As long as STDIN is a keyboard and pointing device combination, and STDOUT is some kind of monitor, then the limits of our physical contact with the PC will demand that we use an interface built on pointing and typing. Most of what makes that kind of interface functional has been thought of, and the current paradigm is good enough that switching is not yet worth the effort.
CLI's rely on human memory... we need to learn to speak the computer's "language", and often need to remember what the computer is currently up to. GUI's rely on our visual pattern recognition abilities. We "see" the commands we want to execute, and have a "finder" or "taskbar" to remind us what is going on. In both cases, the interface is driven by our choices of how we want to communicate with the system, and once you make that decision, a lot of the rest of the design is mostly asthetics.
The change will come when an interface that is obviously better than typing and clicking comes along. Whatever it is, it will need to be enough of a step up to be worth learning. There have been hundreds of "better" keyboards, but they don't get adopted by people because they are not enough of an improvement on the crappy qwerty (or dvorak) that we already know how to use. The next step to succeed will most likely be something completely different than a keyboard, and it will introduce the need for a radiacally different UI.
Oh, I don't know... the way clippy feeds himself through his eyeballs when you are printing... that's gotta count for something. If nothing else, proof that hallucinogens of some kind or another are easilly available in Redmond.
The problem that arises is when children are taught at the elementary level that computers can do all the work for them. Case in point: why would we ever need to know mathematics when we can pull out a calculator and have it do all the work for us?
Yes, and we should also remove all table saws from the shop class. Students are bound to say, "why should we learn to drop chalklines and use a hand saw when a good tablesaw will make a nice, even, level cut for us?"
Metronomes should be banned from music classrooms. If Bach had to find a tempo the hard way, so should our young musicians of today.
And isn't it sending the wrong message to have a custodial staff? I mean, sure, they will probably have access to janitorial services out in the workforce, but that doesn't mean they should need to rely on them.
We need to stamp out this kind of intellectual laziness, and if higher math and other fruity, pie-in-the-sky classes need to suffer for the sake of emphasizing the basics, so be it!
Many people still view only the Mac and Windows as viable OSes in the commercial world
To the average luser, they are.
I love the Linux and NetBSD and how they are both chock full of UNIXy goodness, but they are not for everybody.
No UNIX clone will be a consumer OS until it has:
Copy/Cut/Paste and Drag&Drop integrated in the OS. (vi commands are great for editing a single document if you know what you are doing, but in The Real World users need to move text between different apps all the time)
A complete and reliable web browser. We will have this Real Soon Now. There are several that look promising.
MS Office, or a suite that competes, feature for feature.
Star Office may someday be vastly superior to the M$ Bloatware, but it ain't yet. I hate MS Office, but it is the suite that most of the PC world learned how to use computers on. It is the watermark which an app must rise above to be called "good". (If Nissus starts porting their Mac apps to run in a Gnome environment, all bets are off. They make some majorly cool stuff!)
I have a couple boxes running *n?x for myself, but when my aunt wanted a computer to "do e-mail" on, I set her up with an old Macintosh IIci. It took me less than one hour to teach her everything she needed to know.
There is just one thing I want from slashdot, and that is to have a thoughtful discussion on what Jon Katz is trying to say. Is that too much to ask?
Yes, it is.
The problem is not that we (by we, I mean those of us who are critical of Katz) don't take him seriously, but rather that most of the issues he has been bringing up recently ("corporatism" vs. privacy and freedom; the human impact of the "information age"; etc.) are issues that the average/.er has already pondered and reached conclusions about when we were very young. It is just not new to us anymore... and he writes it all with a tone and style that makes it look like he believes he is teaching us radical new paradigms, rather than re-hashing festering old issues.
I'm starting to suspect that he either does not read the comments to his stories, or ignores all negative criticism (justifying it as "needing a thick skin" to face all the flames), because it is becoming very clear that he does not really know who his audience is. If his columns appeared in Time or a local newspaper, I might be saying "wow, he really does a good job of explaining things to people who know nothing about current technology".
When continues to emit bogons like "Open Media", "Corporatism", "Chick-clickers", and now "Sensemakers", even though he has been criticized and mocked time and time again by the bulk of people responding who obviously see through his attempts to organize percieved trends to fit his model of the Open Source movement, it makes it clear that he values no opinion in this "open" discussion nearly as highly as his own.
