. Why? Because the same people who have been shouting that they'll pay for music will, in the end, not pay for music.
You're completely, 100% wrong. Yeah, it will flop, but not because people won't pay. It's silly to assume people don't pay for music. People pay for music all the time. How else do you think the recording industry stays in business? No, piracy is most certainly not why this will fail. It will fail because the suits misunderstand their thetarget audience for this service.
I have ~18GB of MP3 files. They are all, to the last file, arranged in complete albums, with proper ID3 tags for each file. Why? Because I bought the CDs and then ripped and encoded them myself. Napster was useless. You got iffy quality, screwy naming conventions, weird ID3 tags (if you got them at all), and the files sometimes (mostly) had defects. Even if I didn't want to pay, I'd still pay rather than listen to the crap you get off Napster (or Kaazaa -- same problems there).
I require two things for digital music: The complete album in high bit-rate MP3 format. I do not want single songs. I do not want proprietary (read: non-MP3 or non-OGG) formats with built-in "digital rights management". I do not want to "burn" anything. Why the heck would I burn a Liquid Audio (whatever the hell that is) on to a CD-R? I want the music on my fileserver where it belongs. Where my AudioTron downstairs and my workstation upstairs can get to them. Where I can stream them from work. I might even put them on a portable MP3 player, but last time I checked the portables didn't support "burning" or formats besides MP3.
I'd love the chance to pay $10 for a complete album. As long as it's in MP3 format at a decent bit-rate. But this "service" can't give me that and therefore is completely useless. It will fail because they are going about it all wrong -- not because people don't want cheap music.
And in case you need backward compatibility, I would be very surprised if you can't import a "perl5" module to get back to something more similar to perl5 syntax and semantics.
For what I've read in the past, it has always been the plan to ensure backward compatibility by defaulting to parsing Perl5-style syntax. Said another way, one must explicitly specify that a program is Perl6. This is a good thing, and a feature I'm counting on. There's quite a bit about Perl6 I'll probably not use very much. All I really need Perl for is a glue language. In fact, if I were to replace some chomp()'s with chop()'s most everything I've ever written will run under Perl4. I'm not quite as l33t as some although anyone can read my code. Needless to say, I don't post to perlmonks.org very much.:-)
I don't think Wall will make everyone go back and re-write old code. That would be a grievous mistake.
(Note: I haven't read the latest Apocalypse because perl.com seems to not be responding. If Wall has said anything to the contrary, then things have changed from what I've read in the past.)
For all the supposed, self-described "trolls" one sees here (the people who think a "troll" is a little man under a bridge are especially amusing, and the simpletons who repetitively paste in inane garbage are boorishly amusing at times, but the fishing references are really the best), yours was quite a good one.
The UID isn't quite high enough to really fool people but it's close enough given the +1 posting karmic bonus, which shows a sense of patience and forbearance. However, the AOL reference almost spoiled it as too obvious, and the post could have been longer. A link to a page at http://*.aol.com/* which explains "netiquette" would have been especially helpful in mitigating the obvious AOL reference and certainly would have set you apart from the -1 riff-raff. Using quotes or other HTML 0.9 markup to denote the quoted material would have also increased your overall score slightly as well. In the end, the clincher was the replies you received, which are part and parcel to any good troll.
I give it a 7.3 out of 10 post-Siegel & Canter points. Well done, sir!
WineX does run really well. I've been a subscriber for a while now, and it shows real promise. But be warned: if you have a SCSI CD drive, you will have problems, and almost certainly will not be able to play many newwer games. The latest version claims to support SCSCI drives better than the previous version (ie, lack of support for SCSI drives was a known problem), but I've had no better results with it than any other release.
I have a system which is purely SCSI (U2W/lvd, in fact). Both of my disc drives are made by Plextor -- hardly unknown drives -- and are over two and a half years old. They are well supported by anybody's standards. Yet neither will work with WineX. I get errors with CD protection schemes, errors trying to read the drives, errors in the games saying the disc can't be found, etc. This is with my Plextor CD-R and CD-ROM drives. I've even tried mounting ISO images of the game CDs via the loopback with no luck.
If you have IDE CD drives, then feel free to get a subscription and/or download WineX. If you have a SCSI system then you shouldn't bother with WineX -- unless you get a subscription and then vote for SCSI support. Otherwise just dual boot into Windows (or forego games). IMO, the lack of support for SCSI systems is enough to make me wish I hadn't subscribed (or had been able to find the issue mentioned somewhere on the Transgaming site last October when I signed up).
You make many good points with which I agree completely. Very nice.
Thong/bikini models aren't my taste (by a long shot), but I would hardly find them outright offensive. Indeed, most common decency laws state that pornography and indecency are based completely on the morals and judgement of the community. Given the goatse.cx that has typically proliferated here, I think one would be hard pressed to argue that an "average"/. reader would be offended by images of women in small bathing suits.
Even if I don't have to agree with the site author's taste in pictures -- swimsuit or otherwise -- which he chooses to put on his site, I most certainly do have to agree with his right to put those pictures there.
People get worked up (no pun intended) over the strangest things...
Linux support for most video cards doesn't come from the manufacturer, it comes from people who look at a review, really like the sound of the card, notice there's no linux support, and start working on fixing it.
