Well, in that case: as a consumer I woudn't even consider buying a 15" CRT that flickers that much. Perhaps the refresh rates were set on the lowest possible value, could be? The screen my sister uses is a 'Cheapo 15"' monitor I recovered from the garbage can: that one flickers less! And my sister is a "consumer", and she is very happy with it. Besides, I'm not a designer, I'm a lamo-o-programmer:-)
Well, due to EUR/USD conversion it might seem quite high, yes....But actually it was one of the cheapest that I could find in my country (which is known to be a rich country, in cars we can't get the cheaper models because they are not imported, go figure...). The quality on the other hand is astonishing. Since I'm now reading on it: it's a Sony SDM-M51, perhaps it is cheaper now than half a year ago.
Now don't get me wrong, I like the looks of apples and I found their iMacs quite cute. I even considered buying one for experimentation, but honestly all iMacs I saw on display had horribles monitors: flickering, too much contrast... Really:-(
I by far prefer my 15" Sony LCD screen attached to my home box (Not even that expensive, about 1150$). Of course the 21" aquarium here at work doesn't suck either, but then I'm glad I don't have to move it.
Well I had (correction: have, but didn't touch in years) a Game Gear and I loved that machine. But sometimes, especially just after turning on the machine, it messed up the screens and sprites completely. The game still ran, you could hear that from the sound, but it became unplayable because you coudn't see a thing.
Normally it would fix after a few on/off cycles: I thought of it as 'warming it up';-) The game I had the most trouble with was 'Sonic 2' which is from Sega itself. Perhaps it was a hardware defect, I'll never know.
Too bad it sucked so many batteries...well I still have my memories playing "Lemmings" for hours on it:-)
I know, but you know what you are doing, don't you? Linux has the advantage that you can get into the config files with a bootdisk, repair your mess, and reboot. (Which saved my *ss many many times because in Linux i'm just a newbie!) With windows, forget that, it's in the registry anyway (Yes, I know, regedit works under command line and you can load.reg scripts). The only option is to reinstall, and best not over the old installation because risks of contamination of the problem is high. Also Windows tends to freak out on unknown hardware, but Linux just ignores it (the better approach IMHO)
So technically, Linux never screwed for me because a reinstall was not needed, but it is just inherent to the way it works.
Don't get me wrong, I like NT4, and it installs very well. Just don't think that you can put in the CD and wait! That won't simply work, I've never seen a machine that you could install completely with all drivers wouthout surfing like a madman.
Besides, you did ignore all other things I said (tweaking, partitioning, etc). I was not talking about soley the installation of the bare OS: I don't call that an installation, but raw material to work with.
Besides, people call "the friend who claims to know everything" all the time, even for Windows 9x, and guess what: if *he* fucks up, they call me! Or go back to the shop where the will put in the restore-CD and charge big buck for it.
And no, Linux is not ready for the broad public, and I never claimed that, did I?
I know you are kidding, but considering the fact that installing MS-OSes is not always easy (think NT4) HOW-TO's on that subject might even be very useful. Now the installation works quite well most of the time, but optimizing it, and tweaking it to your needs helps. Correct partitioning (yes, even that is *very* usefull on a WinOS machine! Especially if you want to keep your data safe), ect.
Explaining to joe-normal-user that all those icons in the icon tray *eat* memory and that if you don't need them you can kill them (Run/Services in registry), explanations of how to keep your start menu clean and small (removing README, docs, helpfiles which you can access from the program itself).
Well now that I think of it, I should get started;-) On the other hand, nobody who would *need* this stuff would ever think of searching and reading such a HOW-TO...
Or, what happens if I want a desktop machine with SCSI disks? As I recall (and I may be slightly wrong on this), Apple no longer offers non-IDE drives in their desktops. I don't want to buy a machine just to rip out half of it to replace it.
Ehm, as far as I know, SCSI was the standard hard-disk-interface on all pre-fancy-colours models. At that moment the started to use IDE disks. I know it's a cost decision (IDE is cheaper), but then I love SCSI and I hate IDE (and am willing to pay for that love) There is by the way no problem to get a SCSI card for your G3 (or G4), I saw that numerous times.
But then IANAMU (I am not a Mac user)...
Game developers are particularly into this. You give them X amount of processing power and they will consume it as fast as they can. Then they will go on to surpass it, anticipating an improved chip next year, etc. You want the latest and greatest software? Then every couple years you need to update your processing power to match it.
You sir, need a 3D accelerated graphics card. Now I do agree that games use a lot of CPU power but the most strain is put on the graphics card. I have a Pentium Pro 200 with a Matrox Mystique (for 2D) and a VooDoo2 card. This system is very very outdated for gaming standards. I especially like strategy games, and there CPU power is nearly not used. It plays strategy games without a problem. Well, lots of RAM seems to enhance performance. While First Person Shooters are just *unplayable* when NOT using the VooDoo2 card, I can assure you that they work very smooth and fast at 800x600 resolution. Note: I talk games like Quake, HalfLife, Unreal and the like. I didn't touch new games made in the last year (?) because of lack of time, but as far as I heard they are still based on the same engines, so probably they will run.
Hey andr0meda, I've got mod points and as you know I mostly read you post to mod you up, but this time you really get carried away a bit. If it weren't you I would have modded you (Flamebait,-1). And as you know I rarely even mod down, so I preferred to reply.