There. I'm done ranting, and yes it did feel a little cathartic.
I think your post should be modded up for the headline alone. What a great use of a pop culture reference. I love it when the subject line says almost as much as the post.
I often wonder if journalists should be allowed to write their own headlines instead of a copy editor slapping one on. Some of them might be as clever and inventive as you were this time.
Sorry for getting off-topic. I just thought it was very efficient writing. The various Haiku trolls around here could learn something from Szoup.
If Katz were that worthless, everyone would have bannished his articles from their displays, via Slashdot preferences. The fact that they linger around to read everything he ever writes (even if they claim it's just for a good laugh), says a lot.
Personally, I keep hanging around hoping he will come up with something as interesting as the Hellmouth series. Something that, agree with it or not, introduces a perspective that is under-reported elsewhere and prompts lively debate about our culture.
If there is an information explosion in the woods, and nobody is there to hear it...
Seriously, I don't think there is an explosion of information at all. The pre-Internet days were already brimming over with more information than any one person could hope to process anyway.
What the net has offered is an explosion of repitition. For example, a Google search of buffy the vampire slayer this morning produced 120,999 hits. I like that show, but is there really enough to say about it that you could fill over 120 thousand "pages" with it? Half of those hits were probably just copies of the drinking game (drink if Buffy's bra strap is showing, drink if Cordy gives unwelcome fashion advice, etc.)
The information boom happened in the 17th Centry, not the 20th. Since then we have just been inventing ways of getting our news faster.
People bring this up a lot to show how "biggoted" early America was, but this was actually done to help bring about an end to slavery.
When the number of slaves was used in calculations of the population, the South looked extremely populous, which meant more Congressmen in the house of representatives. Since no slave was free to vote against the choices of his plantation owner, it basically meant that the slave-owning vote counted for more.
To put a stop to this, the census was changed so that only 3/5 of the slave population would count towards representation in Washington, which reduced southern influence in federal politics and eventually lead to more abolitionists in Congress and the success of Lincoln's bid for the Presidency.
WFIW, free black men who voted were counted as one vote, not 3/5 of a vote.
I definitely wouldn't call him conservative. I mean, how many conservatives do you know that want to legalize drugs?
William F. Buckley, for one. His picture could be placed next to "conservative" in the dictionary, but he has spoken up in favor of the decriminalization of drugs on many occasions.
So you are saying that you can hear the difference between a 20 kHz square wave and a 20 kHz sine wave? That your ear can perceive the presence or absence of the odd-order harmonics (60 kHz, 100 kHz etc.) in the square wave?
The human listerner is not that good at parsing what test tones should sound like, but I might have a chance, if the speakers are capable of producing the shapes at that frequency.
A better experiment might be this: IIRC, the average American adult range of hearing only goes up to about 13-18 Khz, depending on the individual, their age, etc. (it should be higher, but American life is hard on the ears). Hook up a good orchestral recording to a quality stereo system (I suggest the Moscow Sessions from Scheffield Labs for this kind of test). Have 10 American adults who listen to a lot of orchestral music hear the album two ways, a few times with a cut-out filter taking out everything above 18Khz, and a few times without the filter. Scramble up the order in which they hear it either way (i.e., On, Off, On, On, On, Off, On, Off, Off...) so they can't start guessing which they were hearing.
In most cases, you will find that most of the 10 people will correctly pick out the "filtered" sound most of the time.
This is what I mean by a double-blind test, and it has been done. Successfully. (Sorry, but I don't have time to look up URLs of such reports, I'm posting from work and I am about to leave...)
These kind of tests were the source of a lot of heated debate back when the CD industry was considering introducing a "silent spot" above the "range of human hearing" as a signal to switch off DAT tape recorders back in the early 90's.
It's not the presence of the 20 Khz signal itself that you hear the loss of, but how the sound of other notes are perceived from the alterations to their harmonics. Even the sound of a trumpet or violin playing around 1 Khz sounds a little different if you drop the high frequency waves.
Okay, first of all, MP3's compression is very lossy. If you can't tell the difference, you either have poor equipment or bad hearing. Even passively listening, I can tell that the sound quality of MP3 is actually worse than from a good cassette player.
