Why should I give a fuck about Microsoft's finances?
I'll buy the console which 1. Does a better job with the big-market games on both platforms, and 2. Has better exclusive games.
And since the only "exclusive" games to Sony that I care about (the GTA series) always get ported to the X-Box, Sony really doesn't have a lot to hold up and make me chose them over the X-Box 360, do they?
If all you want is a lowres PJ then you can do 720p for much less (around $500-$700) with contrast ratios around 15000:1 and a tube life around 8000 hours.
I'm calling bullshit.
1. Those are all used units on your link, some with "acceptable" burn-in on the glass, many with "some" of the tubes recently replaced.
2. Most do not accept digital input. Hell, if they take so much as crappy S-Video they brag about it!
3. You are high if you think you're getting half the contrast ratio I am off those weak-assed bulbs.
4. Not a single one of them offers a long-throw lens, which is a deal-breaker as far as my living room is concerned.
5. The quietest of them sounds like a wind tunnel compared to what I've got.
I looked at CRT's when I was shopping for my system... The lowest-quality one I found even remotely acceptable went for over $5000.
before Gates and Jobs got the desktop idea from PARC.
Bill Gates never visited PARC Labs. Steve Jobs did, and signed a deal with them which allowed Apple to develop the Lisa and shortly afterwards, the Macintosh.
Bill Gates saw APPLE'S implementation of the desktop and liked it enough to copy it.
Since then, Gates as frequently tried to skip over giving credit to Apple for inspiring the way all personal computers work these days by talking about PARC as if that's where he got the idea for Windows, but it's all bullshit and everybody who looks closely at the facts knows it.
My Panasone AE-700 projector is a 720p LCD system which looks glorious on a 119" screen, and even has a long-throw lens built in so I don't need to have the projector anywhere near where I'm sitting. It cost me less than $2000
A comparable CRT projector would cost easily three times as much.
So in some segments of the market, LCD and/or DLP wins on price.
I said before that I don't buy from allofmp3.com, so go for your life and call me Part Of The Problem. Whatever.
So why are you acting like I'm attacking you personally? Relax. I said people who do are Part Of The Problem. Obviously, that does not include you, since you don't.
As for money they've "set aside", that's just silly.
"I'd like to buy your car for $20. I've taken your car to a country which allows me to buy cars for $20 each, and set aside $20 for you. All you need to do is fill out this form which legitimizes what I've done, and you can collect a cool, sweet picture of President Jackson. You have not done so yet, and are trying to find ways to force my government to make me give the car back. What's the matter with you, don't you want my twenty bucks???"
At a pro football game, I can see somebody run at near-olympic speeds across a field, and stretch his arms out to catch a ball knowing full well that he's about to get drilled right in the rib cage.
Sports competition pushes people to their physical limits, and when it is being played by people with exceptional physical limits, it can be compelling to watch.
I'm pretty damn good at playing Quake (if I do say so myself), and on a sliding scale of entertainment value, watching other people play Quake on TV, even world-class players, ranks somewhere between watching somebody write code and going outside to cut the lawn.
Note to moderators: A polite spelling correction, as provided by the parent post, is not "Flamebait."
At worst, it could be marked as "Off-Topic" (as could this post), but the best use of your mod points would be to find comments worthy of being modded up for adding to the discussion.
The (valid) opinion that artists don't get enough money out of their record contracts doesn't change the fact that they get no money ever from their songs being exploided commercially on allofmp3.com
If you're fine with ripping off artists even worse than the record companies which you detest do, then by all means buy songs form allofmp3.com, and enjoy your place in the world as Part Of The Problem.
Assessing blame is something that only needs to happen when there's a problem.
World of Warcraft is a game which is easier to play with a multi-button mouse, as is the case for many games.
The Macintosh is a computer which is not usually bought to mainly be a game machine, and most software for it was carefully designed not to need an additional mouse button. Therefore it's fine that not all models come with multi-button mice, the laptop track-pads are 1-button systems, and their wireless mouse is a one-button mouse. For most Mac apps, one button is all you need.
