The first one of those could be semi-easily defeted with a well written vision program. The second could be very easily defeated by a simple concept to image hash database. Such a database could be built through colabaration such that each user would provide data for the database occationally, but most of the time the interaction could be automated. The final test could simply be brute forced. Pick three buttons. Keep selecting those until they're right. Given enough processing power it would be significantly easier than that.
When designing these novelty programs, the designers assume that nobody will be able to quickly gain an understanding of how a small portion of the human brain works enough to implement it's functionality in software. Worse, by exploiting what we don't know about writing software to emulate the brain, they've define the probelm set in such a way that any guarantees they provide will be short lived. In the present, these programs for ensuring you're interacting with an actual person might be useful for single transactions that involve cash, but they're useless for ensuring you're not geting your web content scraped by a script because you don't need better than 10-20% accuracy when you have infinite retries. In the long term (which is 12-48 months probably) 80-99% accuracy will be easily achieved through study and improvements in hardware.
In other words, If human eyes can read it someone can write software to parse it.
Thank you for not reading my whole message before replying. You're responce is interesting in thread regarding a recent onling subscription style game that flopped mightily when compared to expectations.
Now, while we're all doing math based on bad asumptions, lets point out your fatal flaw:
MMORPG's hit the 50K mark easy.
Not only is that not true now (No game hits the 50K mark easily. Go calculate the standard deviation on your average... It's huge.), but as more subscription based games come to market it'll be even harder to pick up that many customers. Not only that, but since people only have so much money to spend on gaming each month, as more games come out either the average number of initial buyers will have to drop sharply, or the average length of a subscription will have to be much shorter. That means with each addition to the online gaming market, there will be much higher risk in developing an online game and much lower potential rewards. What's a capitalist to do then?
Capitalists with money look at all the risks and factor them into their opinion. Capitalists who can't do that end up like many dot-com investors I know. Communists probably wouldn't have the games in the first place. I expect the number of online games on the shelf at any one time to peak in the next 6-10 months, then you'll be seeing only one or two new online games on the shelf in any given six month period.
Of course we're both speculating, so we'll have to wait a year and see which of us is right.
And then they hand your job to an H1-B, or ship it to India altogether. It's this smug false sense of irreplacability that got us into this mess in the first place.
If the person in India has the skills to do the job just as well, is the person in India less deserving of that job than you? Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway? If you're not truly irreplaceable, and somebody who costs less than you comes along, then you should be replaced.
It's best to look at this as an exercise in schadenfreude: all of those wanna-be technolibertarians who spent most of the 90s shuddering and twitching at the mere mention of unions, collective bargaining or any other manifestation of labor rights now get to find out the hard way what life is like when management holds all of the cards.
All a union would do is make it so you have zero individual say in the terms of your employment contract. I'm sorry, but I want more control over my life then that. The answer is not to form a union, but to make yourself so desireable as an employee that the hiring company doesn't hold all the cards. If you can't do that then you should be aiming for a job where you can do that instead of whining about it and colectively barganing. I don't understand why everybody thinks they're entitiled to work in whatever field they'd like. Get a job that you're so good at you can negotiate the terms, or suck it up and take what they give you.
We got one of those too. I haven't been able to come up with a way to get them to waste their money actually auditing us, but I'm working on it. Except for the single windows machine and my Mac, all of our machines run either free software, or software we wrote ourselves. It would be fun to have them come in and waste their time.
Funny how if you word it right you only have to fabricate one tiny fact to completely distort history.
The "PC Industry" did NOT allow third partys to manufacure machines to bring down costs. Compaq reverce engineered the IBM PC, and the availability of new low cost machines almost killed IBM. Apple should have learned from this and never allowed the clones. There was existing history to demonstrate what would happen.
Now IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore (they rebrand them) and the only reason they're still in business is their other divisions. Funny how whay breaks one can break the other, huh?
$0 * 1,000,000 $50 * 5,000. That's right, even 5,000 people who are willing to pay will bring in more than millions of people who don't want to pay.
Look, you just don't get it. I'm not talking about anything being FREE here. I'm talking about the difference between a fixed up-front cost, and an undefined subscription fee paid over time. Services without an absolute defined cost are less attractive to most people than something with a recurring fee. It's that simple. There is no zero in the equation. There's nobody who doesn't pay. The only difference is how much, and when.