You make an interesting point. I suppose I live in a dream world where hardware vendors realize that there's more than one OS. Instead I'm just a troll in a/. world.:-) Quite honestly, I just don't have the wherewithall to write a driver for a new video chipset -- I'm at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer. I don't feel too badly about it, though, since I can't make silicon. So I can't give a new type of ASIC or chipset back to the community either.
I rely on hardware vendors for a lot of things I can't or won't do myself. Did I write a USB driver for the Palm m505 I bought that came with a USB cradle? No, I just paid for a serial cable after reading a review of the new Palms from a geek site. That review specifically mentioned that if you want to sync up with Linux, you have to get the serial cradle since Palm won't release their USB specs on the m5xx series.
I guess if I have to google for a driver for this new chipset, then everyone else can too. I still think Dan could have thrown that info into his review, since he knew he would submit it himself to Slashdot. Maybe I got the feeling that he needs the page views/new visitors and finally found the "geekiest" hardware yet to review. I like Dan and his site, and I read him a lot, but the self-submission seemed really off without at least mentioning Linux. Maybe in that dream world I live in, Slashdot still has more OSS guys than not.
Also, SIS are one of the few companies that have actually provided their own linux drivers in the past, so there's no reason to believe they won't now.
Especially when the drivers section of the Xabre website doesn't even have Windows drivers there yet.
And this I didn't know. I'll definitely check back (or get notified when an MD5 sum of that page changes) in that case.
And as a matter of fact, every modern video card will work with linux and X via the VESA standards (though admittedly the performance won't be as good as a native driver)
3D? If a video card can't do 3D reasonably well, it won't succeed (personal computers in the home, no not embedded, etc). Since I need 3D, I need a driver.
And BTW, thanks for you post, mabinogi. If I hadn't commented in this story, I would have moderated it up as insightful. 'Course, I wouldn't have made a comment for you to reply to, so the point is somewhat moot...:-) But I learned something and it was good to rationally discuss things (isn't it sad that rational conversation is typically the exception to the norm?).
I read dansdata.com all the time and I like his site; it's one of the sites I check every few days. Dan's an enjoying read, and his heatsink reviews are second to none, IMHO. I even bought a remote control tank based on his review. But this review is incomplete.
Whenever I read a hardware review, I hit ctrl+f, type in "linux" and then hit enter -- first thing. If I see it jump down the page, I read the whole thing. If not, I hit spacebar to make the "not found" dialog go away and carry on with what I was doing. I can't buy hardware that doesn't support Linux, and so I have no time to read about hardware rewviews which only mention Windows. Would a hardcore Windows user care about a review of an iPod? Unless it mentioned something about the Win32 hacks, I doubt it. In fact, I could see some people actually feeling challenged if the review said "the iPod is Apple-only, but there are ways to get it running under Windows, although not for the faint of heart". Or whatever. I haven't read any iPod reviews, so I'm just guessing.
The thing might make tea and toast for me before I get up in the morning, but unless it can run under Linux, it's of zero use to me (as well as quite a few others here, I'd suspect). Normally, I'd have just gone about my business, and chalked the review up to yet another that doesn't mention Linux, which is no big deal at all. But since Dan was pimping his site on/., Linux (and *BSD, come to think of it) should have been mentioned. Lots of people here (40%?) run Windows, sure, but there ought to be a rule that when you self-submit a review you've done to Slashdot, you have to throw the other 60% of us a bone and at least see if you can dual boot or something. Win32 users can get information in hundreds of places. Users of alternative operating systems come here.
In fact I've got two applications and I need to finish writing up - which I wouldn't be doing unless I was *convinced* this was the only way to do things in the short term, and that generic GPL use would be granted
First off: I trust you, Alan, if for no other reason than you still have the bullocks to post here. Call me a lemming, but if you're down with the patent thing, then I'm fine too. I don't like patents, yet I have my name on 17 pending patent applications. I'm not sure they'll pass muster, and I'm not sure I'll care either way. They were filed a while ago, when I worked for a very pro-IP company.
Having said that, it *is* a little weird that Red Hat is patenting stuff. The suits want CYA, the lawyers want accountability, but the guys that wrote the stuff you distribute don't like patents. I didn't either, until amazon.com decided they could patent my finger acting upon a microswitch in the mouse on my desktop, then I realized that everyone had better patent whatever they can before the unscrupulous money weasels got their act together. We're well into the 3rd act.
IM(V)HO, patents aren't that great unless you're on the right end of the licensing agreement and I wish we didn't have to have them all. But we need to have them, if only to keep the bottom feeders of the world from reinventing the tux wheel and then patenting it out of existence. If I invent some novel "Method and Apparatus for the Extraction of Novel Nutrients from Common Playground Sand..." and then GPL/BSD/give-it-to-charity, can someone then patent a slightly reworked version and sue me for doing OSS work? Is that the precedence under which the license I pick wants to be tested? So, completely non-hypothetically, is Red Hat taking the so-called pre-emptive strike here?
I'm hoping -- as a very long time RHAT user, and a stockholder as long as there's been stock to hold -- that you guys will use some clout and cash to take out a patent or fourteen for the "good guys", as nasty as the conept sounds. If you have a claim to something novel, than have at it, I say, as long as you give back the key bits to the world. If you don't, then someone else will just patent it and hold onto/license it. So what sort of use to regular humans will be granted with the rights given RHAT by the USPTO? Does your company have a policy for this sort of thing?