If you want to play games on your Mac (as has been the case with me for about a year now. My last Windows machine was parted out and scrapped last winter), then buying a multi-button mouse is a good idea.
If you are using a laptop, multiple buttons are "t3h sux0r." I love that I can blindly stab thee heel of my RIGHT thumb under the trackpad and always click correctly when I'm working without a mouse. "Ctrl-stab" for "right click" is actually way easier than having to worry about stab locations every time I need to click or right-click something.
I know a lot of Linux geeks who own Apple notebooks hate it, but I will deeply mourn the loss of the one-button trackpad if it ever goes away.
Trying to convince others to not collect stamps, to the point of posting absurd analogies to Slashdot and inventing spaghetti monsters and pink unicorns as a pathetic attempt to ridicule stamp collectors, and complaining how collecting stamps is unscientific and irrational, while not collecting them is scientific despite there being no evidence either way, is either a hobby or an unhealthy obsession. Take your pick.
The win!!!
Take a step back from any discussion between a strident atheist and believers (of anything), and the atheist sounds an awful lot like an raging evangelical fundamentalist. It's not enough for them to believe as they do, for the sake of their own self-worth they must convince others to think as they do, and pour hate and derision on those who refuse to take up their banner.
Hense, atheism is a religion; one which often has no tollerance for heresy.
Well said. I would like to extend upon your remarks about differences between the way each gender expresses their sexuality by pointing out that, all other factors being equal, bisexual women are considerably hotter than their heterosexual female counterparts, perhaps by as much as sixty-nine percent.
So what do you call a "belief of lack", if not atheism? Because there certainly are people who believe exactly that, and they all call themselves atheists.
the agnostic says that reason can never be used to prove the existence of a being who transcends reason
Many Christians agree with that part.
and whether or not He exists, He does not intervene in human affairs
That's perhaps the most preposterous thing I've ever read. If a divine creator exists, then by definition He intervened in human affairs at least once, because if you are going to have human affairs at all, creating humans is a pretty fucking important first step. To say He has no influence on humanity is the same as saying He's not the Creator, and therefore a Creator does not exist, and then you're right back to atheism.
Likewise, by saying "He does not intervene in human affairs," you are clearly taking a position that all accounts of God doing exactly that (including the ministries of Christ and St. Paul) must all be bullshit. Not "probably bullshit", but "bullshit."
That's not a doubting, reasoned, agnostic view, but a pig-headed, dogmatic belief of atheism.
There is no "speak phone button." There is a generic button which becomes assigned to turn the speaker phone on after the call has been engaged for a couple seconds.
Besides, the call connects on the earpiece when you open the hinge, so you can't hit the button before answering.
It gets better, that button in nestled just inside the hinge on the right side, and is very fussy about how you press it... so it's almost impossible to reach by feel while the phone is still up against your ear. You have to take it away from your head for a second.
If devices did not exist which are, in fact, actually bullet-proof, you could then accuse me of being pedantic.
IIRC, there are even a couple laptops on the market that can take a couple rounds from a.32 rifle at medium range and still boot up. Apple's systems, while very nice and relatively rugged, are not among them.
As far as I'm aware, eBay and eDonkey are the only mixed-case trademarks which appear as they did in your examples. E-mail and e-business are almost never spelled like that. Also, everybody gets that "e" stands for "electronic."
"i" kinda-sorta stands for "Internet", but not really.
On the heels of mostly failing to sell a phone with iTunes bolted on, they are now trying to jump into a market (subscription-based music downloads) where nobody is making money.
I've got a Motorola phone right now, and for the most part I'm miserable with it. Sure, it has a lot of spiffy features, but it kind of sucks as a phone. Not only is it of limited reliability, but they made all kinds of goofy interface decisions.
