The geek factor I was referring to is not the value of the GNU/Linux install but simply the idea of putting GNU/Linux somewhere new, like on a potato-powered clock or something similar.
Ummm... yeah.
You do know that LinuxPPC has been running on thousands of Apple systems since 1996, right?
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I were to just give in. To walk into the machine with wide-open eyes; to accept the culture of invasive advertizement as easilly as I accept changes in the weather; to join every booksaver club that saves me even a couple bucks a year; to make all my purchasing decisions based on who calls me and offers me a service; to post my e-mail address everywhere without a care in the world, utterly willing to see my in-box brim over with spam on a daily basis.
It would be an interesting experiment... but would also be a very difficult one to end, once the system had its talons in me.
I have heard people bitch about this all the time but the dvd player on my pc never makes me watch trailers and i just hit the skip ahead 5 seconds thingy for the fbi warning...
Oh, very helpful!
The "Ask Slashdot" topic question was asking what DVD players let you skip the FBI warnings & stuff, and the answer you gave was "mine."
Could you at least include your address, so he can go watch movies at your house?
Honestly, the things that get modded up as "Informative" these days...
If you look at that code and all you see in inefficiency, you are not looking close enough, or are not considering the advantages of using a "CGI" object. I can create rich and varied CGI forms and tables that would take up a crapload of PHP & HTML (the way you write it), and do them in a few lines.
If you are just comparing how short something can be and still say "Hello, world" when you view it on a browser, then I can do you one better. Step 1: Create a text file that contains the following:
Hello, world.
Step 2: Change the.txt file suffix to.html
The C++ way of writing a "Hello, World" program looks inefficient to a BASIC programmer for the same reason you are turning your nose up to Perl's CGI:pm object... the BASIC programmer doesn't yet understand the power of what he's looking at.
Not so great for marketing pages that your design people are doing on frontpage, but it totally rocks for web tools you use internally (such as putting your web logs into html format so the PHB can read them on his browser).
IMHO, it's the other way around. You should choose the your web server's OS based on what will best run your chosen web platform. If you decide that Apache will be your web server (good choice!), then put it on a UNIX or UNIX-alike box. If you go with IIS (less good), then run it on XP.
Since there are several flavors of *nix out there that run on x86 hardware, you aren't even locked into the choice if you already rushed out and bought a shiny new Dell server.
Web servers are a great example of a dedicated box. It sits in the back of your server closet, accessing databases and serving pages. In other words, the OS does not matter, beyond the choices of web software tools available for it.
Jesus and Ghandi both spoke of sacrifice and service, yet gathered no wealth and owned no slaves. Rather, they lead by example, by making themselves servants to those they would lead, and sacrificing everything.
Just two examples that contradict Mr. Galt's rule of thumb concerning prophets. There are others, but I've gone through all this enough times before that I'm really no longer interested in discussing this with you. I was into Rand once, just like most libertarian freedom-lovers were probably hooked on her vibe at one time or another... but then I grew up. You will too, eventually. HAND.
Most of your statements concerning religion are at least as off base as anything I've said about objectivists. Also, kindly refrain from ad hominim attacks, such as claiming a critic is somehow "desperate" to discredit objectivism, if you want to persuade people towards this chosen philosophy of yours. The tone of such comments makes it sound like you are more interested in assuring yourself of your correctness than actually convincing anybody of anything. If that's not the case, then the angry and defensive style with which you have been addressing everybody here might be working against your goal. Just a suggestion.
The proposed action could have more grave consequences than not being allowed into Australia (oh, gawd no! not that!)
For example, if megacorporation x happens to have a mission-critical file on their server, which needs to be up-to-the-second to have full value, and is called "matrix.h", imagine if some hacker working for the movie company notices their LAN is connected to a P2P network (because a 2nd Shift help-desk was downloading his favorite anime theme songs). They hack into the network, find what looks to them like a copy of a popular movie (matrix.h), and delete every iteration of it from the network, forcing the company to go to a 12-hour old back-up tape, which the studio also erases remotely while the night-cycle operator, who who just got done restoring the file, takes a bathroom break before removing the tape.
Shortly after megacorp x's admins work out what happened, the studio is sued for a lot more money than piracy ever cost them.
But they're not very similar other than the underlying theme. (HoD takes place in Africa during the colonialization, Apocalypse in Vietnam during the war.)