There are a couple of factors that degrade the sound of MP3:
1. It is compressed at about a 10:1 ratio. You can't do that without losing a lot more than what you claim (that which the human ear can't hear).
2. Sound that is "outside the range" of human hearing affects the tambre of other sounds on the recording. Even CD's forfeit a little bit of useful sound for the sake of data efficiency, but nowhere near as much as MP3.
3. I'm no "Audiophile" writer, but I promise you that I could tell the difference in double-blind tests between even the best MP3's and a good CD player. Whether I can tell the difference as it comes through the sound output of a PC is another matter.
The good news is that d-a, a-d solutions do not have to be that bad.
Start with a really good CD players (for maximum sound quality for the money, there are some good "bargain hunter" units that out-perform the $1k systems. I reccomend the $300 Rotel. Some reviewers also love the sound of the CD transport on the Panasonic DVD players.)
Now that we have a really top-notch analog source, let's consider a-d input. Even the best soundcards have trouble here, because a PC mobo is such a noisy environment. The good news is that for about $600, you can pick up a halfway decent external unit that does the a/d conversion and sends a digital signal to a PCI card. The "Darla" card is probably one of the most popular of the cheap models... garage band geeks will want the "Layla" or the "Digi001" so the can have multiple-track inputs on other products.
Having done all this, burn yourself a CD to archive if you are so inclined, or just do your MP3 ripping right of the HD and back up the files on whatever format you like.
Will this be a "perfect" digital copy? No, but if you turn around and play your burned CD on that same Rotel player, it will still sound better than the original playing on your buddy's Sony all-in-one home stereo. Will your MP3's sound any worse? No, because MP3 is a low-res format anyway. You could rip them off an FM radio broadcast and I doubt anybody would know the difference.
As for the whole "fair use" argument... If you are just quoting a segment of something for education, research, or other copyright-exemption-type purposes, isn't an analog copy good enough? Particularilly when you are compressing it down?
"Fair use" means that you are allowed to copy data in some situations, but it does not mean that a producer can't publish something that is difficult to copy.
First my comment was moderated up as "funny" three times, probably by Canadians with a sense of humor.
Then my comment was modded up as "informative" by somebody... yea, I thought that was funny, too. For not a single moment was my post intended to be factual.
In meta-moderation, it was slapped all the way back down to 2 for being "flamebait", in spite of the fact that lots of Canadians laughed; only one person flamed me, and it appears that he is not even Canadian.
Really cold, nothing to do, nowhere to go, and everybody stays inside the shelter at all times unless wearing special protective clothing.
Also, they need women.
(Kind of makes me wonder if there are any spots on the Martian "Ice Caps" that are smooth enough to play hockey on... and what is the cost of putting a zamboni on Mars?)
P.S. Take it easy Canadians, I am only kidding. I would never really want to bad-mouth your charming little "country", or your amusingly xenophobic culture. If you took offense at my comments about what a silly place Canada is, I humbly apologize.
P.P.S. I know that didn't look like much of an apology. Sorry.
(Oh, and if you happen to be on the Canadian border patrol, let me tell you in advance that I have no fruit of vegitables in the car to declare... just a fat bag of Peruvian hash and a whole trunkload full of guns.)
Using numbers instead of letters is a common way of making a pronouncable password that is harder to guess or brute force, because there are a lot more possible character combinations.
The word "31337", or just "1337" is often used to mock the way warez kids, who are known for overusing misspellings and number substitutions to obfuscate even conversational writing. (because they think it looks k001... er, sorry... cool.)
In this case, it's "elite", but spelled "eleet", then using 3's for e's (because it looks like a backwards "E"), 1's for l's, and 7's for t's.
I have no idea who might have put a list of suggested substitutions anywhere, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find one. There are no official rules... you could use either "@" or "4" in place of "a".
Anyway, it is not worth spending a lot of time thinking about. If somebody says "j00 4r3 s0 31337!" around here, you can count on them being sarcastic.
Instructions for making coffe: Step 1: Boil Water Step 2: Filter through coffee grounds Step 3: There's no step three.
Coffee is hot. It is supposed to be hot. If steam is not coming off the cup, it must have sat out too long.
Hot food is not safe. You need to use caution. Every time I make a chicken pot pie for myself, I know for a fact that the inside of it is like molton lava, so I am careful with it. I break the crust open and let all that gooey stuff cool a little. I blow on it. Most importantly, I don't dump it on my lap!