I don't mean to grill you, but it *is* weird. Maybe I should think about patenting the process by which an OSS, for-profit company patents new ideas in order to give back to the world by protecting those ideas...:-)
Oh crap. I don't have the time or the money to get into something else. But maybe I can give up/., and pawn some stuff--paintball sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.
It's very fun, and very addictive. Even if I were predisposed to, I could never do drugs because I can't afford them after paying for paintball stuff. It's athletic crack. But so is golf or tennis for some folks. It takes all kinds. But if you like Quake/FPS games and you play paintball once, then you're in serious trouble.
So if I wanted to give it a shot, would you recommend I should get my own gun or use a rental? It sounds like rentals are annoyingly inaccurate, which I'm sure would frustrate me, but I don't want to make a large purchase on something I might only use a couple of times. Are there any entry-level guns that are reliable and accurate? Are places likely to rent these guns?
If you want to try the game, then use a rental the first time or four. They aren't that great, but if you don't like the game they aren't a commitment. If you play at a place that has a lot of rental customers (look for places that advertise at churches, have father/son days, etc.) then you should be fine. The first game is the worst (and most exciting). You have a lot to worry about then, and having a rental gun which can be dropped, mangled, lost, folded, spindled, etc removes a whole set of worries out of your mind and lets you concetrate on the game.
Many fields have several "classes" of guns that you can rent. Thebottom of th rbarrel are the ones that probably have bent barrels. They cost (new, like if you bought one) about $35. You get what you pay for. If you go with a fraternity or church or your dept at work or whatever and everyone gets one of these, then it's all good fun. Having a "race gun" when everyone else has a crappy rental isn't going to be much fun for you or the guy you shoot. Now, if you go out with agroup and you decide to pay the extra $25 or whatever to upgrade to a better gun, then you're The Man and nobody can give you grief because they are just cheap at that point. So you'll see like three classes of rentals: the normal cheapos, the middle types (which aren't much better than cheapos), and the good ones. They good ones are typically fairly decent guns. They see some wear, but they are well made and can handle it. Look for names like Spyder and Tippman and Pirahna; any of those should be fine. My first marker was a Spyder TL+, which I see as a rental quite often. I had a non-stock barrel, but it was essentialy the same gun as a high-end rental.
Oh, pricing. If you go to a full service place that has structures and scenarios and everything, then you likely won't need to bring anything but tennis shoes. You'll pay about $25 for entry and basic rental. Then you might get an all-day air refill for another $5. Then you can rent mask, coveralls, etc for another $30. Paint is about $50 for a case of 2000 of the cheap paint. You'll need 500-1000 the first time (since the hopper on your gun will only hold 200 and you'll have no other way to carry extra paint, you just can't shoot very much more than that). I'd say that for $50 you could have an all-day affair. Way cheaper than skiiing.
Another thing that always prevented me from trying it out (besides not knowing anyone else who wanted to play) is that I figure I would want to use a single-shot gun, because they're cheaper (I assume), but also because I think it would be more fun shooting carefully rather than just spraying paint around; but I imagine it would be really frustrating to go up against guys with 10 shot/sec guns. Do places do things that require all guns to be an equal level, or is it pretty much "use the best gun you can afford?"
You hit the nail on the head: you want to go with one or more friends. For some reason, paintball is hardwired into our lizard brains as a communal activity. You'll get out there and want to know where your buddy is. Even if he's shot out and watching you from the sidelines it'll be comforting. And a couple guys working as a group -- even if they know less about what they are doing -- will usually do much better than every man for themself. I guess that's why you see paintball as a teambuilding thing all the time.
A single-shot is almost unheard of. I can tell that you've shot real guns (or know something about them). You are thinking of paintball as an Olympic sport, where marksmanship counts. That isn't the case, per se. And because most markers have very little recoil (think pellet gun or maybe.22), then single shot vs. semi isn't a very big issue. You'll use a semi, guaranteed. And you'll see a guy running and just pull the trigger until you get him. Remember, the barrel isn't totally smooth, the projectile is (almost) round, and there's no rifling to give a gyroscopic effect to the paintball. You'll get the drop on a guy, line up a shot, and the ball will corkscrew like mad. At that point, he's heard you, so you just keep pulling the trigger.:-)
You probably won't go up against guys that have guns like mine, or who have a lot of experience. It's not fun for anyone. Fields typically split people up into groups based on what experience they have; the better the gear, typically the more experience the player has. If I show up in the beginner group wearing a jersey with my $1500 gun, then they'll know something is up and find me a new group. (BTW, the pic at that link was taken when I was with a beginner group that had never played before. But since I wanted to stay with the group I brought -- about 10 people -- then I had to play with the beginners. So I agreed to stay at the back of the field. If you go forward through the series, you can see my buddies coming up to join me, and then me pointing out where to shoot, which spools to move up to, and such.)
Having said that, you can go spend $150 and then show up with what amounts to a super quality rental. You could spend $400 and show up with a very nice semi auto. You could spend $2000 and show up with a top-end electronic gun. All without every having played. They won't prevent you from playing with the beginner group.