You're also ignoring the next level up of subscription services: things like Xbox Live!. All your fees that you might have to pay per game, are wrapped into one, easy fee. If you want to play 10 games online, great. They'll charge a value that means they can cover costs and maintain their servers, while making a profit. And then they add on premiums, like extra content for games: finished Splinter Cell? Pay 10$ and get a whole new set of missions! Don't want to buy NBA 2k4 at 74$? Pay 15$, and get the 2k4 rosters for 2k3!
Congratulations. You've just proven that you're as dumb as the marketeers hoped. You're getting the same amount of entertainment for more money, and if you really were getting more for less then you've just contridicted your whole argument.
Crap, I just looked at your user name. Whay am I not surprised that you're the same guy who didn't seem to get it in the other thread either... I'm done. Back to work.
Re:There are many reasons to pay.
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Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
If you have a problem with it costing N dollars, wait until it drops, or don't pay. Whinning about how it should be free is stupid -- you're not EA, it's not your decision to make. All you do is make yourself sound like a whiny teenager living in your parents' basement.
For the record, I'm not whining, I'm observing. EA can charge whatever they want, but as the story says, their game flopped. Similarly, instead of whining I just purchase the game I think are price justified. Hense EA did not recieve my purchase, nor did verant or any of those other companies. Blizard, on the other had has gotten $160 out of me in the last four years. When people stop making standalone games altogether I won't whine, I'll start a gmae company and clean up.
Well, it may or may not be a bad model. The market will decide. You need to understand that while you may not personally agree with something, you are not a statistically important part of the market unless you act in concert with other people.
Did you even read my comment? Did you even read the article? I'm done responding to you. You're not worth the words.
at $10/month with 50K subscribers you are bringing in half a million per month
Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million. That means you need to keep your 50K subscribers around for over two years to make as much money as you would selling your game to the wider audience of people not willing to pay per month. Now, considering most people get tired with a game after 6 months or so, who's going to make more money? Why do you think I'm a communist again? Do some math before you question somebodies capitalist sensabilities. Sure I made up the 250,000 number, and the math is alot more complicated than that due to distribution costs, but most games don't become everquest. Most games get a small number of subscribers for a short period of time like we're now seeing with The Sims, and have seen with basically every non-EQ MMORPG. Diablo 2 sold millions of copies at $60 a pop. How many do you think they'd have sold if you had to pay $10 a month to play? Even if it was half, hardly anybody plays still, and it's only a year later. The chances of making a successful subscription based online game are low, and get lower with each new game that ends up on the shelf and the compitition for each person's $10 grows. That makes the economic case for standalone games stronger every day.
You're going to see pay-for-play games slowly die, with only one or two on the shelf at a time as soon as people realize you make more money by not scaring off a huge percentage of you audience with a fee, find that people only pay monthly for one or two games at a time, and see that they hardly ever switch games. Sure there are profits to be made with subscription models, but they're not as big as they sound, and they're not very easy to tap into.
Re:There are many reasons to pay.
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Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
Um, ther's no advertising on battle.net. It's funded by box sales. It doesn't matter wether you'd be willing to pay per month for it because you payed up front. Also, if you couldn't play on battle.net alot, lets say only on saturdays for an hour but you really liked it, wouldn't it suck to have to pay $1 an hour for what everybody else gets for $0.20 a day?
The trouble with most pay-for-play online gaming is not that it costs money. Usually the problem is that the cost is the same no matter how much you play, and the structure of the game is such that the rewards of playing are based on time spent playing. This blocks out a whole segment of gamers who can't play a game for hours a day, or perhaps can't even play every day. The cost per unit fun increases exponentially for people with less gaming time.
That's still not the problem with The Sims online. The problem with The Sims is that they're trying to charge a fee for somthing that their prospective customers already get for free. You're getting to read this comment for free. Why don't you send me some money to read it. Of course you're not going to, because why would you if you can read it (and even publicly respond) for free. Trying to charge people to read my slashdot comments would be a bad business model even though thousands of people read them without paying every day. Similarly trying to charge people to play The Sims is a bad business model even though millions of people play The Sims for free every day. Having alot of mindshare doesn't mean people will give you money.
Convergence is an excuse to keep the price range for devices in the $500 range. I'll agree with your argument when we start to see some useful convergence that is affordable, I.E, features are added because the device could do that anyway and it adds no cost. For now, converged devices jut mean things are more expensive, have shorter battery life, and duplicate functionality with the other stuff you need because each device is only really good at one thing and sucks at everything else.