For example, I need to be "in a call" for about two seconds before I can turn on the speakerphone feature. It's impossible to answer it on the speaker, or place a call over it. Instead I must talk to the person with the phone to my ear for a couple seconds, say "hang on", press a button on the face of the phone just so, wait another half second, ask the person on the other end to say something to indicate that it worked, try pushing the button again if it didn't, rinse, repeat.
How stupid is that? The whole point of a speakerphone is to avoid fucking around with it. If I take a call when I'm on the road, it's actually safer to just keep listening through the earpiece.
A minor annoyance, yes... but one of many with this piece of crap.
The Japanese market went ga-ga for cameras, text-messaging, ring-tones, etc., but from what I've seen, most Americans want a phone that works easilly and reliably as a phone more than anything else. Someday, a phone maker will become clueful about this fact, and they will sell them like hotcakes. I know I'll be in line for one.
It's okay to say "bullet proof" when speaking of software, because the listener knows that you are speaking metaphorically.
However, when it comes to hardware, you really should not call it bullet proof unless it actually stops bullets.
Speaking of solid old Mac laptops, the old duo series was freakishly rugged. My first one was eight years old when it was stolen. For all I know, it still runs. I replaced it with another one from about the same era, and obsolescence eventually left it festering in the bottom of a storage closet, but I bet it would still boot if I tried to fire it up.
I've beaten my G4 iBook all to hell, and it's still going strong, so it seems to me that the tradition is far from dead.
Replacing the battery on my iPod was easier than adding memory to my Dell laptop. A lot easier.
1. Pop the case open with the little plastic tool which the battery maker includes for free. 2. Unplug a little ribbon connector that's in the way. 3. Swap the battery. 4. Plug the connector back in. 5. Snap the iPod case shut again.
The battery cost twenty bucks, and has an even higher capacity than the original.
Gosh, I'm jealous. I can't think of how many times I wanted to stop in mid-jog and record the sounds of passing traffic on my portable MP3 player. Why, or why, didn't I buy the same gizmo as you? How will I continue to endure?
Of course, this might not be true -- it might instead be the case that the basic structure of the universe is simply too complex for ordinary humans to understand even its principles. But I find this hard to believe (for no logical reason, I admit).
Good to see you recognized your own "irrationality" for what it is.
Along similar lines, I happen to believe that Christ was sent by a benevolent creator to grant us eternal life, and, like you, have no logical reason for doing so.
In both cases, the world makes more sense to us if we begin with a few chosen axioms, which are largely based on the way we feel about the how we've experienced reality. That's what faith pretty much is, and everybody has some faith in SOMETHING. You can't really move past Descartes without it, and what good does it do to know "I must exist, because I am thinking" if you feel certain of nothing else?
Sorry for the tangent.
Frankly, I think that the "next Einstein" is probably just around the corner. Einstein was a "rock star" scientist because his work produced very tangible changes in the way the everyday layman experiences life. Not only did he make us see the world a little differently, but he also changed the way the world works. Without the a-bomb, there's no Cold War, and the political landscape of the entire world would have been radically different.
Well, in the case of the Mac mini, you're not supposed to set shit on top of it it. Wireless reception and temperature control both rely on the top remaining uncovered, and also i've been told that the media drive can make some spooky grinding noises if it runs with stuff sitting on top of the mini.
If a design mistake was made, it was in making the top of it flat and level, which makes it seem like a nice place to rest your beer glass if the mini is sitting on a desk or something.
My mini has been standing on its side for as long as I've had it, so this has not been an issue for me at all.
As for the "scratch-prone" nano... I think 90% of the really strident pissing and moaning about it is coming from people who don't even own and iPod of any sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should I give a fuck about Microsoft's finances?
I'll buy the console which 1. Does a better job with the big-market games on both platforms, and 2. Has better exclusive games.
And since the only "exclusive" games to Sony that I care about (the GTA series) always get ported to the X-Box, Sony really doesn't have a lot to hold up and make me chose them over the X-Box 360, do they?
