Has anyone else ever noticed how similar Mos Def and Danny John-Jules look? I mean I swear, stick some fangs, new hair, and some crazy looking duds on Mos Def and he'd be a SHOE IN for Cat from Red Dwarf!
hell, even that doesn't matter. i've been using computers in depth for 20 of my 24 years on this planet, and I can't get a job to save my life in the IT world, and I no longer care. My old IT job got cut, simply because i wasn't conformist enough for the company. I knew as much if not more than my MCSE boss, and basically kept their server together. The only drawback was having to deal with the management to OK decisions, which well, is everywhere you go in corporate environments.
I attended High Tech Institute for a third of a complete session to obtain one of their 'Associate of Arts Certificates' and ended up leaving the school after speaking with their Dean.
When I was attending, I ended up teaching half of the people in the class instead of learning anything useful, and when I got to the Novell course, I was severely dismayed.
The Teacher was not even CERTIFIED in Novell, in fact, he admitted to not having touched Novell much before he started teaching the course. The school claimed to be a Novell certified school, but I doubt that counts as a certified teacher.
Halfway through the six week course the teacher finally came in saying "LOOK! I got my Novell Cert!"
I talked to the dean and found out some nice information that made me feel like a complete asshole for having bothered attending the school.
Graduates of the school with no extra certification were making 30,000$/year starting roughly, students with no certification and who have not graduated were making about 28,000$/year starting... people who DID NOT graduate from the school and simply had certifications they obtained on their own were making 33-35,000$/year starting wages... And people who both graduated from the school and had extra certification? they only made about 1-2,000$ a year more...
Sooooooooooooooo why would I want to keep going to that school and learn absolutely nothing interesting for only an extra 20,000$ of student loans? They weren't even going to cover Windows XP even though it had been out for well over a year at the time. I feel as though I was severely ripped off and I should not have to pay the loans back. The equipment they had at the school and the quality of their network was complete crap, especially for the amount of money that was being poured into the school. I found myself surrounded by highschool dropouts and old farts in their midlife crisis.
The idea of going to a tech school like this made more sense to me than going to a 4 year college for computers, considering the turnaround time of technology these days. By the time I would get out of the 4 year course of college my education would be useless and outdated.
So I gave up on computers as a career... Considering that the only things I've done with my entire life since age 5 were computers and music, it makes choosing a new career a bit challenging...
It's a fine and dandy thing these fucking used car dealership quality scams are finally shutting down their doors.
I'm sure that the Bryman Medical Institute is just as much of a quality school as High Tech Institute, as it's the same company.
I'm not the only one who had issues with the school. A friend of mine who was attending was almost finished with his Mechanical Drafting courses. They were about to cut the Mechanical Drafting courses from the school completely, and I believe his class was the last one. Instead of giving them a challenging final exam that utilized all of the skills of Mechanical drafting, they tossed the class into a standard drafting class and had them draw houses. My friends was no hack, he had experience in drafting before, and was _DAMN_ good at it. He finished his final in an hour because anyone and their mother can draw straight lines and make a house in a drafting program... Not everyone can draw a complete part-by-part remote control car design with intricate gears and such...
So... If anyone wants to join me with a huge pile of explosives, let's go driving around the country blowing up some shitty ass schools!
I have well over 55gb of mp3's on my system at the moment, and most of them are either albums i currently own, my friends own, or i have onced owned at one point in time or rented from the library. How does the RIAA claim who is stealing and who is not?
The only reason that I don't own a lot of the alb ums are that they are either NOT a major label album, not a REAL album at all but live bootlegs, and also because I am very poor and cannot afford 10,000$ of cd's!
so what's the problem with me having a "wish list" i can listen to until i can afford the album?
Hey... The Lightning Bolt can produce a dvd with a couple guys with super 8 cameras, and a small US Tour in a bunch of houses, bars, and venues, which costs gas money for the van, food, not counting lodging due to hospitality to touring bands in most towns, and they have all the gear they need for a live show anywhere anytime with electricity. It's dirt cheap to send a few hacked tapes done up on college campus to a dvd mastering facility, or even using a college one, and sending a master to a label that would then send them anywhere that wanted them. They're getting a pretty decent following from it and plenty of exposure. I can't imagine the recordings costing them anything.
The White Stripes are known for going into a studio and laying down the album in less than three days. A good indie record label has cheap, good sounding recording studios that can really capture the band the way they mean to sound. Dirt cheap recordings, and now they're famous. Hell, I guess you don't even need to know hwo to play drums to really be a good famous drummer!:)
If a band really has talent, then they'll write good music and be able to produce their own album, or at least have a heavy hand in it. The Flaming Lips, the entire Elephant 6 consortium, The Microphones... there's a long good list...
So basically, record companies inflate the hell out of all the numbers because they don't understand what real music is all about anymore. They forgot that long ago and anyone who doesn't realize that is blind. All they look for is the next "big thing" and whomever will get the most sales.
I'd like to see some sort of establishment that would promote government grants or even the RIAA just giving grants for setting up a recording studio for them, or recording an album.
When you've got no certifications, degrees, or any real prior experience, but plenty of knowledge on how to do it all, how does one get into audio engineering?
My boss and I both get paid literally -crap- for our job. We are the entire IT department and we work for a nonprofit orginization. We face the hardship of having our employers not able to understand what we are doing as an IT department because most of the people that work here are complete idiots. Apparently, the management thinks that both of us are overpaid for our positions, however, I get a measly 1200$/mo for being a "Help Desk Technician" who basically does almost all the work. My boss is the guy who takes care of all the department paperwork as he's wheelchair bound with very little use of his hands. Apparently upper management was urging him to get rid of me, even though I know the network inside and out and am probably one of the few people in town who would bother -taking- the job. When you're paid so little for a job that gives you absolutely no gratification except for being chewed out by upper management who doesn't understand why we have to reboot the server so often to help fix things and absolutely no budget to obtain new equipment that isn't on the edge of breaking down. They expect us to magically make their p200 machines run faster with no budget.
So what do you do when you've got employers who are too stupid to realize that technology doesn't grow on trees and that if we weren't here, they'd have a hell of a time finding a replacement mcse or even mcp who would work for such a measly price and still be willing to deal with the complete bullshit way the company is run?
While I absolutely love linux to death and hear wonderful things about Mac OSX, I still use Windows. Windows 98 to be specific. I don't want to upgrade to 2k or XP... why? Because 95% of the stuff I run is legacy applications built specifically for dos or old windows, or just not runnable on linux or macos. Macintoshes are expensive as all getout, while a PC costs you a mere 300$ for a decent system. When you're a poor early 20's youth with a crappy job, cheap is where it's at. Sure I'd love to try mac osx on a nice titanium notebook, and that would probably end up being my notebook of choice for doing audio work (which is what I would use it for) when at a concert or whatnot...
but linux just doesn't support much for audio geeks, and it doesn't support legacy dos apps that well... it also doesn't have the ability to run a majority of the windows software out there and it's impossible to port it over without the sources released.