Besides, this article isn't about convergence, it's about some stupid third party company thinking that a 32MB MP3 player the size of a GBA will be desireable, even though you can't play games at the same time as listening to music like you could if you had truly seperate devices, and the total cost will be the same as two seperate devices.
My sister loves The Sims. She returned The Sims online when she got it for christmas though. She said "I can play the sims and run instant messanger for free. I don't need another bill to pay".
She just hits Alt-Tab like she's flipping through TV stations.
All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. The initial cost of games is already high. I have no desire to pay per month to have access to something I don't know how often I'll have the free time to use. If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?
I know it didn't get my money because movies cost $9 per ticket now, and you have to watch advertisements (I'm not talking about previews) before the show. Perhaps if they cost $6 and had ads, or $9 and had no ads I'd have gone, but unless the pricing changes I'm done seeing movies in the theatres.
Since I skipped it in the theatres, I can watch it at home on my giant television (Which cost about as much money as I used to spend on movie tickets each year back when it cost $7/ticket) after I buy the DVD for $15. I'll still have saved $3, and I'll be able to watch it as many times as I like.
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BTW, before any of you reply to this saying theaters have to show advertisements to make money because the studios take all of the ticket revenue, bon't bother. There's so much money that changes hands at the box office that if the theaters and the studios can't figure out how to make everybody profitable based on that money alone they need to go out of business and let somebody else figure it out.
And yes, I used to spend over $700 a year seeing movies, which isn't hard at $7 a ticket. Just buy two tickets every weekend for a year and you're there. I don't even want to think about how much money I actually spent if you figure in refreshments and quarters at the arcade before the show...
The first 5.25" 1GB hard drive was introduced in 1994 (9 years ago). Your 9GB drives are no older than 6-7 years. They are certainly not 10+ years old.
Any properly treated <= 10k RPM SCSI disk drive you get today will likely last just as long. Also, if it's still working after three years, it'll likely be working after six. You'll find almost all the defects in the first 18 months. It's should be no surprise that cheap IDE disks will be less reliable than the more expensive high quality SCSI disks. They're not just more expensive because of industry colusion. The extra quality costs more to manufacture. Considering that the upgrade cycle for x86 PCs has been less than 2 years for 5 years or so, can you blame the hard drive manufactures for being cheap when a very small percentage of their customers will care?
Also, the technology has improved in the 6 years since those modems I linked to came out. You can get DSL up to 28,000 feet with some of the newer equipment I've seen, but you can't do it with those old SpeedStreams.
Older SDSL modems should do the trick. I know that the SpeedStream 5250 not only works, but when used at both ends can totally autoconfigure a DSL bridge for ethernet at the highest speed your pair is capable of. The best part is that they're old and cheap. You can find them for $10 on eBay, so if you buy them and find out there's a problem with your loop, you're only out $20.
I've seen these things work at 11,000 feet, and the manual for mine says it's possible to use for up to 18,000 feet (measured by line impedance). If you're 2 miles drive from your friend's house you could have 20k+ feet between the two of you, or worse, your line could go through the CO on the way there. If you're too far out for DSL from the CO, you're definatly too far from your friends house if your line makes a stop at the CO first!
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn
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Why VHS Was Better
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I agree that the market is defined by the customers, but I disagree this is not widely accepted among linux developers. Linux developers know who their customers are, and they cater to their wants. It just so happens that the "mainstream" computer user doesn't fall into that category. Sure you here people talking about how they want linux to take over the desktop, but these people aren't linux developers. As for newbies who want to learn linux, perhaps they shouldn't ask their questions on development lists, or in slashdot comments, or (heaven forbid) on irc.slashdot.org. There are plenty of people willing to help. If you don't want to figure out what the rules of the forum you choose are, there are plenty of companies you can pay not to flame you while they help you. They probably won't tell you to reinstall when you have a problem like microsoft will, either.
I write kernel code 60 hours a week. I could care less if anybody other than me considers linux a worthy desktop OS. As long as our server and custom engineering customers keep sending the checks, and as long as I can continue to use XFree86 without some silly desktop environment, I'm perfectly happy. If somebody else wants to make linux into a mainstream desktop operating system they are perfecty welcome, but as far as I can tell linux has been about filling the niche that microsoft and the commercial unix vendors couldn't fill. That's why it was written, and the people doing the work are still driven by the same desire. They want to solve their own problem. That same spirit is present in the people who pay me to write code. They don't know how to do it themselves, but they want linux to scratch their itch, so they pay me to do it. In fact, I'll bet that untill somebody is willing to pay to make linux into a desktop OS it won't completely happen, because the people who know how to write the code to make a great desktop OS know enough to feel constrained by typical desktop features. Remember, linux is 'free' as in freedom, not 'free' of charge.