If all you want is a lowres PJ then you can do 720p for much less (around $500-$700) with contrast ratios around 15000:1 and a tube life around 8000 hours.
I'm calling bullshit.
1. Those are all used units on your link, some with "acceptable" burn-in on the glass, many with "some" of the tubes recently replaced.
2. Most do not accept digital input. Hell, if they take so much as crappy S-Video they brag about it!
3. You are high if you think you're getting half the contrast ratio I am off those weak-assed bulbs.
4. Not a single one of them offers a long-throw lens, which is a deal-breaker as far as my living room is concerned.
5. The quietest of them sounds like a wind tunnel compared to what I've got.
I looked at CRT's when I was shopping for my system... The lowest-quality one I found even remotely acceptable went for over $5000.
before Gates and Jobs got the desktop idea from PARC.
Bill Gates never visited PARC Labs. Steve Jobs did, and signed a deal with them which allowed Apple to develop the Lisa and shortly afterwards, the Macintosh.
Bill Gates saw APPLE'S implementation of the desktop and liked it enough to copy it.
Since then, Gates as frequently tried to skip over giving credit to Apple for inspiring the way all personal computers work these days by talking about PARC as if that's where he got the idea for Windows, but it's all bullshit and everybody who looks closely at the facts knows it.
There's another drawback.
My Panasone AE-700 projector is a 720p LCD system which looks glorious on a 119" screen, and even has a long-throw lens built in so I don't need to have the projector anywhere near where I'm sitting. It cost me less than $2000
A comparable CRT projector would cost easily three times as much.
So in some segments of the market, LCD and/or DLP wins on price.
I said before that I don't buy from allofmp3.com, so go for your life and call me Part Of The Problem. Whatever.
So why are you acting like I'm attacking you personally? Relax. I said people who do are Part Of The Problem. Obviously, that does not include you, since you don't.
As for money they've "set aside", that's just silly.
"I'd like to buy your car for $20. I've taken your car to a country which allows me to buy cars for $20 each, and set aside $20 for you. All you need to do is fill out this form which legitimizes what I've done, and you can collect a cool, sweet picture of President Jackson. You have not done so yet, and are trying to find ways to force my government to make me give the car back. What's the matter with you, don't you want my twenty bucks???"
You read OSM, too?
At a pro football game, I can see somebody run at near-olympic speeds across a field, and stretch his arms out to catch a ball knowing full well that he's about to get drilled right in the rib cage.
Sports competition pushes people to their physical limits, and when it is being played by people with exceptional physical limits, it can be compelling to watch.
I'm pretty damn good at playing Quake (if I do say so myself), and on a sliding scale of entertainment value, watching other people play Quake on TV, even world-class players, ranks somewhere between watching somebody write code and going outside to cut the lawn.
Note to moderators: A polite spelling correction, as provided by the parent post, is not "Flamebait."
At worst, it could be marked as "Off-Topic" (as could this post), but the best use of your mod points would be to find comments worthy of being modded up for adding to the discussion.
The (valid) opinion that artists don't get enough money out of their record contracts doesn't change the fact that they get no money ever from their songs being exploided commercially on allofmp3.com
If you're fine with ripping off artists even worse than the record companies which you detest do, then by all means buy songs form allofmp3.com, and enjoy your place in the world as Part Of The Problem.
Assessing blame is something that only needs to happen when there's a problem.
World of Warcraft is a game which is easier to play with a multi-button mouse, as is the case for many games.
The Macintosh is a computer which is not usually bought to mainly be a game machine, and most software for it was carefully designed not to need an additional mouse button. Therefore it's fine that not all models come with multi-button mice, the laptop track-pads are 1-button systems, and their wireless mouse is a one-button mouse. For most Mac apps, one button is all you need.
If you want to play games on your Mac (as has been the case with me for about a year now. My last Windows machine was parted out and scrapped last winter), then buying a multi-button mouse is a good idea.