Anyways, thanks for the great treatise. The last time I got such a wonderfully lengthy reply from a simple question was when I asked a fly shop owner about the basics of fly fishing. It turned out he had a masters in entomolgy. He talked my ear off for about half an hour and I was hooked. (Boy, that was the second inadvertant stupid pun in this post) Now I can't wait till the waters clear up...
Heh heh.... you're very welcome. Thanks for reading it. I guess I sensed interest or something. It's the same with any passion I suppose. I'm a little older than most players (35) and so I tend to get more esoteric about it. So if anyone asks me about the game and I can tell that they really want to know, I can give them a detailed analysis. And it's a big topic, with a lot of opinion in place of hard fact (accuracy of aftermarket barrels or certain brands of paintballs being a big one).
Summing up, I'd say that you should find someone who's played for a bit locally. Your locale means a lot to what sort of experience you'll find (Georgia has more woodsy fields than Oakland, and so different types of games). If you can't find a friend who's played, then find one wiling to play. Find 5, actually. Then go to the nearest paintball store, buy a case of paint, and ask the owner where the best field for beginners is. He'll talk your ear off better than any fly fisherman can...:-)
BTW, pardon my atrocious spelling. My fingers don't seem to work right. I've been finishing a big project at work, and my carpal tunnel to me....
Slashdot Mirror
So it's basically a money thing, then?
-B
Damn. Now you've made me all nostalgic. Anyone here remember "World Beyond" in Phoenix, AZ in the summers on Saturday morning? They had great trashy sci-fi movies and a ZZ Top guitar riff for intro music? Anyone remember Edmus Scary? Had AC/DC's "Back in Black" for a doorbell?
Damn again. Sometimes I miss being a kid. Then I remember how badly 9th grade sucked and I get over it.
-B
I'm a card-carrying Libertarian and pretty much despise Bush as much as I despised Clinton, but even that "buy the President" crack was a little much for me. As if Microsoft was ever in any danger whatsoever from any government agency or lawsuit. Even if they could "buy themselves a President", they wouldn't have to.
Some people just need a soapbox to stand on I guess. I'm betting we'll hear whining about the Bush/Gore election for many years to come... -B
That said, I'm not nearly as much fisherman as I want to be (grew up in Phoenix, AZ for cryin' out loud) but living near the ocean has got me hooked. No pun intended, mind you. Yes, if Southern California is good for anything it's paintball and fishing. They're both equally good for completely different reasons. I just couldn't think of a way to relate women to paintball. Not without delving into the obvious ball/splatter material. This is a family site, after all.
-B
-B
Well, now... that would depend on what you dream about, wouldn't it? If you fancy a single woman who always wished she could run strace on life's problems and has a geek code, then I'd wager you'd probably find someone to your liking. If your tastes run more towards the bottle blond, lipstick lizard, clothes horse types, then I'd think a mall would be a better bet.
But while I've got you, how about a little piece of free, metaphorical advice from a old fogey: finding women is like fishing. That'sa ll you have to remember. Sounds silly, but it's very true if you examine it for a minute. You don't go fishing with a pole if you want shrimp, and a net won't get you many marlin. And while there are a lot of fish in the sea, they're pretty much concentrated in certain areas. Identifying and then placing yourself in those areas is a primary goal. You'll do better on the coast near the mouth of a river than 800 miles out over deep water maybe. And you need bait to match the fish in your area. You most certainly aren't going to catch cod with balls-o-fire.
Even still, just being where the most fish are is only half the battle. You have to remember that the volume of water to fish is enourmous. So you have to improve your your odds of hauling in the fish you want by catching lots of fish and only keeping the one(s) you want. Catch-and-release is alive in love as in fishing, trust me. This means you have better chances of hooking that lunker if you are the only boat on the water or if you can fool the fish by thinking you're only boat on the water, say by putting more/flashier/smellier bait in the water. Chum sometimes works, but it also attracts fish you don't want; too much smelt and barracuda and not enough calico bass makes for bad fishing. You also have to be careful because other boats can run off the fish, or into you even. The minute you tangle your lines with those from another guy's boat is the minute you look real long and hard at the fish on the hook. You probably don't want it.
Anyway, I could go on and on but you get the idea:
- Figure out what kind of fish you want
- Get the right kind of bait
- Get out there where the fish are
- Get there early so your alone
- Hook as many as you can while only keeping the good ones
That's what I did. Good luck to you.-B
-B
-B
No, just lucky... :-)
-B
-B
Correlation doesn't prove causation. The number of people with personal computers -- and therefore the number of people getting online -- also increased during this time. Are you saying that these new Internet users surveyed their browsing options and picked MSIE because it had a greater feature set or was more robust? That's ludicrous.
I will grant that a number of Netscape users migrated to MSIE as it matured. This is only natural. But I think it's important to realize that when one talks about Netscape's dominant market share in the early- or mid-nineties, the absolute number of users was comparatively tiny in relation to the number of overall users towards the end of the decade. Even if a significant portion of Netscape users didn't switch to MSIE, Netscape's market share -- when expressed as a percentage -- would have dramatically decreased.
My point was this: The bundling of the browser with the OS played a significant role in it's increasing popularity. That doesn't discount a better feature set as playing a part of it, albeit a relatively small one.