Linux is wonderful in theory, but Linux also needs to have its head screwed on straight. What's the point in trying to continuously copy microsoft and keep up with where they are going? why isn't linux taking itself to a new level and trying to design a completely new idea on how to use a computer, or at least use the idea of quick, tight, small, optimized code that runs on barebones systems? I've noticed that linux with any of the GUIS usually runs like complete crap compared to windows on a p200 32mb system. Fat lot of good that does most users.
I work in a very small tightly budgeted IT position in a nonprofit orginization. All of our systems are win98 boxes running p200 32mb on average. Linux is hardly a viable option. Windows runs slow enough on these boxes, but having to teach users how to use a mouse is our primary concern, not figuring out how to make (insert windows based app) work in linux.
simply put, linux has come a long way, but it has a LOOOOOOOoonnnnnnng way to go yet...
Exactly how incredibly messed up is this technology?
Seems to me that it's not that incompatible according to sony's claims... from their website:
Playback can consist of 3 channel, 4 channel, 5 channel or 5.1 channel, depending on what the artist/producer wants to achieve musically. Whether 2 channel or 5.1 channel, multi-channel SACD delivers the same high resolution audio through all channels simultaneously. All channels provide for up to 100kHz frequency response and a sampling rate of 2.822 Megahertz. That's 64 times the sampling rate of a regular CD! With the hybrid disc option, a multi- channel SACD disc can contain up to 6 channels of high resolution audio, a separate 2 channel, studio-mixed version of the same music, AND a regular CD layer which contains the same recording in CD quality so you can take the very same disc and enjoy SACD in your home, car, portable or any existing CD player.
^^^ there it says you can play it in your home, car portable, or ANY EXISTING CD PLAYER...
well we'll have to stick 'em to it won't we?
So obviously if the cd can be read by normal cd players, there's a normal audio cd layer, right?
I'm sorry, but if I like a band, I want to hear their music by any means needed to be taken. I will download the mp3's from the internet or get a tape copy from a friend (SAVE THE CASSETTES!) or have them burn me a cd copy of the music. However, since the RIAA decides it's a grand idea to charge 20$ for 45 minutes of music I have never heard in my life, I refuse to pay for it on the grounds that I'm fucking POOR.
I've got a ton of mp3's, mostly albums, that I have either ripped from my own collection, a friends collection, or by checking out gobs of cd's at the library and ripping them. All of those methods are the same method that I used to use to get all the music I had before CD's were big. I'd have friends give me tape copies of everything, or I'd borrow and do a tape copy.
Why did I do that? BECAUSE I WAS FUCKING POOR.
By poor I don't mean "Woe is me I'm poverty stricken" - I mean that I don't have enough money to support buying 500 albums at 20$/pop. Say I want a complete collective of a bunch of bands because I like all those bands. If I have to buy 500 albums at even $2 a piece, i'd be paying 1000$ on cd's. make that 20$ a piece, and suddenly i'm $10,000 in the hole.
Now, how many of you have an extra $10k to spend on music? I know I don't.
Oh, and I stopped supporting big label music. I don't listen to things that are on major labels, I buy my music direct from the indie artists who make better music for the sake of making music, not for the sake of being a trendsetting hip moneymaker for a year.
Unwound went 10 years, got many big label offers, refused them, and continued to make some of the greatest music I've ever heard. That's respect for music and that shows a die-hard group that knows what music is -really- about.
When I was young I never thought it was needed to go poking for books on how to do more things with my toys. Whatever happened to people thinking for themselves and coming up with their own ideas and ways of using things?
Something just strikes me as incredibly wrong when you have to use a thick book to play with toys.
Aren't toys supposed to be an amusing waste of time and not a complete thing you have to study?
And this is how far the United States gets in the race for having issues with morality and letting their christian religion bully them into thinking the way they do about everything.
If the US expects to get ahead, they really gotta pull their heads out of their asses and elect someone decent for president.
Funny thing is that I don't listen to the radio and I don't watch MTV. How am I learning about new music then? From friends who are into music I have never heard about and is not covered on the radio. Well, when a friend says "Hey, you should go check out the band Burning Airlines!" and I go strolling off to the nearest record store to find them and find nothing to hear. Well, I certainly am not going to buy something I've never heard before, so I go online and search for MP3's of that band. As soon as I hear a few good MP3's of the band I decide weather or not the album is worth having.
Honestly, I really really really really like having the physical album in hand. If i could, I would have a vinyl copy of everything I have on CD as well for the sheer inane pleasure of having the records. I'm a completist and like having entire collective works of bands (until things start happening like new Pink Floyd "Collectives" like Echoes which are complete bullshit) so I tend to buy the album.
Problem: I've got about 30 cd's full of MP3 files, most of them complete albums. Because I have these shoddy MP3's on CD, does that mean I'm pirating something? I really would love to own all of these albums, but I just don't have the spare ten thousand dollars to buy all of them.
If cd's were sold at oh, 10$ in the stores rather than some bloated fat 20$ for a 40 minute album, I might buy more CD's than I do. Currently, this year I have bought absolutely no CD's. The last set of CD's I bought were used albums and stuff that was independant and I had heard LIVE before I ever heard it (never heard it?) on the radio.
So Down with the RIAA, and I hope their revenues do drop more and more and more. They do nothing but make it impossible for artists with little or no funding to make a name for themselves. They squash out the little guy and prevent them from taking away "precious revenue" by showing off the real talent that lies in the underground.
It's a damn shame that there's so much hype and fame and glory associated with being a complete dipshit asshole or a bimbo with boobs and rather little talent.
Donating to charity and non-profit orginizations is a really really good thing. I support it wholeheartedly as I work for a nonprofit orginization. Funding is tough, and getting gear to replace the stuff that's falling apart and no longer working is even harder. Upgrading to windows 2000 is a completely laughable idea with our current system and most workstations are pentium 200 or less with not very much ram.
If you're in washington state and wish to donate, please e-mail me. We could use the help. Thanks!
what we really need is to organize a mass-demonstration in DC with everyone rallying to force things to be changed... if you don't change these things (drops huge stack of papers) now, then we're going to flood the capital and have a huge geekparty!
"Our New Pearl Harbor" is really a horrible way to state this. This is an attack with our own planes against our own people. This was nothing like pearl harbor at all, it was worse.