Something like if they look left, then they are accessing the left hand side of the brain which is the 'artistic' side - so they are making something up. If they look right then they are trying to do memory recall.
You do realize that if this is really what they said then they are full of shit, right? While there may be some truth to the idea that one side of the brain is responsible for a certain kind of thinking and the other is responsible for the rest, it's definatly not the same side for everybody. Also, some people can use both sides effectively for everything.
Seriously, there have been lots of presidents who have done unpopular things, and have been booed louder and longer than George W. has been. It just seems to you like nobody's ever needed it more than George W. because he's in the spotlight right now, and the booing that was edited out of past president's speeches has been long forgotten.
If you're going to short change history, don't do it while you're bitching about history being short changed.
Thanks, that's great. A window still has to be in the foreground to have focus, but I think I can live with that. No more instant messages to the wrong person!
That's only half true. PCI devices can still use the extra speed for DMA, so while only half to the memory throughput can be used by the processor, the PCI and AGP busses can get to memory using the remaining throughput. It's not completely crippled.
Oh, and 133MHz SDRAM is still WAY cheaper than DDR.
Your problem with understanding wht I'm talking about is that you think a script is simply a list of actions you can perform with a GUI with the potential for some user interaction. Worse, in the example you provided, you show that you are limited to the operations that microsoft chose to make available for any particular object. That means you can't write a script that does something microsoft hasn't already thought of. Real flexable, huh?
Sure, windows scripting may be suitable for common administration tasks, but it's not suitable for novel tasks.
Sorry, I was a windows and DOS user first and then moved to unix. Windows scripting is crippled, and the basic utilities that come with unix dont come with windows. It's so broken that even microsoft has admitted it and they're fixing it in longhorn. You just admitted it yourself.
I will give you that perl will shorten tasks that I described as taking hundreds of lines of code.
Slashdot Mirror
The first one of those could be semi-easily defeted with a well written vision program. The second could be very easily defeated by a simple concept to image hash database. Such a database could be built through colabaration such that each user would provide data for the database occationally, but most of the time the interaction could be automated. The final test could simply be brute forced. Pick three buttons. Keep selecting those until they're right. Given enough processing power it would be significantly easier than that.
When designing these novelty programs, the designers assume that nobody will be able to quickly gain an understanding of how a small portion of the human brain works enough to implement it's functionality in software. Worse, by exploiting what we don't know about writing software to emulate the brain, they've define the probelm set in such a way that any guarantees they provide will be short lived. In the present, these programs for ensuring you're interacting with an actual person might be useful for single transactions that involve cash, but they're useless for ensuring you're not geting your web content scraped by a script because you don't need better than 10-20% accuracy when you have infinite retries. In the long term (which is 12-48 months probably) 80-99% accuracy will be easily achieved through study and improvements in hardware.
In other words, If human eyes can read it someone can write software to parse it.
Thank you for not reading my whole message before replying. You're responce is interesting in thread regarding a recent onling subscription style game that flopped mightily when compared to expectations.
Now, while we're all doing math based on bad asumptions, lets point out your fatal flaw:
MMORPG's hit the 50K mark easy.
Not only is that not true now (No game hits the 50K mark easily. Go calculate the standard deviation on your average... It's huge.), but as more subscription based games come to market it'll be even harder to pick up that many customers. Not only that, but since people only have so much money to spend on gaming each month, as more games come out either the average number of initial buyers will have to drop sharply, or the average length of a subscription will have to be much shorter. That means with each addition to the online gaming market, there will be much higher risk in developing an online game and much lower potential rewards. What's a capitalist to do then?
Communists ignore profits, Capitalists exploit them.
Capitalists with money look at all the risks and factor them into their opinion. Capitalists who can't do that end up like many dot-com investors I know. Communists probably wouldn't have the games in the first place. I expect the number of online games on the shelf at any one time to peak in the next 6-10 months, then you'll be seeing only one or two new online games on the shelf in any given six month period.
Of course we're both speculating, so we'll have to wait a year and see which of us is right.