In the event that I am clumsy enough to dump a steaming hot chicken pot pie on my lap (or hot grits down the pants, as the trolls would say), I would not sue swansons for marketing such a dangerous product. The accident would be my fault, therefore my problem.
Were I on that jury, I would have ruled that McD's was right to tell that lady to buzz off and awarded no punative damages whatsoever. S* happens, that's why we pay for health insurance.
Start with a G4-based enterprise server (not the Macintosh) Install LinuxPPC Run Mac-on-Linux Run the RealPC emulator for Macintosh Install a lilo dual-boot of Windows and Linux on that Within the Linux partition, run Wine on VMWare Within Wine, run VGS.
They probably figured why bother with this case since PSX2 is almost out.
That, and they were getting their a?? kicked. Most of the patent disputes were already rejected by the courts. This was just the last nail in the coffin of the Sony lawsuit.
Hopefully, when "VGS2" comes out, they will not waste their time. After all, the PSX2 has lots of crunchy features that make it a nifty living room appliance, but the typical PC owner who already has a DVD player will have little reason to bother with the platform unless there is an emulator... and Sony makes the big money on the games, not the player.
if they had really wanted to win the hearts of all the gamers out there, they would have gotten in bed with Loki way back to get this thing out for Windows, Mac, and Linux all at once. When a game is more than a year behind schedule, you get it out the door - fast. Simultanious development can often push release dates back, and given that Diablo II is "old school" compared to the EQ/UO/AC trend as it is, they could ill-afford to delay even longer just to make a handful of Mac and Linux zealots happy.
1.5 million pre-orders, baby! Are there even 1.5 million iMacs out there yet?
Disclaimer: I love the Mac and do stuff at my G3 every day. I'm just a realist about gaming markets. My advice, keep doing your Photoshop and Dreamweaver on that Mac of yours, and pick up a cheap PC for a gaming console (and a second one for a *n[iu]x firewall, while you are at it).
Almost all Linux users also use MICROS~1 boxes. Get over it and move on with your life.
I'm a freakin' Macintosh bigot, and I have two Windows systems (one of which is about to become a SCO UNIX box), a Linux PC, a G3 that boots into OS8.6 and LinuxPPC, and an old PowerBook Duo that I take everywhere and beat the hell out of.
Some of us have grown up a little from the days of Holy Wars and just want to use the best tool for the job. When the best tool is Linux, that is what I will use.
If M$ wants to charge me a C-Note for their OS, and I want to play a game that runs on their OS, I will buy it. You can scream all you want about how I'm not 31337 enough because I'm not a "pure" FSF freak, but I really don't give a crap.
Slashdot Mirror
CLI's rely on human memory... we need to learn to speak the computer's "language", and often need to remember what the computer is currently up to. GUI's rely on our visual pattern recognition abilities. We "see" the commands we want to execute, and have a "finder" or "taskbar" to remind us what is going on. In both cases, the interface is driven by our choices of how we want to communicate with the system, and once you make that decision, a lot of the rest of the design is mostly asthetics.
The change will come when an interface that is obviously better than typing and clicking comes along. Whatever it is, it will need to be enough of a step up to be worth learning. There have been hundreds of "better" keyboards, but they don't get adopted by people because they are not enough of an improvement on the crappy qwerty (or dvorak) that we already know how to use. The next step to succeed will most likely be something completely different than a keyboard, and it will introduce the need for a radiacally different UI.
Oh, I don't know... the way clippy feeds himself through his eyeballs when you are printing... that's gotta count for something. If nothing else, proof that hallucinogens of some kind or another are easilly available in Redmond.
Yes, and we should also remove all table saws from the shop class. Students are bound to say, "why should we learn to drop chalklines and use a hand saw when a good tablesaw will make a nice, even, level cut for us?"
Metronomes should be banned from music classrooms. If Bach had to find a tempo the hard way, so should our young musicians of today.
And isn't it sending the wrong message to have a custodial staff? I mean, sure, they will probably have access to janitorial services out in the workforce, but that doesn't mean they should need to rely on them.
We need to stamp out this kind of intellectual laziness, and if higher math and other fruity, pie-in-the-sky classes need to suffer for the sake of emphasizing the basics, so be it!
To the average luser, they are.