I hear a lot of -really- stupid stuff flying from a lot of peoples mouths today... most of it is due to the ability to speak before thinking - which i think is what most people do... people stick blame everywhere at once and say "BLOW EVERYTHING UP" - but then again... don't people stop to think and say "hey... they just killed 13259710295 of our people, if we do the same to some other random country that may or may not be the one who attacked us (IF another country attacked us) what will it accomplish? what we have to do is investigate and figure out what the hell really happened...
it's a sad day, but we'll just have to cope, clean up, life goes on, don't dwell on the distant past and try to reflect it to now. pearl harbor has nothing to do with this, and i really hate that sentiment.
I agree that a hasty counterattack is a really dumb texan's way to do things (hold my beer, watch this!) but...
I think that the golden rule (whatever you want to call it) should be put into effect... it should be a world standard for living in the first place... if someone is going to crash our planes into innocent people, then we should crash their heads into innocent concrete...
I agree that war is something that should not happen, should never happen, but damnit, you don't watch someone shoot your friend in the head and then just walk away, do you? what would you do if someone killed a friend of yours or a loved one of yours out of cold blood? i'm fairly sure that you'd want to do something to strike revenge for the loss...
i may live in america, but i hate this country... this makes me hate it even more... we've got fucked-up politics full of bickering and stupidity. we've got corporate-run everything these days. we've got "freedom" but that doesn't seem to exist much anymore... and it's probably going to fall further away from us because of this incident.
we started with the ten amendments. those amendments then were edited "to fit with the current times" which is complete bollocks.
now look what we have...
"freedom of speech" - yet i can't say "shit" in public without getting stared down funny, even if i am talking about fecal matter
"freedom of religion" - only THE LAWRD JEEZUZ CHRIST in this country! AMEN!
"freedom of assembly" - uh, cops, we're having a street party, go away please (thwack thwack thwack - ouch) they don't let us do that...
"right to bear arms" - which is slowly being taken away, but heed this: if you take the guns away from the citizens, who has guns? the CRIMINALS... therefore it's like putting a huge sign in front of your house saying "I DON'T HAVE A WEAPON IN HERE! BUST IN AND STEAL MY STUFF!"
it goes on...
so we pour millions of our tax dollars into what? we have a government "for the people and by the people" but they don't seem to give a damn about what i really think as a citizen. we have a defense system that doesn't seem to be defending very well today. we have intelligence that obviously isn't so intelligent today. what we have here is proof that america's egotistical "better than thou" views are completely corrupting the country and we need to shape something up before we completely fall under.
this act today was sick, sad, and wrong, and i believe that the people who attacked us, whomever it was, -should- be dealt with. as for war? war is useless and stupid. it's killing lots of people for political reasons. if you fight a war you're fighting yourself just as much as the "enemy" that you fight.
what the united states needs to do is get a goddamned life. anyone recommend a better country to move to? i'm getting sick of this place...
i'm tired of the fundamentalist linux/microsoft is "GOD" freaks...
i'm a user of both linux and microsoft operating systems and honestly, i'm not very happy with either of them. linux makes a wonderful server system that never crashes, however, when i try to use it as a functional desktop workstation - it blows. there's nothing that i find useful for linux. there's no professional quality audio editing software, there's no excellent selection of games, there's no easily-compatible way to network it to an NT lan without having to learn samba (this kind of thing should be natively supported by now damnit.)
but at least linux is stable as a rock.
hoo-f-ing ray... i can stare at linux all day and it'll never crash no matter what i do! shame i have nothing i want to do on it!
then we turn the page to microsoft...
who has lost compatibility, increased required resources, and generally pissed off a lot of people most of the time. i'm still using windows 98... i won't use ME because it crashes -really- often for me... i won't use windows 2k because it can't run old dos software (although 2k is a very nice set of server software, not quite linux, but nice) and i'm avoiding XP like the plague. windows crashes and is really buggy (so is a lot of linux stuff, most of it in fact - it's all beta!)...
but at least i can attempt to use a bunch of different software on windows! *crash*
there's no right choice...
*(BIG IMPORTANT PART)*
i see the linux community... and it's beginning to make me somewhat sick...
there's a ton of amazingly brilliant resource in the linux community, but it's so divided and disconnected and unorganized that it's almost worthless. each distribution team has their heads up their asses and decides not to look at what needs to be done to actually make an operating system worth looking at.
dear linux developers... write something worth writing... what we need is something that outdates microsoft's plans five years from now to be released -now-...
we need stability, speed, functionality, software to go with it - something useful for everybody, compatibility with the rest of the world, ease of use for the stupid people who work in the offices... all in a small tight clean package that can be manipulated, upgraded, undone, and transformed with ease...
if that doesn't get created by linux developers working together (as they should be in the first place but seem to fail to do) then there will be no viable future for linux as -the- operating system.
it's sad to see such potential being wasted... apple took freebsd and made ultra-eyecandy out of it... why is it taking the linux developers to come anywhere near that for the gui? on top of that, linux, even for an experienced computer user, is -damned- frustrating to use when you haven't used it before... wheras windows is easy enough for a child to figure out in a day...
so what can the linux community do? unless they regroup and rethink their strategy, they're not going anywhere.
blah blah blah, e-mail is getting big... blah blah blah...
you know, i find that most of this completely inane babble (typically KatzBabble) to be pretty much a given. the internet is growing exceptionally fast, people are beginning to turn to digital things for ways of life because of the digital things going mainstream, so of course e-mail is going to become this huge behemoth for communication. it's fast, it's cheap, it can include pictures and sounds and such... why wouldn't someone want to use e-mail instead of snailmail? the only thing we lack now is the ability to send a physical object through e-mail, and that's coming soon enough, i'm pretty sure.
so katz... stop your pointless yammering and find something more constructive to do. your "editorials" are boring and worthless and bring few insightful points out.
i've often thought of the idea of starting to ship computers in specialized shaped cases, vanity cases or something... like a crazy pirateship or some such...
Honestly, The Phoenix office of Bechtel, the HR department where I work, still uses 95. They're considering upgrading to 2000 sometime in the next year or two... maybey...
Meanwhile, they're gonna stick to 95, and the won't let us use anything else, period.
So how would companies like this, that just don't give a damn, or even small companies that don't want to upgrade... why would they even want to THINK about upgrading that way?
I mean... honestly, if I have a company that's working just fine running the systems they're running, why would i want to bother upgrading my software to something even more ludicrously bloated, potentially unstable, and gives a very good reason to have to shove out tons of money to upgrade the internet connections?
Then again, that's a good idea. Someone convince Bechtel to upgrade to XP and upgrade the internet connectivity for the Phoenix office.