That's funny. I would have said they are not very different apart from the setting.
It has been pointed out by others that self-love and self-hatred are two sides of the same coin: self-worship.
The worship of the self is an empty and futile exercise, because you are fixating on something that will be dust in less than a Century. No matter how much you succeed or fail at achiving the Randian ideal, you still amount to the same as everybody else in the end. (Unless you believe that your existance continues beyond your death; but Rand, who is currently Yet Another Corpse, did not.)
That majesty you admire is a quality you can have if you want it.
You just exposed the central flaw of almost all of Rand's ideas. Majesty is attainable if you want it. The correlary to that statement is that those who lack such majesty simply must not want it. Ergo, the cripple must be lazy for not rising from his wheelchair and walking, and building a ramp to the door of the public library just encourages said laziness. A well-ordered Randian society would close the library anyway, and spur our disabled hero to buy his own books with the money he could be making as a professional athelete, if only he wanted to, the slothful bastard. Libraries which loan out books for free and those who build wheelchair ramps are preventing mandkind from reaching its lofty potential.
This sort of thinking is exactly why so few people take Rand seriously at all.
Re:Atlas Shrugged. - OT reply to parent post
on
Dystopic Novels?
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· Score: 1
(As an aside, cheap potshots at religious texts rarely strenghten your argument. I'm not a christian by any stretch, but parts of the bible are very humane. Parts advocate things like stoning homosexuals, but your statement was over-broad).
Sorry to nitpick, but the Bible never advocates stoning homosexuals, even if some of those who do advocate that sort of thing claim to have read it "in there somewhere."
For one thing, the Bible never distinguishes between "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals". The concept that a person could "be" one or the other was completely alien to them. Gay sex was forbidden within the ancient nation of Israel (and only among Jews) for reasons that get into that whole "kosher" thing which prevented them from trimming their earlocks, eating shellfish, or weaving two different fabrics together. The topic of homosexuality is then pretty much abandoned until the New Testament scriptures, where Paul writes about it in his letters. He stressed that followers of Christ should not do that sort of thing, but also urges tollerance and compassion towards those who do.
For the record, Christ himself only advocated putting one group of people to death, and that was child abusers. IIRC, he said that it would be better for all concerned if you tied a rock around such a man's neck and throw it into the bottom of a river.
As for why the post you were replying to was taking "potshots" at religious texts, it should come as no surprise. He's an Ayn Rand fan, and Rand hated religion almost as much as communism. She saw it as just another tool to keep the '1337 individualists of the world down.
Okay, I'm not singling out the parent post here, but a lot of people here seem to be confused about the definition of "dystopic novels." Really confused. As in "Alanis Moressette is confused about what 'ironic' means" confused.
"Dystopic" is meant to mean "the opposite of utopian." (Utopia being a fantasy of a man-made paradise, Dystopia therefore is a cautionary nightmare fantasy of a man-made Hell.)
Webster's Dictionary defines a dystopia "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." A "dystopic novel" is a sub-genre of fantasy/sci-fi which takes place in such a setting.
"We", "1984", "Brave New World" are dystopic novels.
"Brazil" is probably the best original dystopic film I know of.
Balzac was a Romantic Era writer who wrote about the problems of the real world, not the perils implied by an imaginary one. His books may be depressing, but that's not the same thing as being dystopic.
But, having a handful of these already, I see this as a list of books to avoid!
I would say that a list of books to avoid has value. If only somebody had taken me aside in the early 90's and persuaded me to just read the cutesy side-bar comments in the margins of Copeland's "Generation X", and skip the horrible novel printed between them, they could have saved me the trouble of reading that lame story (although it was fairly short).
Actually, the "Apple is dying" crowd usually say 2%-3%. The 5% figure has often been displayed prominently in Apple's own ads. If that figure ignored Apple's in-store and on-line sales, don't you think Apple would have commissioned another study by now, or demanded a correction from the companies doing these surveys, rather than run adds on their website saying, "now if we can just convince 1 out of every 19 PC users to switch to a Mac, we would double our market share!"
You were close to being right. All G4's come from Motorolla, because what makes a G4 a G4 is Motorolla's "AltiVec" layer.
G3's are also made by IBM, as the chip was jointly designed by the same "AIM" alliance (AAPL/IBM/MOTO) that came up with the PPC chip in the first place. For that matter, Apple could, in theory, just make their own G3's if they spent the money on the infrastructure to do it.