-B
Also, if everybody knows about an insecurity then the company will HAVE to take remedial action.
That magic word "should". I should floss more often. I also should get on the treadmill (and off the PC) more often. I should do the dishes every night, should save more money for retirement, should take classes to finish my cert, should thank a veteran on Veteran's Day, should clean my garage, should mail Dad a gift, and should eat out less. A perfect world would be a busy world, to be sure.
That said, there's about a 1 in 6.02x10^23 chance that corporations will voluntarily disclose theft of sensitive data. If everyone knows about Company A's insecurity, the customers will go to Company B which doesn't disclose such information. Press releases are sent out about getting pantsed, competitors create disparaging ads, customers leave, investors get nervous, stock prices drop. And then companies learn it pays to keep your mouth shut.
In fact, I'd wager a company is more likely to pay other people to keep their mouths shut as well than it is to be open and honest and forthcoming. Remember, a public company has one -- and only one -- duty: increase or maintain shareholder value. If they don't do that, then the board can be sued, the chairman ousted, etc, etc. Yeah, I'd bet that not getting thrown off the board is worth some hush-up money in the right places. If I were The Chairman, for instance, I'd make damn sure my sysadmins and IT group had fairly hefty NDAs/non-competes as well as hefty bonuses for "resolving" security issues in a discreet way.
Here's a hypothetical example: Datek gets broken into every once in a great while, has an insecure setup, whatever. Confidential data gets lost or intercepted easily maybe, who knows. But it decides to be honest with everyone. It gets a web page going of all the recent compromises, sends email to people whose info was pinched, fixes the problems via the aforementioned remedial actions. E*trade keeps quiet, Datek starts looking sloppy and has a "history" of being insecure, E*trade gets more business even if they don't decide to smear Datek. Datek is soon a fading memory with secure business systems.
Disabuse yourself of the notion that you will know who got what and when. It is not in a company's best interest to let you know your privacy and financial security was compromised, no matter how much grandstanding they do over security and trust. Just don't use a Visa/Mastercard debit card or your SSN online and everything will be fine.
-B
If you think that there's a correlation between MSIE's quality and its popularity increasing over time, you're deluding yourself. MSIE got popular because MS said "Make everything we do exist in the context of the Internet." Shortly thereafter, a TCP/IP stack was shoehorned into an operating system, some Spyglass code was licensed, Word could save HTML docs, Outlook could send mail, FrontPage was cabbaged together, and PWS/IIS was foisted upon an unsuspecting public.
As the number of people getting computers rose, so did the number of MSIE users. They saw an icon that said "Internet", they clicked, the modem dialed and they were placing orders in Beanie Baby auctions and finding naked pictures of David Hasselhoff in short order. But quality had nothing to do with it. They could have been running batch files which were telnetting to port 80 and piping to more for all their web browsing -- most of them wouldn't have known any better nor cared one way or the other.
MSIE was a truly horrible browser for a long time. In many ways it still is (holy wars aside, I doubt that merely viewing web pages with a browser besides MSIE will get you infected with the trojan du mois). It could have been the zenith or the nadir of browser technology and it still would have been just as popular.
Anyway, long story short: Don't attribute to thoughtful engineering and careful testing that which can be adequately explained by anti-competitive acts of market aggression in search of an abusive monopoly.
-B
That's a lot of i's for the end of a word that looks a lot like cactus or octopus or rebus or syllabus in it's singular form. Oddly enough, like those others, the plural of virus doesn't have all those i's at the end. It's just plain "viruses", man.
I could see where it might be "viri", maybe; catci and octopi both set that precedent. But not "virii". That's just nasty. Can you imagine someone using "rebii" or "cactii"? Or maybe even "trojii" and "worii", while we're adding i's to everything that can infect your PC.
Anyway, I don't mean to harp on you, necessarily. It's just that "virii" is the literary equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. I'm not the only one with this hangup either, although I have mixed feelings about being in the same boat as Tom Christiansen on any issue...
-B
Like the title says. Forever is a long time. Got any pre-System7 Mac software laying around? Tried to run it recently? I have more than a little old software from my DOS days that I would have a hard time running without jumping through hoops. However, I have old data from back then which is easy to look at (if I cared to).
I get your point, and it's a good one, but why should I have to tote a binary around with my data? Wouldn't you rather have all those Webshots images in TIFF (or whatever) so that when you want to print five years from now you can? Who knows if their software will work on Windows2008, with the printer driver you have, etc. It's orders of magnitude more convenient/elegant/etc to have data which requires no special software. I'd almost say it's a requirement.
Here's a real-world example: I had to deal with an old DOS 6.22 era Clarion-based database software installation last year. They were upgrading (because of 2K bugs, oddly enough) to Windows 2000. They got Windows installed, but the old DB software wouldn't run under Win2K. Fine, they said, just get our data out of the old database and into the new one. Guess what? No tool to do that. No way to know what their file format was, either, so forget abotu writing a filter. What are they doing? They are running the old software on a Windows 3.11 machine and the new stuff on their Win2K box. They figure it'll be a couple years before all their customers have been serviced and are integrated into their new system. Then they'll no longer need their old data files -- and the proprietary viewer needed to get at their old data.