Currently we run through the most ugly firewall/proxy/run to another city setup. Yeah, in other words, I type a character, it goes from Phoenix, to San Francisco, to the rest of the net through who knows what size dsl connection (yeah, dsl) thus giving every phoenix user an average speed of 1.2k/sec... speedy like 14.4!
So, if I were smart and I wanted to not spend much money, I wouldn't ever ever upgrade to that version of windows.
What if Apple stays at the single-buy license system like they are now? I'd be inclined to stick with that company a bit more. From a business-minded standpoint, I'd also like to see Apple get OS/X running on x86 machines, simply to smoosh Microsoft.
So if you read the "technical" section of the Microsoft writeup, you'll notice their use of the female gender as the hypothetical attacker.
"This would give the attacker complete control of the server, and would enable her to take virtually any action she chose."
So, is Microsoft saying that all people who are hacking their webservers are female or that the person who found the bug is female?
Microsoft, watch out! You could be next on the list for those crazy women's rights activists to attack!
back in the day in middle school i was a very very angsty individual who hated everyone and everything. i was complete geek at the time, buried in my computer stuff. on top of that, being overweight was a burden. i'm not like huge obese, i've just got those love handles that the ladies crave so very very much. i went through sixth grade angry and raging, seventh cooling off a little, and eighth being a depressive mess... that summer i found smoking cigarettes and smoking pot and started loosening out. freshman year of highschool i had been smoking a lot of both and ended up getting really good grades, and raising my self esteem bar a little. unfortunately, things happen, mothers become tyrannical, and life changes. sophomore year i had quit smoking and my self esteem and grades went down due to the looming cloud of oppressive mother forcing me into a little hole that she wanted me to live in... junior year was better, senior year i ended up slowly beginning to find myself though. back into the groove of being a complete hippie with long hair and everything (http://br.crashed.net/~subbi/pics/ - you can find some there). that was also the year my mother who forced me into her christian world that was completely hypocritical kicked me out of the house because i didn't go to church. so i moved in with my dad who didn't care which way i went as long as i wasn't getting in any trouble and i slacked off for a year. senior year / that year between doing anything of value were two important years. i had to do a lot of introspection because living with my mom had severely screwed me up. constantly being yelled at, told what to believe, told how to act, told what to do, so exact and excruciatingly not me that i couldn't handle it anymore. throughout highschool i wore normal clothing, but always considered myself what the little black-wearing kiddies thought they were. they thought they were goth, i knew i was what the real definition of it is. i was constantly a depressive ugly mess, short tempered, always grouchy, people didn't want to be near me. ended up getting out of highschool and doing a lot of partying. eventually i found lsd and began taking copius amounts of it for a month when i found out how much i enjoyed it and how it made me a happy person. i was using the logic that if i can't change myself, i'll use something to change myself with. apparantly it worked. since that month where i really should have fried my brain, i came out a much more insightful and much happier person then ever before.
i'm not promoting drug use, i'm just saying that that happened to be the path i took.
kids will be kids, meaning that they'll ridicule, taunt, hurt, maim, destroy, and cause general chaos. i wanted to kill myself many many times but eventually realized that if i kill myself, anyone i'm remotely close to would be crushed. it's the most selfish act you can perform and it doesn't help you anyway. it's running from your problems and being a weak link. honestly, i'm gonna say that i'm a bastard and people who want to kill themselves who start threatening that they'll kill themselves who won't listen to you should go ahead and off themselves because it's one less idiot on this planet. nowadays i'm still a cigarette chugging potsmoking party hippie in a rock band, but that's only on the weekends and nights. i've found myself to be a very happy person, and i'm happy with who i am. i figure who cares what my body looks like as long as i feel healthy (it would be nice to have not inherited a lot of my dads genes in that aspect though) and i can do what i want to do.
i'm not entirely sure that i agree with the "life gets better after highschool" statement. for me, i don't think it really has gotten much better. i'm happy with myself, but i hate my life. i'm in a corporate work environment doing braindead data entry work and attending a corporate bullshit tech school called High Tech Institute. I realized much too late that HTI is a load of bollocks and i'm wasting my money there. I'm living in phoenix, and being a native of washington state, Phoenix is a horrible horrible thing to have happeend to me. the people are for the majority rather rude, people drive like they're on crack (most of them are) and there's nothing decent to offer here. it's a bunch of daily grind and nothing entertaining. lots of pop culture, lots of spanish culture, lots of metal, and tons of ghetto everywhere. it's spread out, miserable, and completely displeasing. I never get any sleep since i work full time and i go to school five hours a night, so i'm constantly exhausted, living in a roach-infested shithole studio apartment, always broke and hungry, yet i somehow manage to make myself say "i don't give a damn how shitty this is, i'm just gonna go through with it"
karma seems to be a fairly good thing to follow, and i believe that if you follow it that it'll turn out that you will get back what you've tossed out. it may not be right now or soon, but it'll be worth your while. i also tend to believe that life leads you where it wants you to go. things happen to you for a reson, good or bad, but they're there to teach you something about life. you do learn something new every day, you just have to realize that you've learned it.
go watch as the cheerleaders become teen mothers and the football stars become drunken idiot rednecks with loser jobs married to those teen mothers. the geeks/nerds/brains are the ones that end up doing the worthwhile stuff anymore.
so drop those knives, put down those nooses, stop blowing away your classmates and listen up:
life ain't so shitty and in the long run, all that stupid ridicule is complete bullshit. you already know that you're smarter and better than they are so why lower yourself below their level by killing yourself or someone else? let them ridicule you and prove their stupidity, someday you're going to be richer than any of those bastards will ever be!
um, yes. long rant, sorry.:D
This would hardly be the death of a general purpose PC, at least for someone like me. They might make a bunch of little appliances that do this and do that but I would personally still like to stick to a centralized place of doing everything and not have fifteen remote controls floating around for this pantload of devices that I probably wouldn't use. Besides, what's the point of buying a brand-spanking-new thing when you know that six months later there's going to be one twice as cool and twice as fast? The technological world is moving so fast that I'm afraid to upgrade from my 350MHz machine to something new. It works for my purposes now, so why would I get a superfast expensive system that's going to be outdated next year? I don't have the spare money to go spending like that on little toys. Technology can do all it wants to make me want to buy buy buy and get the newest fad, but there's no reason to become a lemming following the newest trend. If it works, use it, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Has anyone else ever noticed how similar Mos Def and Danny John-Jules look? I mean I swear, stick some fangs, new hair, and some crazy looking duds on Mos Def and he'd be a SHOE IN for Cat from Red Dwarf!
hell, even that doesn't matter.
i've been using computers in depth for 20 of my 24 years on this planet, and I can't get a job to save my life in the IT world, and I no longer care. My old IT job got cut, simply because i wasn't conformist enough for the company. I knew as much if not more than my MCSE boss, and basically kept their server together. The only drawback was having to deal with the management to OK decisions, which well, is everywhere you go in corporate environments.