If you are using a laptop, multiple buttons are "t3h sux0r." I love that I can blindly stab thee heel of my RIGHT thumb under the trackpad and always click correctly when I'm working without a mouse. "Ctrl-stab" for "right click" is actually way easier than having to worry about stab locations every time I need to click or right-click something.
I know a lot of Linux geeks who own Apple notebooks hate it, but I will deeply mourn the loss of the one-button trackpad if it ever goes away.
Trying to convince others to not collect stamps, to the point of posting absurd analogies to Slashdot and inventing spaghetti monsters and pink unicorns as a pathetic attempt to ridicule stamp collectors, and complaining how collecting stamps is unscientific and irrational, while not collecting them is scientific despite there being no evidence either way, is either a hobby or an unhealthy obsession. Take your pick.
The win!!!
Take a step back from any discussion between a strident atheist and believers (of anything), and the atheist sounds an awful lot like an raging evangelical fundamentalist. It's not enough for them to believe as they do, for the sake of their own self-worth they must convince others to think as they do, and pour hate and derision on those who refuse to take up their banner.
Hense, atheism is a religion; one which often has no tollerance for heresy.
It's "actually" a very, very old joke, and pre-dates Brendan Fraser's birth, never mind his movies.
My most dangerous idea: Asking /. posters what their most dangerous idea is. :)
Saying "no" to Chuck Norris.
Oh, sorry, has that meme already played out? It all moves so fast these days.
Well said. I would like to extend upon your remarks about differences between the way each gender expresses their sexuality by pointing out that, all other factors being equal, bisexual women are considerably hotter than their heterosexual female counterparts, perhaps by as much as sixty-nine percent.
So what do you call a "belief of lack", if not atheism? Because there certainly are people who believe exactly that, and they all call themselves atheists.
the agnostic says that reason can never be used to prove the existence of a being who transcends reason
Many Christians agree with that part.
and whether or not He exists, He does not intervene in human affairs
That's perhaps the most preposterous thing I've ever read. If a divine creator exists, then by definition He intervened in human affairs at least once, because if you are going to have human affairs at all, creating humans is a pretty fucking important first step. To say He has no influence on humanity is the same as saying He's not the Creator, and therefore a Creator does not exist, and then you're right back to atheism.
Likewise, by saying "He does not intervene in human affairs," you are clearly taking a position that all accounts of God doing exactly that (including the ministries of Christ and St. Paul) must all be bullshit. Not "probably bullshit", but "bullshit."
That's not a doubting, reasoned, agnostic view, but a pig-headed, dogmatic belief of atheism.
There is no "speak phone button." There is a generic button which becomes assigned to turn the speaker phone on after the call has been engaged for a couple seconds.
Besides, the call connects on the earpiece when you open the hinge, so you can't hit the button before answering.
It gets better, that button in nestled just inside the hinge on the right side, and is very fussy about how you press it... so it's almost impossible to reach by feel while the phone is still up against your ear. You have to take it away from your head for a second.
If devices did not exist which are, in fact, actually bullet-proof, you could then accuse me of being pedantic.
.32 rifle at medium range and still boot up. Apple's systems, while very nice and relatively rugged, are not among them.
IIRC, there are even a couple laptops on the market that can take a couple rounds from a
eCommerce eMail eDonkey eWords eBay eBusiness eCard eWallet
Wonder what the next popular letter will be.
As far as I'm aware, eBay and eDonkey are the only mixed-case trademarks which appear as they did in your examples. E-mail and e-business are almost never spelled like that. Also, everybody gets that "e" stands for "electronic."
"i" kinda-sorta stands for "Internet", but not really.
Besides the new hottness is already established.
It's "g"
On the heels of mostly failing to sell a phone with iTunes bolted on, they are now trying to jump into a market (subscription-based music downloads) where nobody is making money.