Jobs seems to like AltiVec, though, so everything except the iBook and the $899 "budget" iMac has been moved to the G4, which creates the vendor lock that Apple is currently dealing with.
Re:"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?
on
Intel Inside For Apple?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The tougher fact is this: The 2.5GHz P4 is significantly cheaper than the 1GHz G4. You can buy 1GHz G4's in top-of-the-line Macs. You can buy 2.5GHz P4's at Costco.
The ratio is, literally, "bang for the buck". At some point the bang for the buck for Intel will so outstrip the PowerPC that Apple simply won't have any choice but to make the jump. Thankfully, once Apple's got everyone on board on MacOS X, the procedure isn't too evil. NeXT did it once already.
P4's are cheaper to buy, yes. However, they consume more power and run hotter, which makes the G4 a vastly superior choice for laptops (even in bang for the buck comparisons).
As for the notion that the gap will widen and Apple will be forced to switch, keep in minds that in the desktop market the x86 archetecture has always had a ! for $ edge over any Motorolla/Apple system (with the exception of the original Apple ][, in which Woz chose a Moto knock-off over Intel chips because they were cheaper). I'm fairly sure that no Mac has ever given you more flops-per-dollar than whatever the prevailing Wintel box of the day was... Not so much because the chips are so much more expensive (although the do cost a little more), but because Apple's superior operating systems have let them sell their boxen with a much higher profit margin than companies like Compaq (RIP) and Packard Bell (Ditto), who had no way of really making their computer stand out from the budget systems from your local neighborhood screwdriver shop (or the no-name vendors who get all their sales from good scores on Pricewatch.com).
So yea, Apple could (in theory) save about $50 a system (their cost) by moving everything over to Intel. But they would also end up increasing the odds that somebody could reverse-engineer their ROMs (as Compaq once did to IBM), and suddenly all those "Pricewatch Special" shitbox PC's and PC Mo-Bo kits (and I say that as a big fan of "Pricewatch Special" shitbox kits) will be able to run OS X after a simple chip-mod, and Apple would die a horrible death shortly thereafter, making version 10.5 (or whatever) the last Mac OS ever.
Nobody can make enough money to sustain a company by writing operating systems for commodity PC's sold by other vendors. Microsoft doesn't; they make the big bucks selling their Office Suite (which is MS's Real Monopoly if you ask me). Red Hat also doesn't; they sell and support an OS that they did not have to write or buy, and is being constantly dev'd by people they don't pay. Remember when we were told in the pages of "In the Beggining Was the Command Line" that Be would be the wave of the future? Be is gone. Remember when they tried to revive the Amiga OS? Remember when Gateway bought it to port to x86? Remember when the chumps they sold it to were going to release something?
Apple learned the hard way during their 1-year attempt at "clone" licensing that the only way they can develop a desktop OS and make money doing it is if they sell every single computer that runs it. By using a chip that is not a commodity part, they raise the barrier of entry to somebody that wants to copy their ROM settings and make a rival motherboard. Switching to an x86 archetecture jeopardizes that plan. Some think that this is part of the reason why Apple became interested in StrongARM technology last time their relations with Motorolla became strained. If they were to drop Motorolla, I'm guessing that they would be far more likely to contact some other chip maker (i.e., IBM, Siemens, TI, Lucent, AMD, whoever) and contract them to make another non-x86 chipset for them... maybe even one that already understands the existing G3 instructions. For that matter, buying those high-performing G3's that IBM is already making for their servers might even make more sense than moving to Intel.
Still, I can't help but think that a lot of these rumors get started by Apple turf-layers, who are hoping to light a fire under the asses of Motorolla engineers.
If you treasure old DOS games, buy an old x86 from a pawn shop or something. You might even be able to find one for free.
Likewise, if you really love some elderly Mac games, just run them on an old Mac (which you should be able to aquire fairly cheaply... a friend of mine offered me his old 4400 for free!)
Obsolete games don't really end up in "oblivion." They still run on the hardware they were written for, and if they were truely popular somebody will usually end up writing a VM that will run them on modern systems.
Try "Little Green Men" by Christopher Buckley. It's a book about a powerful and respected journalist who finds himself rapidly becoming one of those fringe tabloid cranks after he experiences what he believes to be an alien abduction. A very twisted story.