I don't understand how they're surviving still...
I attended High Tech Institute for a third of a complete session to obtain one of their 'Associate of Arts Certificates' and ended up leaving the school after speaking with their Dean.
When I was attending, I ended up teaching half of the people in the class instead of learning anything useful, and when I got to the Novell course, I was severely dismayed.
The Teacher was not even CERTIFIED in Novell, in fact, he admitted to not having touched Novell much before he started teaching the course. The school claimed to be a Novell certified school, but I doubt that counts as a certified teacher.
Halfway through the six week course the teacher finally came in saying "LOOK! I got my Novell Cert!"
I talked to the dean and found out some nice information that made me feel like a complete asshole for having bothered attending the school.
Graduates of the school with no extra certification were making 30,000$/year starting roughly, students with no certification and who have not graduated were making about 28,000$/year starting... people who DID NOT graduate from the school and simply had certifications they obtained on their own were making 33-35,000$/year starting wages... And people who both graduated from the school and had extra certification? they only made about 1-2,000$ a year more...
Sooooooooooooooo why would I want to keep going to that school and learn absolutely nothing interesting for only an extra 20,000$ of student loans? They weren't even going to cover Windows XP even though it had been out for well over a year at the time. I feel as though I was severely ripped off and I should not have to pay the loans back. The equipment they had at the school and the quality of their network was complete crap, especially for the amount of money that was being poured into the school. I found myself surrounded by highschool dropouts and old farts in their midlife crisis.
The idea of going to a tech school like this made more sense to me than going to a 4 year college for computers, considering the turnaround time of technology these days. By the time I would get out of the 4 year course of college my education would be useless and outdated.
So I gave up on computers as a career... Considering that the only things I've done with my entire life since age 5 were computers and music, it makes choosing a new career a bit challenging...
It's a fine and dandy thing these fucking used car dealership quality scams are finally shutting down their doors.
I'm sure that the Bryman Medical Institute is just as much of a quality school as High Tech Institute, as it's the same company.
I'm not the only one who had issues with the school. A friend of mine who was attending was almost finished with his Mechanical Drafting courses. They were about to cut the Mechanical Drafting courses from the school completely, and I believe his class was the last one. Instead of giving them a challenging final exam that utilized all of the skills of Mechanical drafting, they tossed the class into a standard drafting class and had them draw houses. My friends was no hack, he had experience in drafting before, and was _DAMN_ good at it. He finished his final in an hour because anyone and their mother can draw straight lines and make a house in a drafting program... Not everyone can draw a complete part-by-part remote control car design with intricate gears and such...
So... If anyone wants to join me with a huge pile of explosives, let's go driving around the country blowing up some shitty ass schools!
yay for ACiD!
and yay for pHluid!
I'm glad to be a part of this wonderful group. pHluid itself was the group that started my interest in tracking, and now I'm a part of it.
Thanks everyone!
subliminal / pHluid
I have well over 55gb of mp3's on my system at the moment, and most of them are either albums i currently own, my friends own, or i have onced owned at one point in time or rented from the library. How does the RIAA claim who is stealing and who is not?
The only reason that I don't own a lot of the alb ums are that they are either NOT a major label album, not a REAL album at all but live bootlegs, and also because I am very poor and cannot afford 10,000$ of cd's!
so what's the problem with me having a "wish list" i can listen to until i can afford the album?
Hey... The Lightning Bolt can produce a dvd with a couple guys with super 8 cameras, and a small US Tour in a bunch of houses, bars, and venues, which costs gas money for the van, food, not counting lodging due to hospitality to touring bands in most towns, and they have all the gear they need for a live show anywhere anytime with electricity. It's dirt cheap to send a few hacked tapes done up on college campus to a dvd mastering facility, or even using a college one, and sending a master to a label that would then send them anywhere that wanted them. They're getting a pretty decent following from it and plenty of exposure. I can't imagine the recordings costing them anything.
:)
The White Stripes are known for going into a studio and laying down the album in less than three days. A good indie record label has cheap, good sounding recording studios that can really capture the band the way they mean to sound. Dirt cheap recordings, and now they're famous. Hell, I guess you don't even need to know hwo to play drums to really be a good famous drummer!
If a band really has talent, then they'll write good music and be able to produce their own album, or at least have a heavy hand in it. The Flaming Lips, the entire Elephant 6 consortium, The Microphones... there's a long good list...
So basically, record companies inflate the hell out of all the numbers because they don't understand what real music is all about anymore. They forgot that long ago and anyone who doesn't realize that is blind. All they look for is the next "big thing" and whomever will get the most sales.
I'd like to see some sort of establishment that would promote government grants or even the RIAA just giving grants for setting up a recording studio for them, or recording an album.
When you've got no certifications, degrees, or any real prior experience, but plenty of knowledge on how to do it all, how does one get into audio engineering?
My boss and I both get paid literally -crap- for our job. We are the entire IT department and we work for a nonprofit orginization. We face the hardship of having our employers not able to understand what we are doing as an IT department because most of the people that work here are complete idiots. Apparently, the management thinks that both of us are overpaid for our positions, however, I get a measly 1200$/mo for being a "Help Desk Technician" who basically does almost all the work. My boss is the guy who takes care of all the department paperwork as he's wheelchair bound with very little use of his hands. Apparently upper management was urging him to get rid of me, even though I know the network inside and out and am probably one of the few people in town who would bother -taking- the job. When you're paid so little for a job that gives you absolutely no gratification except for being chewed out by upper management who doesn't understand why we have to reboot the server so often to help fix things and absolutely no budget to obtain new equipment that isn't on the edge of breaking down. They expect us to magically make their p200 machines run faster with no budget.
So what do you do when you've got employers who are too stupid to realize that technology doesn't grow on trees and that if we weren't here, they'd have a hell of a time finding a replacement mcse or even mcp who would work for such a measly price and still be willing to deal with the complete bullshit way the company is run?
While I absolutely love linux to death and hear wonderful things about Mac OSX, I still use Windows. Windows 98 to be specific. I don't want to upgrade to 2k or XP... why? Because 95% of the stuff I run is legacy applications built specifically for dos or old windows, or just not runnable on linux or macos. Macintoshes are expensive as all getout, while a PC costs you a mere 300$ for a decent system. When you're a poor early 20's youth with a crappy job, cheap is where it's at. Sure I'd love to try mac osx on a nice titanium notebook, and that would probably end up being my notebook of choice for doing audio work (which is what I would use it for) when at a concert or whatnot...
but linux just doesn't support much for audio geeks, and it doesn't support legacy dos apps that well... it also doesn't have the ability to run a majority of the windows software out there and it's impossible to port it over without the sources released.