I love the Linux and NetBSD and how they are both chock full of UNIXy goodness, but they are not for everybody.
No UNIX clone will be a consumer OS until it has:
Copy/Cut/Paste and Drag&Drop integrated in the OS. (vi commands are great for editing a single document if you know what you are doing, but in The Real World users need to move text between different apps all the time)
A complete and reliable web browser. We will have this Real Soon Now. There are several that look promising.
MS Office, or a suite that competes, feature for feature.
Star Office may someday be vastly superior to the M$ Bloatware, but it ain't yet. I hate MS Office, but it is the suite that most of the PC world learned how to use computers on. It is the watermark which an app must rise above to be called "good". (If Nissus starts porting their Mac apps to run in a Gnome environment, all bets are off. They make some majorly cool stuff!)
I have a couple boxes running *n?x for myself, but when my aunt wanted a computer to "do e-mail" on, I set her up with an old Macintosh IIci. It took me less than one hour to teach her everything she needed to know.
I'll have a go. Not counting legal and marketing innovations, here's what I came up with:
1. Microsoft Bob
2. "Clippy", your MS Office assistant
3. The General Protection Fault: One error that covers all problems. Reboot.
4. Visual Basic autorun in some versions of Outlook. We all "LUV" that feature.
5. A web interface as the default text viewer in Win98.
6. An entire game hidden as an office application's easter egg.
7. Step One for shutting down Windows9x is, "Click on Start".
8. "Enhanced" Java.
9. The friendly warning message Windows 3.0 gave to all DR DOS users.
10. The RANT ("Redundant Array of NT servers")... neccessity is often the mother of invention.
"Metacomplainers"... what a great candidate for the Jargon List. Nice work, AC. I wish you had logged on so you would get credit for coining that.
Yes, it is.
The problem is not that we (by we, I mean those of us who are critical of Katz) don't take him seriously, but rather that most of the issues he has been bringing up recently ("corporatism" vs. privacy and freedom; the human impact of the "information age"; etc.) are issues that the average /.er has already pondered and reached conclusions about when we were very young. It is just not new to us anymore... and he writes it all with a tone and style that makes it look like he believes he is teaching us radical new paradigms, rather than re-hashing festering old issues.
I'm starting to suspect that he either does not read the comments to his stories, or ignores all negative criticism (justifying it as "needing a thick skin" to face all the flames), because it is becoming very clear that he does not really know who his audience is. If his columns appeared in Time or a local newspaper, I might be saying "wow, he really does a good job of explaining things to people who know nothing about current technology".
When continues to emit bogons like "Open Media", "Corporatism", "Chick-clickers", and now "Sensemakers", even though he has been criticized and mocked time and time again by the bulk of people responding who obviously see through his attempts to organize percieved trends to fit his model of the Open Source movement, it makes it clear that he values no opinion in this "open" discussion nearly as highly as his own.
There. I'm done ranting, and yes it did feel a little cathartic.
I often wonder if journalists should be allowed to write their own headlines instead of a copy editor slapping one on. Some of them might be as clever and inventive as you were this time.
Sorry for getting off-topic. I just thought it was very efficient writing. The various Haiku trolls around here could learn something from Szoup.
Personally, I keep hanging around hoping he will come up with something as interesting as the Hellmouth series. Something that, agree with it or not, introduces a perspective that is under-reported elsewhere and prompts lively debate about our culture.
This ain't it.
Seriously, I don't think there is an explosion of information at all. The pre-Internet days were already brimming over with more information than any one person could hope to process anyway.
What the net has offered is an explosion of repitition. For example, a Google search of buffy the vampire slayer this morning produced 120,999 hits. I like that show, but is there really enough to say about it that you could fill over 120 thousand "pages" with it? Half of those hits were probably just copies of the drinking game (drink if Buffy's bra strap is showing, drink if Cordy gives unwelcome fashion advice, etc.)
The information boom happened in the 17th Centry, not the 20th. Since then we have just been inventing ways of getting our news faster.
People bring this up a lot to show how "biggoted" early America was, but this was actually done to help bring about an end to slavery.
When the number of slaves was used in calculations of the population, the South looked extremely populous, which meant more Congressmen in the house of representatives. Since no slave was free to vote against the choices of his plantation owner, it basically meant that the slave-owning vote counted for more.