Occaisionally you'll see one in a fancy bar or in a wealthy person's basement.
Not very common in the Minneapolis area? Are you serious? I live in the Twin Cities too, and foosball tables can be found in lots of non-"fancy" bars, and even some bowling alleys. Also, a crapload of middle-class suburban homes have them in their basements. Growing up in East Bloomington (back when living in Bloomington was fairly cheap), there were two kids on my block alone alone that had them. They're generally cheaper than a good billiards or pool table. Head over to either Peter's Billiards or All American Recriation and ask the sales guys there, and you will find that they sell plenty of foosball and air hockey tables in Minnesota, both to bars and to homes.
My house didn't have a foosball table when I was a kid (so I always got my ass kicked by the kids that did have them), but my industriously geeky dad built a very nice, solid air-hockey table, after measuring the specs of the one at the store and mail-ordering for the goals, paddles and puck.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... yeah.
You do know that LinuxPPC has been running on thousands of Apple systems since 1996, right?
It would be an interesting experiment... but would also be a very difficult one to end, once the system had its talons in me.
Granted, that advice is less helpful whenever Disney releases a good movie, but at least in this case you are good to go.
Oh, very helpful!
The "Ask Slashdot" topic question was asking what DVD players let you skip the FBI warnings & stuff, and the answer you gave was "mine."
Could you at least include your address, so he can go watch movies at your house?
Honestly, the things that get modded up as "Informative" these days...
If you are just comparing how short something can be and still say "Hello, world" when you view it on a browser, then I can do you one better. Step 1: Create a text file that contains the following:
Hello, world.
Step 2: Change the .txt file suffix to .html
The C++ way of writing a "Hello, World" program looks inefficient to a BASIC programmer for the same reason you are turning your nose up to Perl's CGI:pm object... the BASIC programmer doesn't yet understand the power of what he's looking at.
Sorry. My first IT job was for a brokerage, so I'm used to spelling it "MOTO".
I hate to pile on, but there's also the object-based approach:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use CGI;
$q = new CGI;
$var = "Hello World";
print $q->start_html(-type=>"text/html),
$q->p("$var"), $q->end_html;
Not so great for marketing pages that your design people are doing on frontpage, but it totally rocks for web tools you use internally (such as putting your web logs into html format so the PHB can read them on his browser).
Since there are several flavors of *nix out there that run on x86 hardware, you aren't even locked into the choice if you already rushed out and bought a shiny new Dell server.
Web servers are a great example of a dedicated box. It sits in the back of your server closet, accessing databases and serving pages. In other words, the OS does not matter, beyond the choices of web software tools available for it.
Just two examples that contradict Mr. Galt's rule of thumb concerning prophets. There are others, but I've gone through all this enough times before that I'm really no longer interested in discussing this with you. I was into Rand once, just like most libertarian freedom-lovers were probably hooked on her vibe at one time or another... but then I grew up. You will too, eventually. HAND.
Most of your statements concerning religion are at least as off base as anything I've said about objectivists. Also, kindly refrain from ad hominim attacks, such as claiming a critic is somehow "desperate" to discredit objectivism, if you want to persuade people towards this chosen philosophy of yours. The tone of such comments makes it sound like you are more interested in assuring yourself of your correctness than actually convincing anybody of anything. If that's not the case, then the angry and defensive style with which you have been addressing everybody here might be working against your goal. Just a suggestion.
No, it's not my thinking either. It's the sort of thinking that many, many Objectivism bosters express in on-line discussions all the time.
For example, if megacorporation x happens to have a mission-critical file on their server, which needs to be up-to-the-second to have full value, and is called "matrix.h", imagine if some hacker working for the movie company notices their LAN is connected to a P2P network (because a 2nd Shift help-desk was downloading his favorite anime theme songs). They hack into the network, find what looks to them like a copy of a popular movie (matrix.h), and delete every iteration of it from the network, forcing the company to go to a 12-hour old back-up tape, which the studio also erases remotely while the night-cycle operator, who who just got done restoring the file, takes a bathroom break before removing the tape.
Shortly after megacorp x's admins work out what happened, the studio is sued for a lot more money than piracy ever cost them.
Okay, not a likely scenario, but fun to imagine.
That's funny. I would have said they are not very different apart from the setting.