Linux is wonderful in theory, but Linux also needs to have its head screwed on straight. What's the point in trying to continuously copy microsoft and keep up with where they are going? why isn't linux taking itself to a new level and trying to design a completely new idea on how to use a computer, or at least use the idea of quick, tight, small, optimized code that runs on barebones systems? I've noticed that linux with any of the GUIS usually runs like complete crap compared to windows on a p200 32mb system. Fat lot of good that does most users.
I work in a very small tightly budgeted IT position in a nonprofit orginization. All of our systems are win98 boxes running p200 32mb on average. Linux is hardly a viable option. Windows runs slow enough on these boxes, but having to teach users how to use a mouse is our primary concern, not figuring out how to make (insert windows based app) work in linux.
simply put, linux has come a long way, but it has a LOOOOOOOoonnnnnnng way to go yet...
and mac is expensive. too expensive.
Exactly how incredibly messed up is this technology?
Seems to me that it's not that incompatible according to sony's claims... from their website:
Playback can consist of 3 channel, 4 channel, 5 channel or 5.1 channel, depending on what the artist/producer wants to achieve musically. Whether 2 channel or 5.1 channel, multi-channel SACD delivers the same high resolution audio through all channels simultaneously. All channels provide for up to 100kHz frequency response and a sampling rate of 2.822 Megahertz. That's 64 times the sampling rate of a regular CD! With the hybrid disc option, a multi- channel SACD disc can contain up to 6 channels of high resolution audio, a separate 2 channel, studio-mixed version of the same music, AND a regular CD layer which contains the same recording in CD quality so you can take the very same disc and enjoy SACD in your home, car, portable or any existing CD player.
^^^
there it says you can play it in your home, car portable, or ANY EXISTING CD PLAYER...
well we'll have to stick 'em to it won't we?
So obviously if the cd can be read by normal cd players, there's a normal audio cd layer, right?
I'm sorry, but if I like a band, I want to hear their music by any means needed to be taken. I will download the mp3's from the internet or get a tape copy from a friend (SAVE THE CASSETTES!) or have them burn me a cd copy of the music. However, since the RIAA decides it's a grand idea to charge 20$ for 45 minutes of music I have never heard in my life, I refuse to pay for it on the grounds that I'm fucking POOR.
I've got a ton of mp3's, mostly albums, that I have either ripped from my own collection, a friends collection, or by checking out gobs of cd's at the library and ripping them. All of those methods are the same method that I used to use to get all the music I had before CD's were big. I'd have friends give me tape copies of everything, or I'd borrow and do a tape copy.
Why did I do that? BECAUSE I WAS FUCKING POOR.
By poor I don't mean "Woe is me I'm poverty stricken" - I mean that I don't have enough money to support buying 500 albums at 20$/pop. Say I want a complete collective of a bunch of bands because I like all those bands. If I have to buy 500 albums at even $2 a piece, i'd be paying 1000$ on cd's. make that 20$ a piece, and suddenly i'm $10,000 in the hole.
Now, how many of you have an extra $10k to spend on music? I know I don't.
Oh, and I stopped supporting big label music. I don't listen to things that are on major labels, I buy my music direct from the indie artists who make better music for the sake of making music, not for the sake of being a trendsetting hip moneymaker for a year.
Unwound went 10 years, got many big label offers, refused them, and continued to make some of the greatest music I've ever heard. That's respect for music and that shows a die-hard group that knows what music is -really- about.
When I was young I never thought it was needed to go poking for books on how to do more things with my toys. Whatever happened to people thinking for themselves and coming up with their own ideas and ways of using things?
Something just strikes me as incredibly wrong when you have to use a thick book to play with toys.
Aren't toys supposed to be an amusing waste of time and not a complete thing you have to study?
We can always start looking at our computers in lead-walled cameraman boxes such as in old photography cameras.
Me? I'll opt for the best choice ever.
Blinking modem light? NO PROBLEM!
DUCK IT!
Glowing Monitor? NO PROBLEM!
DUCK IT!
Big stupid mouth shouting a lot of bullshit to make people paranoid? NO PROBLEM!
DUCK IT!
When will people learn?
And the race is on...
And this is how far the United States gets in the race for having issues with morality and letting their christian religion bully them into thinking the way they do about everything.
If the US expects to get ahead, they really gotta pull their heads out of their asses and elect someone decent for president.
Funny thing is that I don't listen to the radio and I don't watch MTV. How am I learning about new music then? From friends who are into music I have never heard about and is not covered on the radio. Well, when a friend says "Hey, you should go check out the band Burning Airlines!" and I go strolling off to the nearest record store to find them and find nothing to hear. Well, I certainly am not going to buy something I've never heard before, so I go online and search for MP3's of that band. As soon as I hear a few good MP3's of the band I decide weather or not the album is worth having.
Honestly, I really really really really like having the physical album in hand. If i could, I would have a vinyl copy of everything I have on CD as well for the sheer inane pleasure of having the records. I'm a completist and like having entire collective works of bands (until things start happening like new Pink Floyd "Collectives" like Echoes which are complete bullshit) so I tend to buy the album.
Problem: I've got about 30 cd's full of MP3 files, most of them complete albums. Because I have these shoddy MP3's on CD, does that mean I'm pirating something? I really would love to own all of these albums, but I just don't have the spare ten thousand dollars to buy all of them.
If cd's were sold at oh, 10$ in the stores rather than some bloated fat 20$ for a 40 minute album, I might buy more CD's than I do. Currently, this year I have bought absolutely no CD's. The last set of CD's I bought were used albums and stuff that was independant and I had heard LIVE before I ever heard it (never heard it?) on the radio.
So Down with the RIAA, and I hope their revenues do drop more and more and more. They do nothing but make it impossible for artists with little or no funding to make a name for themselves. They squash out the little guy and prevent them from taking away "precious revenue" by showing off the real talent that lies in the underground.
It's a damn shame that there's so much hype and fame and glory associated with being a complete dipshit asshole or a bimbo with boobs and rather little talent.
Donating to charity and non-profit orginizations is a really really good thing. I support it wholeheartedly as I work for a nonprofit orginization. Funding is tough, and getting gear to replace the stuff that's falling apart and no longer working is even harder. Upgrading to windows 2000 is a completely laughable idea with our current system and most workstations are pentium 200 or less with not very much ram.