And then they hand your job to an H1-B, or ship it to India altogether. It's this smug false sense of irreplacability that got us into this mess in the first place.
If the person in India has the skills to do the job just as well, is the person in India less deserving of that job than you? Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway? If you're not truly irreplaceable, and somebody who costs less than you comes along, then you should be replaced.
It's best to look at this as an exercise in schadenfreude: all of those wanna-be technolibertarians who spent most of the 90s shuddering and twitching at the mere mention of unions, collective bargaining or any other manifestation of labor rights now get to find out the hard way what life is like when management holds all of the cards.
All a union would do is make it so you have zero individual say in the terms of your employment contract. I'm sorry, but I want more control over my life then that. The answer is not to form a union, but to make yourself so desireable as an employee that the hiring company doesn't hold all the cards. If you can't do that then you should be aiming for a job where you can do that instead of whining about it and colectively barganing. I don't understand why everybody thinks they're entitiled to work in whatever field they'd like. Get a job that you're so good at you can negotiate the terms, or suck it up and take what they give you.
We got one of those too. I haven't been able to come up with a way to get them to waste their money actually auditing us, but I'm working on it. Except for the single windows machine and my Mac, all of our machines run either free software, or software we wrote ourselves. It would be fun to have them come in and waste their time.
Funny how if you word it right you only have to fabricate one tiny fact to completely distort history.
The "PC Industry" did NOT allow third partys to manufacure machines to bring down costs. Compaq reverce engineered the IBM PC, and the availability of new low cost machines almost killed IBM. Apple should have learned from this and never allowed the clones. There was existing history to demonstrate what would happen.
Now IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore (they rebrand them) and the only reason they're still in business is their other divisions. Funny how whay breaks one can break the other, huh?
$0 * 1,000,000 $50 * 5,000. That's right, even 5,000 people who are willing to pay will bring in more than millions of people who don't want to pay.
Look, you just don't get it. I'm not talking about anything being FREE here. I'm talking about the difference between a fixed up-front cost, and an undefined subscription fee paid over time. Services without an absolute defined cost are less attractive to most people than something with a recurring fee. It's that simple. There is no zero in the equation. There's nobody who doesn't pay. The only difference is how much, and when.
You're also ignoring the next level up of subscription services: things like Xbox Live!. All your fees that you might have to pay per game, are wrapped into one, easy fee. If you want to play 10 games online, great. They'll charge a value that means they can cover costs and maintain their servers, while making a profit. And then they add on premiums, like extra content for games: finished Splinter Cell? Pay 10$ and get a whole new set of missions! Don't want to buy NBA 2k4 at 74$? Pay 15$, and get the 2k4 rosters for 2k3!
Congratulations. You've just proven that you're as dumb as the marketeers hoped. You're getting the same amount of entertainment for more money, and if you really were getting more for less then you've just contridicted your whole argument.
Crap, I just looked at your user name. Whay am I not surprised that you're the same guy who didn't seem to get it in the other thread either... I'm done. Back to work.
If you have a problem with it costing N dollars, wait until it drops, or don't pay. Whinning about how it should be free is stupid -- you're not EA, it's not your decision to make. All you do is make yourself sound like a whiny teenager living in your parents' basement.
For the record, I'm not whining, I'm observing. EA can charge whatever they want, but as the story says, their game flopped. Similarly, instead of whining I just purchase the game I think are price justified. Hense EA did not recieve my purchase, nor did verant or any of those other companies. Blizard, on the other had has gotten $160 out of me in the last four years. When people stop making standalone games altogether I won't whine, I'll start a gmae company and clean up.
Well, it may or may not be a bad model. The market will decide. You need to understand that while you may not personally agree with something, you are not a statistically important part of the market unless you act in concert with other people.
Did you even read my comment? Did you even read the article? I'm done responding to you. You're not worth the words.
at $10/month with 50K subscribers you are bringing in half a million per month
Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million. That means you need to keep your 50K subscribers around for over two years to make as much money as you would selling your game to the wider audience of people not willing to pay per month. Now, considering most people get tired with a game after 6 months or so, who's going to make more money? Why do you think I'm a communist again? Do some math before you question somebodies capitalist sensabilities. Sure I made up the 250,000 number, and the math is alot more complicated than that due to distribution costs, but most games don't become everquest. Most games get a small number of subscribers for a short period of time like we're now seeing with The Sims, and have seen with basically every non-EQ MMORPG. Diablo 2 sold millions of copies at $60 a pop. How many do you think they'd have sold if you had to pay $10 a month to play? Even if it was half, hardly anybody plays still, and it's only a year later. The chances of making a successful subscription based online game are low, and get lower with each new game that ends up on the shelf and the compitition for each person's $10 grows. That makes the economic case for standalone games stronger every day.