The worship of the self is an empty and futile exercise, because you are fixating on something that will be dust in less than a Century. No matter how much you succeed or fail at achiving the Randian ideal, you still amount to the same as everybody else in the end. (Unless you believe that your existance continues beyond your death; but Rand, who is currently Yet Another Corpse, did not.)
You just exposed the central flaw of almost all of Rand's ideas. Majesty is attainable if you want it. The correlary to that statement is that those who lack such majesty simply must not want it. Ergo, the cripple must be lazy for not rising from his wheelchair and walking, and building a ramp to the door of the public library just encourages said laziness. A well-ordered Randian society would close the library anyway, and spur our disabled hero to buy his own books with the money he could be making as a professional athelete, if only he wanted to, the slothful bastard. Libraries which loan out books for free and those who build wheelchair ramps are preventing mandkind from reaching its lofty potential.
This sort of thinking is exactly why so few people take Rand seriously at all.
Sorry to nitpick, but the Bible never advocates stoning homosexuals, even if some of those who do advocate that sort of thing claim to have read it "in there somewhere."
For one thing, the Bible never distinguishes between "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals". The concept that a person could "be" one or the other was completely alien to them. Gay sex was forbidden within the ancient nation of Israel (and only among Jews) for reasons that get into that whole "kosher" thing which prevented them from trimming their earlocks, eating shellfish, or weaving two different fabrics together. The topic of homosexuality is then pretty much abandoned until the New Testament scriptures, where Paul writes about it in his letters. He stressed that followers of Christ should not do that sort of thing, but also urges tollerance and compassion towards those who do.
For the record, Christ himself only advocated putting one group of people to death, and that was child abusers. IIRC, he said that it would be better for all concerned if you tied a rock around such a man's neck and throw it into the bottom of a river.
As for why the post you were replying to was taking "potshots" at religious texts, it should come as no surprise. He's an Ayn Rand fan, and Rand hated religion almost as much as communism. She saw it as just another tool to keep the '1337 individualists of the world down.
"Dystopic" is meant to mean "the opposite of utopian." (Utopia being a fantasy of a man-made paradise, Dystopia therefore is a cautionary nightmare fantasy of a man-made Hell.)
Webster's Dictionary defines a dystopia "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." A "dystopic novel" is a sub-genre of fantasy/sci-fi which takes place in such a setting.
"We", "1984", "Brave New World" are dystopic novels.
"Brazil" is probably the best original dystopic film I know of.
Balzac was a Romantic Era writer who wrote about the problems of the real world, not the perils implied by an imaginary one. His books may be depressing, but that's not the same thing as being dystopic.
I would say that a list of books to avoid has value. If only somebody had taken me aside in the early 90's and persuaded me to just read the cutesy side-bar comments in the margins of Copeland's "Generation X", and skip the horrible novel printed between them, they could have saved me the trouble of reading that lame story (although it was fairly short).
That movie was every bit as dry and pedantic as Rand's novels, and stay's fairly true to her fun reactionary politics.
Plus, you would get a primer on Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas about archetecture at the same time! Two philosophy lessons for the price of one rental!
Actually, the "Apple is dying" crowd usually say 2%-3%. The 5% figure has often been displayed prominently in Apple's own ads. If that figure ignored Apple's in-store and on-line sales, don't you think Apple would have commissioned another study by now, or demanded a correction from the companies doing these surveys, rather than run adds on their website saying, "now if we can just convince 1 out of every 19 PC users to switch to a Mac, we would double our market share!"
G3's are also made by IBM, as the chip was jointly designed by the same "AIM" alliance (AAPL/IBM/MOTO) that came up with the PPC chip in the first place. For that matter, Apple could, in theory, just make their own G3's if they spent the money on the infrastructure to do it.
Jobs seems to like AltiVec, though, so everything except the iBook and the $899 "budget" iMac has been moved to the G4, which creates the vendor lock that Apple is currently dealing with.
The tougher fact is this: The 2.5GHz P4 is significantly cheaper than the 1GHz G4. You can buy 1GHz G4's in top-of-the-line Macs. You can buy 2.5GHz P4's at Costco.
The ratio is, literally, "bang for the buck". At some point the bang for the buck for Intel will so outstrip the PowerPC that Apple simply won't have any choice but to make the jump. Thankfully, once Apple's got everyone on board on MacOS X, the procedure isn't too evil. NeXT did it once already.