If you're in washington state and wish to donate, please e-mail me. We could use the help. Thanks!
what we really need is to organize a mass-demonstration in DC with everyone rallying to force things to be changed... if you don't change these things (drops huge stack of papers) now, then we're going to flood the capital and have a huge geekparty!
"Our New Pearl Harbor" is really a horrible way to state this. This is an attack with our own planes against our own people. This was nothing like pearl harbor at all, it was worse.
I hear a lot of -really- stupid stuff flying from a lot of peoples mouths today... most of it is due to the ability to speak before thinking - which i think is what most people do... people stick blame everywhere at once and say "BLOW EVERYTHING UP" - but then again... don't people stop to think and say "hey... they just killed 13259710295 of our people, if we do the same to some other random country that may or may not be the one who attacked us (IF another country attacked us) what will it accomplish? what we have to do is investigate and figure out what the hell really happened...
it's a sad day, but we'll just have to cope, clean up, life goes on, don't dwell on the distant past and try to reflect it to now. pearl harbor has nothing to do with this, and i really hate that sentiment.
I agree that a hasty counterattack is a really dumb texan's way to do things (hold my beer, watch this!) but...
...
I think that the golden rule (whatever you want to call it) should be put into effect... it should be a world standard for living in the first place... if someone is going to crash our planes into innocent people, then we should crash their heads into innocent concrete...
I agree that war is something that should not happen, should never happen, but damnit, you don't watch someone shoot your friend in the head and then just walk away, do you? what would you do if someone killed a friend of yours or a loved one of yours out of cold blood? i'm fairly sure that you'd want to do something to strike revenge for the loss...
i may live in america, but i hate this country... this makes me hate it even more... we've got fucked-up politics full of bickering and stupidity. we've got corporate-run everything these days. we've got "freedom" but that doesn't seem to exist much anymore... and it's probably going to fall further away from us because of this incident.
we started with the ten amendments. those amendments then were edited "to fit with the current times" which is complete bollocks.
now look what we have
"freedom of speech" - yet i can't say "shit" in public without getting stared down funny, even if i am talking about fecal matter
"freedom of religion" - only THE LAWRD JEEZUZ CHRIST in this country! AMEN!
"freedom of assembly" - uh, cops, we're having a street party, go away please (thwack thwack thwack - ouch) they don't let us do that...
"right to bear arms" - which is slowly being taken away, but heed this: if you take the guns away from the citizens, who has guns? the CRIMINALS... therefore it's like putting a huge sign in front of your house saying "I DON'T HAVE A WEAPON IN HERE! BUST IN AND STEAL MY STUFF!"
it goes on...
so we pour millions of our tax dollars into what? we have a government "for the people and by the people" but they don't seem to give a damn about what i really think as a citizen. we have a defense system that doesn't seem to be defending very well today. we have intelligence that obviously isn't so intelligent today. what we have here is proof that america's egotistical "better than thou" views are completely corrupting the country and we need to shape something up before we completely fall under.
this act today was sick, sad, and wrong, and i believe that the people who attacked us, whomever it was, -should- be dealt with. as for war? war is useless and stupid. it's killing lots of people for political reasons. if you fight a war you're fighting yourself just as much as the "enemy" that you fight.
what the united states needs to do is get a goddamned life. anyone recommend a better country to move to? i'm getting sick of this place...
i'm tired of the fundamentalist linux/microsoft is "GOD" freaks...
i'm a user of both linux and microsoft operating systems and honestly, i'm not very happy with either of them. linux makes a wonderful server system that never crashes, however, when i try to use it as a functional desktop workstation - it blows. there's nothing that i find useful for linux. there's no professional quality audio editing software, there's no excellent selection of games, there's no easily-compatible way to network it to an NT lan without having to learn samba (this kind of thing should be natively supported by now damnit.)
but at least linux is stable as a rock.
hoo-f-ing ray... i can stare at linux all day and it'll never crash no matter what i do! shame i have nothing i want to do on it!
then we turn the page to microsoft...
who has lost compatibility, increased required resources, and generally pissed off a lot of people most of the time. i'm still using windows 98... i won't use ME because it crashes -really- often for me... i won't use windows 2k because it can't run old dos software (although 2k is a very nice set of server software, not quite linux, but nice) and i'm avoiding XP like the plague. windows crashes and is really buggy (so is a lot of linux stuff, most of it in fact - it's all beta!)...
but at least i can attempt to use a bunch of different software on windows! *crash*
there's no right choice...
*(BIG IMPORTANT PART)*
i see the linux community... and it's beginning to make me somewhat sick...
there's a ton of amazingly brilliant resource in the linux community, but it's so divided and disconnected and unorganized that it's almost worthless. each distribution team has their heads up their asses and decides not to look at what needs to be done to actually make an operating system worth looking at.
dear linux developers... write something worth writing... what we need is something that outdates microsoft's plans five years from now to be released -now-...
we need stability, speed, functionality, software to go with it - something useful for everybody, compatibility with the rest of the world, ease of use for the stupid people who work in the offices... all in a small tight clean package that can be manipulated, upgraded, undone, and transformed with ease...
if that doesn't get created by linux developers working together (as they should be in the first place but seem to fail to do) then there will be no viable future for linux as -the- operating system.
it's sad to see such potential being wasted... apple took freebsd and made ultra-eyecandy out of it... why is it taking the linux developers to come anywhere near that for the gui? on top of that, linux, even for an experienced computer user, is -damned- frustrating to use when you haven't used it before... wheras windows is easy enough for a child to figure out in a day...
so what can the linux community do? unless they regroup and rethink their strategy, they're not going anywhere.
'nuff said.
blah blah blah, e-mail is getting big... blah blah blah...
you know, i find that most of this completely inane babble (typically KatzBabble) to be pretty much a given. the internet is growing exceptionally fast, people are beginning to turn to digital things for ways of life because of the digital things going mainstream, so of course e-mail is going to become this huge behemoth for communication. it's fast, it's cheap, it can include pictures and sounds and such... why wouldn't someone want to use e-mail instead of snailmail? the only thing we lack now is the ability to send a physical object through e-mail, and that's coming soon enough, i'm pretty sure.
so katz... stop your pointless yammering and find something more constructive to do. your "editorials" are boring and worthless and bring few insightful points out.
i've often thought of the idea of starting to ship computers in specialized shaped cases, vanity cases or something... like a crazy pirateship or some such...