I've got a Motorola phone right now, and for the most part I'm miserable with it. Sure, it has a lot of spiffy features, but it kind of sucks as a phone. Not only is it of limited reliability, but they made all kinds of goofy interface decisions.
For example, I need to be "in a call" for about two seconds before I can turn on the speakerphone feature. It's impossible to answer it on the speaker, or place a call over it. Instead I must talk to the person with the phone to my ear for a couple seconds, say "hang on", press a button on the face of the phone just so, wait another half second, ask the person on the other end to say something to indicate that it worked, try pushing the button again if it didn't, rinse, repeat.
How stupid is that? The whole point of a speakerphone is to avoid fucking around with it. If I take a call when I'm on the road, it's actually safer to just keep listening through the earpiece.
A minor annoyance, yes... but one of many with this piece of crap.
The Japanese market went ga-ga for cameras, text-messaging, ring-tones, etc., but from what I've seen, most Americans want a phone that works easilly and reliably as a phone more than anything else. Someday, a phone maker will become clueful about this fact, and they will sell them like hotcakes. I know I'll be in line for one.
The older powerbooks were pretty bullet proof.
It's okay to say "bullet proof" when speaking of software, because the listener knows that you are speaking metaphorically.
However, when it comes to hardware, you really should not call it bullet proof unless it actually stops bullets.
Speaking of solid old Mac laptops, the old duo series was freakishly rugged. My first one was eight years old when it was stolen. For all I know, it still runs. I replaced it with another one from about the same era, and obsolescence eventually left it festering in the bottom of a storage closet, but I bet it would still boot if I tried to fire it up.
I've beaten my G4 iBook all to hell, and it's still going strong, so it seems to me that the tradition is far from dead.
the non-replaceable iPod battery
No such animal.
Replacing the battery on my iPod was easier than adding memory to my Dell laptop. A lot easier.
1. Pop the case open with the little plastic tool which the battery maker includes for free.
2. Unplug a little ribbon connector that's in the way.
3. Swap the battery.
4. Plug the connector back in.
5. Snap the iPod case shut again.
The battery cost twenty bucks, and has an even higher capacity than the original.
Gosh, I'm jealous. I can't think of how many times I wanted to stop in mid-jog and record the sounds of passing traffic on my portable MP3 player. Why, or why, didn't I buy the same gizmo as you? How will I continue to endure?
Of course, this might not be true -- it might instead be the case that the basic structure of the universe is simply too complex for ordinary humans to understand even its principles. But I find this hard to believe (for no logical reason, I admit).
Good to see you recognized your own "irrationality" for what it is.
Along similar lines, I happen to believe that Christ was sent by a benevolent creator to grant us eternal life, and, like you, have no logical reason for doing so.
In both cases, the world makes more sense to us if we begin with a few chosen axioms, which are largely based on the way we feel about the how we've experienced reality. That's what faith pretty much is, and everybody has some faith in SOMETHING. You can't really move past Descartes without it, and what good does it do to know "I must exist, because I am thinking" if you feel certain of nothing else?
Sorry for the tangent.
Frankly, I think that the "next Einstein" is probably just around the corner. Einstein was a "rock star" scientist because his work produced very tangible changes in the way the everyday layman experiences life. Not only did he make us see the world a little differently, but he also changed the way the world works. Without the a-bomb, there's no Cold War, and the political landscape of the entire world would have been radically different.
Well, in the case of the Mac mini, you're not supposed to set shit on top of it it. Wireless reception and temperature control both rely on the top remaining uncovered, and also i've been told that the media drive can make some spooky grinding noises if it runs with stuff sitting on top of the mini.
If a design mistake was made, it was in making the top of it flat and level, which makes it seem like a nice place to rest your beer glass if the mini is sitting on a desk or something.
My mini has been standing on its side for as long as I've had it, so this has not been an issue for me at all.
As for the "scratch-prone" nano... I think 90% of the really strident pissing and moaning about it is coming from people who don't even own and iPod of any sort.