No, I think I'll take data -- especially if I purchase it -- as independant from any specific binaries (and their operating systems) as possible, thank you very much. I'll decide what vewier I need.
-B
You're completely, 100% wrong. Yeah, it will flop, but not because people won't pay. It's silly to assume people don't pay for music. People pay for music all the time. How else do you think the recording industry stays in business? No, piracy is most certainly not why this will fail. It will fail because the suits misunderstand their thetarget audience for this service.
I have ~18GB of MP3 files. They are all, to the last file, arranged in complete albums, with proper ID3 tags for each file. Why? Because I bought the CDs and then ripped and encoded them myself. Napster was useless. You got iffy quality, screwy naming conventions, weird ID3 tags (if you got them at all), and the files sometimes (mostly) had defects. Even if I didn't want to pay, I'd still pay rather than listen to the crap you get off Napster (or Kaazaa -- same problems there).
I require two things for digital music: The complete album in high bit-rate MP3 format. I do not want single songs. I do not want proprietary (read: non-MP3 or non-OGG) formats with built-in "digital rights management". I do not want to "burn" anything. Why the heck would I burn a Liquid Audio (whatever the hell that is) on to a CD-R? I want the music on my fileserver where it belongs. Where my AudioTron downstairs and my workstation upstairs can get to them. Where I can stream them from work. I might even put them on a portable MP3 player, but last time I checked the portables didn't support "burning" or formats besides MP3.
I'd love the chance to pay $10 for a complete album. As long as it's in MP3 format at a decent bit-rate. But this "service" can't give me that and therefore is completely useless. It will fail because they are going about it all wrong -- not because people don't want cheap music.
-B
For what I've read in the past, it has always been the plan to ensure backward compatibility by defaulting to parsing Perl5-style syntax. Said another way, one must explicitly specify that a program is Perl6. This is a good thing, and a feature I'm counting on. There's quite a bit about Perl6 I'll probably not use very much. All I really need Perl for is a glue language. In fact, if I were to replace some chomp()'s with chop()'s most everything I've ever written will run under Perl4. I'm not quite as l33t as some although anyone can read my code. Needless to say, I don't post to perlmonks.org very much. :-)
I don't think Wall will make everyone go back and re-write old code. That would be a grievous mistake.
(Note: I haven't read the latest Apocalypse because perl.com seems to not be responding. If Wall has said anything to the contrary, then things have changed from what I've read in the past.)
-B
The UID isn't quite high enough to really fool people but it's close enough given the +1 posting karmic bonus, which shows a sense of patience and forbearance. However, the AOL reference almost spoiled it as too obvious, and the post could have been longer. A link to a page at http://*.aol.com/* which explains "netiquette" would have been especially helpful in mitigating the obvious AOL reference and certainly would have set you apart from the -1 riff-raff. Using quotes or other HTML 0.9 markup to denote the quoted material would have also increased your overall score slightly as well. In the end, the clincher was the replies you received, which are part and parcel to any good troll.
I give it a 7.3 out of 10 post-Siegel & Canter points. Well done, sir!
-B
AFAIK, it's hardware issue.
-B
I have a system which is purely SCSI (U2W/lvd, in fact). Both of my disc drives are made by Plextor -- hardly unknown drives -- and are over two and a half years old. They are well supported by anybody's standards. Yet neither will work with WineX. I get errors with CD protection schemes, errors trying to read the drives, errors in the games saying the disc can't be found, etc. This is with my Plextor CD-R and CD-ROM drives. I've even tried mounting ISO images of the game CDs via the loopback with no luck.
If you have IDE CD drives, then feel free to get a subscription and/or download WineX. If you have a SCSI system then you shouldn't bother with WineX -- unless you get a subscription and then vote for SCSI support. Otherwise just dual boot into Windows (or forego games). IMO, the lack of support for SCSI systems is enough to make me wish I hadn't subscribed (or had been able to find the issue mentioned somewhere on the Transgaming site last October when I signed up).
-B
Thong/bikini models aren't my taste (by a long shot), but I would hardly find them outright offensive. Indeed, most common decency laws state that pornography and indecency are based completely on the morals and judgement of the community. Given the goatse.cx that has typically proliferated here, I think one would be hard pressed to argue that an "average" /. reader would be offended by images of women in small bathing suits.
Even if I don't have to agree with the site author's taste in pictures -- swimsuit or otherwise -- which he chooses to put on his site, I most certainly do have to agree with his right to put those pictures there.
People get worked up (no pun intended) over the strangest things...
-B
You make an interesting point. I suppose I live in a dream world where hardware vendors realize that there's more than one OS. Instead I'm just a troll in a /. world. :-) Quite honestly, I just don't have the wherewithall to write a driver for a new video chipset -- I'm at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer. I don't feel too badly about it, though, since I can't make silicon. So I can't give a new type of ASIC or chipset back to the community either.
I rely on hardware vendors for a lot of things I can't or won't do myself. Did I write a USB driver for the Palm m505 I bought that came with a USB cradle? No, I just paid for a serial cable after reading a review of the new Palms from a geek site. That review specifically mentioned that if you want to sync up with Linux, you have to get the serial cradle since Palm won't release their USB specs on the m5xx series.