You're going to see pay-for-play games slowly die, with only one or two on the shelf at a time as soon as people realize you make more money by not scaring off a huge percentage of you audience with a fee, find that people only pay monthly for one or two games at a time, and see that they hardly ever switch games. Sure there are profits to be made with subscription models, but they're not as big as they sound, and they're not very easy to tap into.
Um, ther's no advertising on battle.net. It's funded by box sales. It doesn't matter wether you'd be willing to pay per month for it because you payed up front. Also, if you couldn't play on battle.net alot, lets say only on saturdays for an hour but you really liked it, wouldn't it suck to have to pay $1 an hour for what everybody else gets for $0.20 a day?
The trouble with most pay-for-play online gaming is not that it costs money. Usually the problem is that the cost is the same no matter how much you play, and the structure of the game is such that the rewards of playing are based on time spent playing. This blocks out a whole segment of gamers who can't play a game for hours a day, or perhaps can't even play every day. The cost per unit fun increases exponentially for people with less gaming time.
That's still not the problem with The Sims online. The problem with The Sims is that they're trying to charge a fee for somthing that their prospective customers already get for free. You're getting to read this comment for free. Why don't you send me some money to read it. Of course you're not going to, because why would you if you can read it (and even publicly respond) for free. Trying to charge people to read my slashdot comments would be a bad business model even though thousands of people read them without paying every day. Similarly trying to charge people to play The Sims is a bad business model even though millions of people play The Sims for free every day. Having alot of mindshare doesn't mean people will give you money.
Convergence is an excuse to keep the price range for devices in the $500 range. I'll agree with your argument when we start to see some useful convergence that is affordable, I.E, features are added because the device could do that anyway and it adds no cost. For now, converged devices jut mean things are more expensive, have shorter battery life, and duplicate functionality with the other stuff you need because each device is only really good at one thing and sucks at everything else.
Besides, this article isn't about convergence, it's about some stupid third party company thinking that a 32MB MP3 player the size of a GBA will be desireable, even though you can't play games at the same time as listening to music like you could if you had truly seperate devices, and the total cost will be the same as two seperate devices.
My sister loves The Sims. She returned The Sims online when she got it for christmas though. She said "I can play the sims and run instant messanger for free. I don't need another bill to pay".
She just hits Alt-Tab like she's flipping through TV stations.
All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. The initial cost of games is already high. I have no desire to pay per month to have access to something I don't know how often I'll have the free time to use. If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?
I know it didn't get my money because movies cost $9 per ticket now, and you have to watch advertisements (I'm not talking about previews) before the show. Perhaps if they cost $6 and had ads, or $9 and had no ads I'd have gone, but unless the pricing changes I'm done seeing movies in the theatres.
Since I skipped it in the theatres, I can watch it at home on my giant television (Which cost about as much money as I used to spend on movie tickets each year back when it cost $7/ticket) after I buy the DVD for $15. I'll still have saved $3, and I'll be able to watch it as many times as I like.
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BTW, before any of you reply to this saying theaters have to show advertisements to make money because the studios take all of the ticket revenue, bon't bother. There's so much money that changes hands at the box office that if the theaters and the studios can't figure out how to make everybody profitable based on that money alone they need to go out of business and let somebody else figure it out.
And yes, I used to spend over $700 a year seeing movies, which isn't hard at $7 a ticket. Just buy two tickets every weekend for a year and you're there. I don't even want to think about how much money I actually spent if you figure in refreshments and quarters at the arcade before the show...
Good luck collecting on that one. You probably can't extract very much money from jobless students with poor social skills.
The first 5.25" 1GB hard drive was introduced in 1994 (9 years ago). Your 9GB drives are no older than 6-7 years. They are certainly not 10+ years old.
Any properly treated <= 10k RPM SCSI disk drive you get today will likely last just as long. Also, if it's still working after three years, it'll likely be working after six. You'll find almost all the defects in the first 18 months. It's should be no surprise that cheap IDE disks will be less reliable than the more expensive high quality SCSI disks. They're not just more expensive because of industry colusion. The extra quality costs more to manufacture. Considering that the upgrade cycle for x86 PCs has been less than 2 years for 5 years or so, can you blame the hard drive manufactures for being cheap when a very small percentage of their customers will care?