P4's are cheaper to buy, yes. However, they consume more power and run hotter, which makes the G4 a vastly superior choice for laptops (even in bang for the buck comparisons).
As for the notion that the gap will widen and Apple will be forced to switch, keep in minds that in the desktop market the x86 archetecture has always had a ! for $ edge over any Motorolla/Apple system (with the exception of the original Apple ][, in which Woz chose a Moto knock-off over Intel chips because they were cheaper). I'm fairly sure that no Mac has ever given you more flops-per-dollar than whatever the prevailing Wintel box of the day was... Not so much because the chips are so much more expensive (although the do cost a little more), but because Apple's superior operating systems have let them sell their boxen with a much higher profit margin than companies like Compaq (RIP) and Packard Bell (Ditto), who had no way of really making their computer stand out from the budget systems from your local neighborhood screwdriver shop (or the no-name vendors who get all their sales from good scores on Pricewatch.com).
So yea, Apple could (in theory) save about $50 a system (their cost) by moving everything over to Intel. But they would also end up increasing the odds that somebody could reverse-engineer their ROMs (as Compaq once did to IBM), and suddenly all those "Pricewatch Special" shitbox PC's and PC Mo-Bo kits (and I say that as a big fan of "Pricewatch Special" shitbox kits) will be able to run OS X after a simple chip-mod, and Apple would die a horrible death shortly thereafter, making version 10.5 (or whatever) the last Mac OS ever.
Nobody can make enough money to sustain a company by writing operating systems for commodity PC's sold by other vendors. Microsoft doesn't; they make the big bucks selling their Office Suite (which is MS's Real Monopoly if you ask me). Red Hat also doesn't; they sell and support an OS that they did not have to write or buy, and is being constantly dev'd by people they don't pay. Remember when we were told in the pages of "In the Beggining Was the Command Line" that Be would be the wave of the future? Be is gone. Remember when they tried to revive the Amiga OS? Remember when Gateway bought it to port to x86? Remember when the chumps they sold it to were going to release something?
Apple learned the hard way during their 1-year attempt at "clone" licensing that the only way they can develop a desktop OS and make money doing it is if they sell every single computer that runs it. By using a chip that is not a commodity part, they raise the barrier of entry to somebody that wants to copy their ROM settings and make a rival motherboard. Switching to an x86 archetecture jeopardizes that plan. Some think that this is part of the reason why Apple became interested in StrongARM technology last time their relations with Motorolla became strained. If they were to drop Motorolla, I'm guessing that they would be far more likely to contact some other chip maker (i.e., IBM, Siemens, TI, Lucent, AMD, whoever) and contract them to make another non-x86 chipset for them... maybe even one that already understands the existing G3 instructions. For that matter, buying those high-performing G3's that IBM is already making for their servers might even make more sense than moving to Intel.
Still, I can't help but think that a lot of these rumors get started by Apple turf-layers, who are hoping to light a fire under the asses of Motorolla engineers.
Likewise, if you really love some elderly Mac games, just run them on an old Mac (which you should be able to aquire fairly cheaply... a friend of mine offered me his old 4400 for free!)
Obsolete games don't really end up in "oblivion." They still run on the hardware they were written for, and if they were truely popular somebody will usually end up writing a VM that will run them on modern systems.
Try "Little Green Men" by Christopher Buckley. It's a book about a powerful and respected journalist who finds himself rapidly becoming one of those fringe tabloid cranks after he experiences what he believes to be an alien abduction. A very twisted story.
Not very common in the Minneapolis area? Are you serious? I live in the Twin Cities too, and foosball tables can be found in lots of non-"fancy" bars, and even some bowling alleys. Also, a crapload of middle-class suburban homes have them in their basements. Growing up in East Bloomington (back when living in Bloomington was fairly cheap), there were two kids on my block alone alone that had them. They're generally cheaper than a good billiards or pool table. Head over to either Peter's Billiards or All American Recriation and ask the sales guys there, and you will find that they sell plenty of foosball and air hockey tables in Minnesota, both to bars and to homes.
My house didn't have a foosball table when I was a kid (so I always got my ass kicked by the kids that did have them), but my industriously geeky dad built a very nice, solid air-hockey table, after measuring the specs of the one at the store and mail-ordering for the goals, paddles and puck.