To put a stop to this, the census was changed so that only 3/5 of the slave population would count towards representation in Washington, which reduced southern influence in federal politics and eventually lead to more abolitionists in Congress and the success of Lincoln's bid for the Presidency.
WFIW, free black men who voted were counted as one vote, not 3/5 of a vote.
William F. Buckley, for one. His picture could be placed next to "conservative" in the dictionary, but he has spoken up in favor of the decriminalization of drugs on many occasions.
The human listerner is not that good at parsing what test tones should sound like, but I might have a chance, if the speakers are capable of producing the shapes at that frequency.
A better experiment might be this: IIRC, the average American adult range of hearing only goes up to about 13-18 Khz, depending on the individual, their age, etc. (it should be higher, but American life is hard on the ears). Hook up a good orchestral recording to a quality stereo system (I suggest the Moscow Sessions from Scheffield Labs for this kind of test). Have 10 American adults who listen to a lot of orchestral music hear the album two ways, a few times with a cut-out filter taking out everything above 18Khz, and a few times without the filter. Scramble up the order in which they hear it either way (i.e., On, Off, On, On, On, Off, On, Off, Off...) so they can't start guessing which they were hearing.
In most cases, you will find that most of the 10 people will correctly pick out the "filtered" sound most of the time.
This is what I mean by a double-blind test, and it has been done. Successfully. (Sorry, but I don't have time to look up URLs of such reports, I'm posting from work and I am about to leave...)
These kind of tests were the source of a lot of heated debate back when the CD industry was considering introducing a "silent spot" above the "range of human hearing" as a signal to switch off DAT tape recorders back in the early 90's.
It's not the presence of the 20 Khz signal itself that you hear the loss of, but how the sound of other notes are perceived from the alterations to their harmonics. Even the sound of a trumpet or violin playing around 1 Khz sounds a little different if you drop the high frequency waves.
s/tambre/timbre/
s/products/projects
and so on...
There are a couple of factors that degrade the sound of MP3:
1. It is compressed at about a 10:1 ratio. You can't do that without losing a lot more than what you claim (that which the human ear can't hear).
2. Sound that is "outside the range" of human hearing affects the tambre of other sounds on the recording. Even CD's forfeit a little bit of useful sound for the sake of data efficiency, but nowhere near as much as MP3.
3. I'm no "Audiophile" writer, but I promise you that I could tell the difference in double-blind tests between even the best MP3's and a good CD player. Whether I can tell the difference as it comes through the sound output of a PC is another matter.
The good news is that d-a, a-d solutions do not have to be that bad.
Start with a really good CD players (for maximum sound quality for the money, there are some good "bargain hunter" units that out-perform the $1k systems. I reccomend the $300 Rotel. Some reviewers also love the sound of the CD transport on the Panasonic DVD players.)
Now that we have a really top-notch analog source, let's consider a-d input. Even the best soundcards have trouble here, because a PC mobo is such a noisy environment. The good news is that for about $600, you can pick up a halfway decent external unit that does the a/d conversion and sends a digital signal to a PCI card. The "Darla" card is probably one of the most popular of the cheap models... garage band geeks will want the "Layla" or the "Digi001" so the can have multiple-track inputs on other products.
Having done all this, burn yourself a CD to archive if you are so inclined, or just do your MP3 ripping right of the HD and back up the files on whatever format you like.
Will this be a "perfect" digital copy? No, but if you turn around and play your burned CD on that same Rotel player, it will still sound better than the original playing on your buddy's Sony all-in-one home stereo.
Will your MP3's sound any worse? No, because MP3 is a low-res format anyway. You could rip them off an FM radio broadcast and I doubt anybody would know the difference.
As for the whole "fair use" argument... If you are just quoting a segment of something for education, research, or other copyright-exemption-type purposes, isn't an analog copy good enough? Particularilly when you are compressing it down?
"Fair use" means that you are allowed to copy data in some situations, but it does not mean that a producer can't publish something that is difficult to copy.
Then my comment was modded up as "informative" by somebody... yea, I thought that was funny, too. For not a single moment was my post intended to be factual.
In meta-moderation, it was slapped all the way back down to 2 for being "flamebait", in spite of the fact that lots of Canadians laughed; only one person flamed me, and it appears that he is not even Canadian.