Honestly, The Phoenix office of Bechtel, the HR department where I work, still uses 95. They're considering upgrading to 2000 sometime in the next year or two... maybey... Meanwhile, they're gonna stick to 95, and the won't let us use anything else, period. So how would companies like this, that just don't give a damn, or even small companies that don't want to upgrade... why would they even want to THINK about upgrading that way? I mean... honestly, if I have a company that's working just fine running the systems they're running, why would i want to bother upgrading my software to something even more ludicrously bloated, potentially unstable, and gives a very good reason to have to shove out tons of money to upgrade the internet connections? Then again, that's a good idea. Someone convince Bechtel to upgrade to XP and upgrade the internet connectivity for the Phoenix office. Currently we run through the most ugly firewall/proxy/run to another city setup. Yeah, in other words, I type a character, it goes from Phoenix, to San Francisco, to the rest of the net through who knows what size dsl connection (yeah, dsl) thus giving every phoenix user an average speed of 1.2k/sec... speedy like 14.4! So, if I were smart and I wanted to not spend much money, I wouldn't ever ever upgrade to that version of windows. What if Apple stays at the single-buy license system like they are now? I'd be inclined to stick with that company a bit more. From a business-minded standpoint, I'd also like to see Apple get OS/X running on x86 machines, simply to smoosh Microsoft.
So if you read the "technical" section of the Microsoft writeup, you'll notice their use of the female gender as the hypothetical attacker. "This would give the attacker complete control of the server, and would enable her to take virtually any action she chose." So, is Microsoft saying that all people who are hacking their webservers are female or that the person who found the bug is female? Microsoft, watch out! You could be next on the list for those crazy women's rights activists to attack!
back in the day in middle school i was a very very angsty individual who hated everyone and everything. i was complete geek at the time, buried in my computer stuff. on top of that, being overweight was a burden. i'm not like huge obese, i've just got those love handles that the ladies crave so very very much. i went through sixth grade angry and raging, seventh cooling off a little, and eighth being a depressive mess... that summer i found smoking cigarettes and smoking pot and started loosening out. freshman year of highschool i had been smoking a lot of both and ended up getting really good grades, and raising my self esteem bar a little. unfortunately, things happen, mothers become tyrannical, and life changes. sophomore year i had quit smoking and my self esteem and grades went down due to the looming cloud of oppressive mother forcing me into a little hole that she wanted me to live in... junior year was better, senior year i ended up slowly beginning to find myself though. back into the groove of being a complete hippie with long hair and everything (http://br.crashed.net/~subbi/pics/ - you can find some there). that was also the year my mother who forced me into her christian world that was completely hypocritical kicked me out of the house because i didn't go to church. so i moved in with my dad who didn't care which way i went as long as i wasn't getting in any trouble and i slacked off for a year. senior year / that year between doing anything of value were two important years. i had to do a lot of introspection because living with my mom had severely screwed me up. constantly being yelled at, told what to believe, told how to act, told what to do, so exact and excruciatingly not me that i couldn't handle it anymore. throughout highschool i wore normal clothing, but always considered myself what the little black-wearing kiddies thought they were. they thought they were goth, i knew i was what the real definition of it is. i was constantly a depressive ugly mess, short tempered, always grouchy, people didn't want to be near me. ended up getting out of highschool and doing a lot of partying. eventually i found lsd and began taking copius amounts of it for a month when i found out how much i enjoyed it and how it made me a happy person. i was using the logic that if i can't change myself, i'll use something to change myself with. apparantly it worked. since that month where i really should have fried my brain, i came out a much more insightful and much happier person then ever before. i'm not promoting drug use, i'm just saying that that happened to be the path i took. kids will be kids, meaning that they'll ridicule, taunt, hurt, maim, destroy, and cause general chaos. i wanted to kill myself many many times but eventually realized that if i kill myself, anyone i'm remotely close to would be crushed. it's the most selfish act you can perform and it doesn't help you anyway. it's running from your problems and being a weak link. honestly, i'm gonna say that i'm a bastard and people who want to kill themselves who start threatening that they'll kill themselves who won't listen to you should go ahead and off themselves because it's one less idiot on this planet. nowadays i'm still a cigarette chugging potsmoking party hippie in a rock band, but that's only on the weekends and nights. i've found myself to be a very happy person, and i'm happy with who i am. i figure who cares what my body looks like as long as i feel healthy (it would be nice to have not inherited a lot of my dads genes in that aspect though) and i can do what i want to do. i'm not entirely sure that i agree with the "life gets better after highschool" statement. for me, i don't think it really has gotten much better. i'm happy with myself, but i hate my life. i'm in a corporate work environment doing braindead data entry work and attending a corporate bullshit tech school called High Tech Institute. I realized much too late that HTI is a load of bollocks and i'm wasting my money there. I'm living in phoenix, and being a native of washington state, Phoenix is a horrible horrible thing to have happeend to me. the people are for the majority rather rude, people drive like they're on crack (most of them are) and there's nothing decent to offer here. it's a bunch of daily grind and nothing entertaining. lots of pop culture, lots of spanish culture, lots of metal, and tons of ghetto everywhere. it's spread out, miserable, and completely displeasing. I never get any sleep since i work full time and i go to school five hours a night, so i'm constantly exhausted, living in a roach-infested shithole studio apartment, always broke and hungry, yet i somehow manage to make myself say "i don't give a damn how shitty this is, i'm just gonna go through with it" karma seems to be a fairly good thing to follow, and i believe that if you follow it that it'll turn out that you will get back what you've tossed out. it may not be right now or soon, but it'll be worth your while. i also tend to believe that life leads you where it wants you to go. things happen to you for a reson, good or bad, but they're there to teach you something about life. you do learn something new every day, you just have to realize that you've learned it. go watch as the cheerleaders become teen mothers and the football stars become drunken idiot rednecks with loser jobs married to those teen mothers. the geeks/nerds/brains are the ones that end up doing the worthwhile stuff anymore. so drop those knives, put down those nooses, stop blowing away your classmates and listen up: life ain't so shitty and in the long run, all that stupid ridicule is complete bullshit. you already know that you're smarter and better than they are so why lower yourself below their level by killing yourself or someone else? let them ridicule you and prove their stupidity, someday you're going to be richer than any of those bastards will ever be! um, yes. long rant, sorry. :D
This would hardly be the death of a general purpose PC, at least for someone like me. They might make a bunch of little appliances that do this and do that but I would personally still like to stick to a centralized place of doing everything and not have fifteen remote controls floating around for this pantload of devices that I probably wouldn't use. Besides, what's the point of buying a brand-spanking-new thing when you know that six months later there's going to be one twice as cool and twice as fast? The technological world is moving so fast that I'm afraid to upgrade from my 350MHz machine to something new. It works for my purposes now, so why would I get a superfast expensive system that's going to be outdated next year? I don't have the spare money to go spending like that on little toys. Technology can do all it wants to make me want to buy buy buy and get the newest fad, but there's no reason to become a lemming following the newest trend. If it works, use it, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.