I guess if I have to google for a driver for this new chipset, then everyone else can too. I still think Dan could have thrown that info into his review, since he knew he would submit it himself to Slashdot. Maybe I got the feeling that he needs the page views/new visitors and finally found the "geekiest" hardware yet to review. I like Dan and his site, and I read him a lot, but the self-submission seemed really off without at least mentioning Linux. Maybe in that dream world I live in, Slashdot still has more OSS guys than not.
Also, SIS are one of the few companies that have actually provided their own linux drivers in the past, so there's no reason to believe they won't now. Especially when the drivers section of the Xabre website doesn't even have Windows drivers there yet.
And this I didn't know. I'll definitely check back (or get notified when an MD5 sum of that page changes) in that case.
And as a matter of fact, every modern video card will work with linux and X via the VESA standards (though admittedly the performance won't be as good as a native driver)
3D? If a video card can't do 3D reasonably well, it won't succeed (personal computers in the home, no not embedded, etc). Since I need 3D, I need a driver.
And BTW, thanks for you post, mabinogi. If I hadn't commented in this story, I would have moderated it up as insightful. 'Course, I wouldn't have made a comment for you to reply to, so the point is somewhat moot... :-) But I learned something and it was good to rationally discuss things (isn't it sad that rational conversation is typically the exception to the norm?).
-B
Whenever I read a hardware review, I hit ctrl+f, type in "linux" and then hit enter -- first thing. If I see it jump down the page, I read the whole thing. If not, I hit spacebar to make the "not found" dialog go away and carry on with what I was doing. I can't buy hardware that doesn't support Linux, and so I have no time to read about hardware rewviews which only mention Windows. Would a hardcore Windows user care about a review of an iPod? Unless it mentioned something about the Win32 hacks, I doubt it. In fact, I could see some people actually feeling challenged if the review said "the iPod is Apple-only, but there are ways to get it running under Windows, although not for the faint of heart". Or whatever. I haven't read any iPod reviews, so I'm just guessing.
The thing might make tea and toast for me before I get up in the morning, but unless it can run under Linux, it's of zero use to me (as well as quite a few others here, I'd suspect). Normally, I'd have just gone about my business, and chalked the review up to yet another that doesn't mention Linux, which is no big deal at all. But since Dan was pimping his site on /., Linux (and *BSD, come to think of it) should have been mentioned. Lots of people here (40%?) run Windows, sure, but there ought to be a rule that when you self-submit a review you've done to Slashdot, you have to throw the other 60% of us a bone and at least see if you can dual boot or something. Win32 users can get information in hundreds of places. Users of alternative operating systems come here.
-B
First off: I trust you, Alan, if for no other reason than you still have the bullocks to post here. Call me a lemming, but if you're down with the patent thing, then I'm fine too. I don't like patents, yet I have my name on 17 pending patent applications. I'm not sure they'll pass muster, and I'm not sure I'll care either way. They were filed a while ago, when I worked for a very pro-IP company.
Having said that, it *is* a little weird that Red Hat is patenting stuff. The suits want CYA, the lawyers want accountability, but the guys that wrote the stuff you distribute don't like patents. I didn't either, until amazon.com decided they could patent my finger acting upon a microswitch in the mouse on my desktop, then I realized that everyone had better patent whatever they can before the unscrupulous money weasels got their act together. We're well into the 3rd act.
IM(V)HO, patents aren't that great unless you're on the right end of the licensing agreement and I wish we didn't have to have them all. But we need to have them, if only to keep the bottom feeders of the world from reinventing the tux wheel and then patenting it out of existence. If I invent some novel "Method and Apparatus for the Extraction of Novel Nutrients from Common Playground Sand..." and then GPL/BSD/give-it-to-charity, can someone then patent a slightly reworked version and sue me for doing OSS work? Is that the precedence under which the license I pick wants to be tested? So, completely non-hypothetically, is Red Hat taking the so-called pre-emptive strike here?
I'm hoping -- as a very long time RHAT user, and a stockholder as long as there's been stock to hold -- that you guys will use some clout and cash to take out a patent or fourteen for the "good guys", as nasty as the conept sounds. If you have a claim to something novel, than have at it, I say, as long as you give back the key bits to the world. If you don't, then someone else will just patent it and hold onto/license it. So what sort of use to regular humans will be granted with the rights given RHAT by the USPTO? Does your company have a policy for this sort of thing?
I don't mean to grill you, but it *is* weird. Maybe I should think about patenting the process by which an OSS, for-profit company patents new ideas in order to give back to the world by protecting those ideas... :-)
-B
It's very fun, and very addictive. Even if I were predisposed to, I could never do drugs because I can't afford them after paying for paintball stuff. It's athletic crack. But so is golf or tennis for some folks. It takes all kinds. But if you like Quake/FPS games and you play paintball once, then you're in serious trouble.
So if I wanted to give it a shot, would you recommend I should get my own gun or use a rental? It sounds like rentals are annoyingly inaccurate, which I'm sure would frustrate me, but I don't want to make a large purchase on something I might only use a couple of times. Are there any entry-level guns that are reliable and accurate? Are places likely to rent these guns?
If you want to try the game, then use a rental the first time or four. They aren't that great, but if you don't like the game they aren't a commitment. If you play at a place that has a lot of rental customers (look for places that advertise at churches, have father/son days, etc.) then you should be fine. The first game is the worst (and most exciting). You have a lot to worry about then, and having a rental gun which can be dropped, mangled, lost, folded, spindled, etc removes a whole set of worries out of your mind and lets you concetrate on the game.