Clue to Slashdot: Meta-moderation is not helping.
Really cold, nothing to do, nowhere to go, and everybody stays inside the shelter at all times unless wearing special protective clothing.
Also, they need women.
(Kind of makes me wonder if there are any spots on the Martian "Ice Caps" that are smooth enough to play hockey on... and what is the cost of putting a zamboni on Mars?)
P.S. Take it easy Canadians, I am only kidding. I would never really want to bad-mouth your charming little "country", or your amusingly xenophobic culture. If you took offense at my comments about what a silly place Canada is, I humbly apologize.
P.P.S. I know that didn't look like much of an apology. Sorry.
(Oh, and if you happen to be on the Canadian border patrol, let me tell you in advance that I have no fruit of vegitables in the car to declare... just a fat bag of Peruvian hash and a whole trunkload full of guns.)
The word "31337", or just "1337" is often used to mock the way warez kids, who are known for overusing misspellings and number substitutions to obfuscate even conversational writing. (because they think it looks k001... er, sorry... cool.)
In this case, it's "elite", but spelled "eleet", then using 3's for e's (because it looks like a backwards "E"), 1's for l's, and 7's for t's.
I have no idea who might have put a list of suggested substitutions anywhere, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find one. There are no official rules... you could use either "@" or "4" in place of "a".
Anyway, it is not worth spending a lot of time thinking about. If somebody says "j00 4r3 s0 31337!" around here, you can count on them being sarcastic.
Step 1: Boil Water
Step 2: Filter through coffee grounds
Step 3: There's no step three.
Coffee is hot. It is supposed to be hot. If steam is not coming off the cup, it must have sat out too long.
Hot food is not safe. You need to use caution. Every time I make a chicken pot pie for myself, I know for a fact that the inside of it is like molton lava, so I am careful with it. I break the crust open and let all that gooey stuff cool a little. I blow on it. Most importantly, I don't dump it on my lap!
In the event that I am clumsy enough to dump a steaming hot chicken pot pie on my lap (or hot grits down the pants, as the trolls would say), I would not sue swansons for marketing such a dangerous product. The accident would be my fault, therefore my problem.
Were I on that jury, I would have ruled that McD's was right to tell that lady to buzz off and awarded no punative damages whatsoever. S* happens, that's why we pay for health insurance.
Start with a G4-based enterprise server (not the Macintosh)
Install LinuxPPC
Run Mac-on-Linux
Run the RealPC emulator for Macintosh
Install a lilo dual-boot of Windows and Linux on that
Within the Linux partition, run Wine on VMWare
Within Wine, run VGS.
Half measures never got us nuthin! :)
They've gone about as fer as they can go...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
One big advantage, I hear they got some crazy little women there.
That, and they were getting their a?? kicked. Most of the patent disputes were already rejected by the courts. This was just the last nail in the coffin of the Sony lawsuit.
Hopefully, when "VGS2" comes out, they will not waste their time. After all, the PSX2 has lots of crunchy features that make it a nifty living room appliance, but the typical PC owner who already has a DVD player will have little reason to bother with the platform unless there is an emulator... and Sony makes the big money on the games, not the player.
1.5 million pre-orders, baby! Are there even 1.5 million iMacs out there yet?
Disclaimer: I love the Mac and do stuff at my G3 every day. I'm just a realist about gaming markets. My advice, keep doing your Photoshop and Dreamweaver on that Mac of yours, and pick up a cheap PC for a gaming console (and a second one for a *n[iu]x firewall, while you are at it).
Dual
Boot
Almost all Linux users also use MICROS~1 boxes. Get over it and move on with your life.
I'm a freakin' Macintosh bigot, and I have two Windows systems (one of which is about to become a SCO UNIX box), a Linux PC, a G3 that boots into OS8.6 and LinuxPPC, and an old PowerBook Duo that I take everywhere and beat the hell out of.
Some of us have grown up a little from the days of Holy Wars and just want to use the best tool for the job. When the best tool is Linux, that is what I will use.
If M$ wants to charge me a C-Note for their OS, and I want to play a game that runs on their OS, I will buy it. You can scream all you want about how I'm not 31337 enough because I'm not a "pure" FSF freak, but I really don't give a crap.
Here endeth the rant.
(Or maybe my perspective is a little warped because I rented Chasing Amy again last week...)