Also, the technology has improved in the 6 years since those modems I linked to came out. You can get DSL up to 28,000 feet with some of the newer equipment I've seen, but you can't do it with those old SpeedStreams.
Oops. :)
Older SDSL modems should do the trick. I know that the SpeedStream 5250 not only works, but when used at both ends can totally autoconfigure a DSL bridge for ethernet at the highest speed your pair is capable of. The best part is that they're old and cheap. You can find them for $10 on eBay, so if you buy them and find out there's a problem with your loop, you're only out $20.
I've seen these things work at 11,000 feet, and the manual for mine says it's possible to use for up to 18,000 feet (measured by line impedance). If you're 2 miles drive from your friend's house you could have 20k+ feet between the two of you, or worse, your line could go through the CO on the way there. If you're too far out for DSL from the CO, you're definatly too far from your friends house if your line makes a stop at the CO first!
I agree that the market is defined by the customers, but I disagree this is not widely accepted among linux developers. Linux developers know who their customers are, and they cater to their wants. It just so happens that the "mainstream" computer user doesn't fall into that category. Sure you here people talking about how they want linux to take over the desktop, but these people aren't linux developers. As for newbies who want to learn linux, perhaps they shouldn't ask their questions on development lists, or in slashdot comments, or (heaven forbid) on irc.slashdot.org. There are plenty of people willing to help. If you don't want to figure out what the rules of the forum you choose are, there are plenty of companies you can pay not to flame you while they help you. They probably won't tell you to reinstall when you have a problem like microsoft will, either.
I write kernel code 60 hours a week. I could care less if anybody other than me considers linux a worthy desktop OS. As long as our server and custom engineering customers keep sending the checks, and as long as I can continue to use XFree86 without some silly desktop environment, I'm perfectly happy. If somebody else wants to make linux into a mainstream desktop operating system they are perfecty welcome, but as far as I can tell linux has been about filling the niche that microsoft and the commercial unix vendors couldn't fill. That's why it was written, and the people doing the work are still driven by the same desire. They want to solve their own problem. That same spirit is present in the people who pay me to write code. They don't know how to do it themselves, but they want linux to scratch their itch, so they pay me to do it. In fact, I'll bet that untill somebody is willing to pay to make linux into a desktop OS it won't completely happen, because the people who know how to write the code to make a great desktop OS know enough to feel constrained by typical desktop features. Remember, linux is 'free' as in freedom, not 'free' of charge.
Something like if they look left, then they are accessing the left hand side of the brain which is the 'artistic' side - so they are making something up. If they look right then they are trying to do memory recall.
You do realize that if this is really what they said then they are full of shit, right? While there may be some truth to the idea that one side of the brain is responsible for a certain kind of thinking and the other is responsible for the rest, it's definatly not the same side for everybody. Also, some people can use both sides effectively for everything.
but none ever needed them more than W.
Nice troll.
Seriously, there have been lots of presidents who have done unpopular things, and have been booed louder and longer than George W. has been. It just seems to you like nobody's ever needed it more than George W. because he's in the spotlight right now, and the booing that was edited out of past president's speeches has been long forgotten.
If you're going to short change history, don't do it while you're bitching about history being short changed.
Thanks, that's great. A window still has to be in the foreground to have focus, but I think I can live with that. No more instant messages to the wrong person!
That's only half true. PCI devices can still use the extra speed for DMA, so while only half to the memory throughput can be used by the processor, the PCI and AGP busses can get to memory using the remaining throughput. It's not completely crippled.
Oh, and 133MHz SDRAM is still WAY cheaper than DDR.
Your problem with understanding wht I'm talking about is that you think a script is simply a list of actions you can perform with a GUI with the potential for some user interaction. Worse, in the example you provided, you show that you are limited to the operations that microsoft chose to make available for any particular object. That means you can't write a script that does something microsoft hasn't already thought of. Real flexable, huh?
Sure, windows scripting may be suitable for common administration tasks, but it's not suitable for novel tasks.
Sorry, I was a windows and DOS user first and then moved to unix. Windows scripting is crippled, and the basic utilities that come with unix dont come with windows. It's so broken that even microsoft has admitted it and they're fixing it in longhorn. You just admitted it yourself.
I will give you that perl will shorten tasks that I described as taking hundreds of lines of code.