Many fields have several "classes" of guns that you can rent. Thebottom of th rbarrel are the ones that probably have bent barrels. They cost (new, like if you bought one) about $35. You get what you pay for. If you go with a fraternity or church or your dept at work or whatever and everyone gets one of these, then it's all good fun. Having a "race gun" when everyone else has a crappy rental isn't going to be much fun for you or the guy you shoot. Now, if you go out with agroup and you decide to pay the extra $25 or whatever to upgrade to a better gun, then you're The Man and nobody can give you grief because they are just cheap at that point. So you'll see like three classes of rentals: the normal cheapos, the middle types (which aren't much better than cheapos), and the good ones. They good ones are typically fairly decent guns. They see some wear, but they are well made and can handle it. Look for names like Spyder and Tippman and Pirahna; any of those should be fine. My first marker was a Spyder TL+, which I see as a rental quite often. I had a non-stock barrel, but it was essentialy the same gun as a high-end rental. Oh, pricing. If you go to a full service place that has structures and scenarios and everything, then you likely won't need to bring anything but tennis shoes. You'll pay about $25 for entry and basic rental. Then you might get an all-day air refill for another $5. Then you can rent mask, coveralls, etc for another $30. Paint is about $50 for a case of 2000 of the cheap paint. You'll need 500-1000 the first time (since the hopper on your gun will only hold 200 and you'll have no other way to carry extra paint, you just can't shoot very much more than that). I'd say that for $50 you could have an all-day affair. Way cheaper than skiiing.
Another thing that always prevented me from trying it out (besides not knowing anyone else who wanted to play) is that I figure I would want to use a single-shot gun, because they're cheaper (I assume), but also because I think it would be more fun shooting carefully rather than just spraying paint around; but I imagine it would be really frustrating to go up against guys with 10 shot/sec guns. Do places do things that require all guns to be an equal level, or is it pretty much "use the best gun you can afford?"
You hit the nail on the head: you want to go with one or more friends. For some reason, paintball is hardwired into our lizard brains as a communal activity. You'll get out there and want to know where your buddy is. Even if he's shot out and watching you from the sidelines it'll be comforting. And a couple guys working as a group -- even if they know less about what they are doing -- will usually do much better than every man for themself. I guess that's why you see paintball as a teambuilding thing all the time.
A single-shot is almost unheard of. I can tell that you've shot real guns (or know something about them). You are thinking of paintball as an Olympic sport, where marksmanship counts. That isn't the case, per se. And because most markers have very little recoil (think pellet gun or maybe .22), then single shot vs. semi isn't a very big issue. You'll use a semi, guaranteed. And you'll see a guy running and just pull the trigger until you get him. Remember, the barrel isn't totally smooth, the projectile is (almost) round, and there's no rifling to give a gyroscopic effect to the paintball. You'll get the drop on a guy, line up a shot, and the ball will corkscrew like mad. At that point, he's heard you, so you just keep pulling the trigger. :-)
You probably won't go up against guys that have guns like mine, or who have a lot of experience. It's not fun for anyone. Fields typically split people up into groups based on what experience they have; the better the gear, typically the more experience the player has. If I show up in the beginner group wearing a jersey with my $1500 gun, then they'll know something is up and find me a new group. (BTW, the pic at that link was taken when I was with a beginner group that had never played before. But since I wanted to stay with the group I brought -- about 10 people -- then I had to play with the beginners. So I agreed to stay at the back of the field. If you go forward through the series, you can see my buddies coming up to join me, and then me pointing out where to shoot, which spools to move up to, and such.)
Having said that, you can go spend $150 and then show up with what amounts to a super quality rental. You could spend $400 and show up with a very nice semi auto. You could spend $2000 and show up with a top-end electronic gun. All without every having played. They won't prevent you from playing with the beginner group.
Anyways, thanks for the great treatise. The last time I got such a wonderfully lengthy reply from a simple question was when I asked a fly shop owner about the basics of fly fishing. It turned out he had a masters in entomolgy. He talked my ear off for about half an hour and I was hooked. (Boy, that was the second inadvertant stupid pun in this post) Now I can't wait till the waters clear up...
Heh heh.... you're very welcome. Thanks for reading it. I guess I sensed interest or something. It's the same with any passion I suppose. I'm a little older than most players (35) and so I tend to get more esoteric about it. So if anyone asks me about the game and I can tell that they really want to know, I can give them a detailed analysis. And it's a big topic, with a lot of opinion in place of hard fact (accuracy of aftermarket barrels or certain brands of paintballs being a big one).
Summing up, I'd say that you should find someone who's played for a bit locally. Your locale means a lot to what sort of experience you'll find (Georgia has more woodsy fields than Oakland, and so different types of games). If you can't find a friend who's played, then find one wiling to play. Find 5, actually. Then go to the nearest paintball store, buy a case of paint, and ask the owner where the best field for beginners is. He'll talk your ear off better than any fly fisherman can... :-)
BTW, pardon my atrocious spelling. My fingers don't seem to work right. I've been finishing a big project at work, and my carpal tunnel to me....
-B