Now I do agree with a lot of your points. There is a strong puritanic feeling in the USA but you may not forget the historic part of it: don't forget that the puritans were some of the first pioneers in the "New World", pursued for their religious beliefs here. So it seems quite logical that puritanic beliefs have still a big impact on the thinking of some Americans. What I personally do not like with their puritanic feelings is the huge hypocrisy:
...and that are just minor points.
Here in Europe we have quite a lot of very conservative people, but it seems that we just ignore them and they keep quite down in the media.
Your main point seems to be that it is up to the parents to educate their kids about sexuality. Sex is just so personal, and if parents haven't got a free mind about sexuality, you can't expect that they are able to educate their kids properly. As matter of fact, I think good sex education at school could be a very big help, in every country, be it US or Europe or Japan or name-a-country-yourself. I mean by good sex education, not the usual anatomical talk but the more practical (yeah! really!) talk: emotions, contraception, foreplay. It seems quite straightforward, but I think it would really help.
As for censorship, I can only say that I never ever fell on a porn site on the internet without searching it. Yes, porn, is out there and the worst kinds I can even try to imagine but that's not the point. It is not up to the ISP to regulate that (well, at least not by default) and laws are not very usefull for regulating that. If I happen to like blowjob pictures, there are a lot of places where that sexual activity is considered illegal. Furthermore, laws will be passed in the context of a certain ideology that reigns during the time: laws get obsolete very very fast IMHO and are unfortunately not kept up to date in a timely fashion.
Well, my points of view of course....
Luxembourg/Europe here (for those who don't know me....which is about slashdot minus andr0meda)
Are you sure about the "cheapshit Taiwanese generic" products of TDK? I don't think so: I happen to live in the country that hosts the European Headquarters of TDK. Go and look for some facts. Look at the bottom of the page: "Production Sites". And yes, of course, I also buy TDK because it supports local employment. So call me a nationalist;-)
My fav brand is TDK. Never had a CD-R that didn't work or lose data with that brand. Last time I bought some (I burn quite rarely, max 2 CD's / month, but my sister is a big consumer) it was 0.6$ per CD (spindle of 50 CDs). Quite expensive compared to the 0.15$ as stated in some comments, but at least I know they work well. (Prices I state are for Europe...)
I also fail to see why it (directly) relates to the human-rights committee.
You forget we are talking about politics and not about science. Politics typically do not need a causes that are directly connected to each other. This is especially true for international politics. A decision may well be taken to boycott a certain country because of some other "unacceptable" (from point of view of the first country) event.
A typical example would be that during country-to-country conflicts it happens that emabassies (sp?) are closed. In a conflict (well non-wartime of course), you need dialogue and so it would be illogical to close an embassy. Why is this done? Well, it could be a symbolic act, but it could also be to promote dialogue to a higher level(president-to-president). Who knows? My point is just that politics is a dirty game where everything is connected to everything or nothing to nothing.
But then of course IANAP (I am not a politician).
Another civilian who attempted to go into space, Christa McAuliffe, died aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Well, I may be wrong, but as far as I remember she was a teacher chosen amongst thousands to give some lessons from orbit to eath over video. This is not in the same leage as Tito and this wacko, because she woudn't have funded it herself. She was lucky to be chosen, unlucky to pick the only space shuttle that blew up in history.
Yeah, great....and then hoping that M$ implements a Visual Basic API for ActiveSmell(tm)(c)(r)! That way, you can smell an ISMELLYOU infected Outlook from miles away.
It's your software and you don't need to enter into an agreement to use it I wonder if this is true: if it were my software I would be able to disassemble it and make modifications to it. (Well, provided I knew assembler which I only know in very basic terms) I clearly am not allowed to do that as far as I know. As for the painting: I am free to rip it apart and make my own artwork from it, called "decadence of a disturbed mind" or so. You see ownership of software is quite "vage" and ownership of real things isn't.
As for the web-site approvals-click: I agree, you are right. I didn't think of it as
an agreement of terms and services...but it is! I didn't pay a thing yet, and can still decide not to agree. I fear that I am not the only one who didn't realise the difference between the two. My problem is that I can't read legalese and my guess is that most people can't. But of course I also signed the insurance of my car with just roughly skimming over terms and conditions. I guess real life and virtual life don't differ much in this question.
I wonder why my post was moderated "Troll", it wasn't meant that way...I was very serious. But on topic again: I suspect that you are right. Mangling the setup program could work too...perhaps someone already implemented such a thing. Of course, I fear that any court would rule such manipulation of executables as "criminal usage" or so.
The case that I actually removed the lisence file was accidental (just forgot to copy it...) I never claimed it would work on every setup.
Now as a European I don't really bother too much about the UCITA, but woudn't there be a way around it? Consider this: I had a case where I copied the installable product from CD to harddisk, removed a text file called 'lisence.txt' and then launched the setup. The click through agreement said exactly nothing (empty textfield), so I clicked accept for a empty agreement. And don't say, I coudn't remove the lisence.txt file because up until then I did not agree to anything. Oh, besides...does anyone remember those diskette pakages that said "if you open this package you agree to the encosed lisence agreement". I didn't notice them in ages, do they still exist?
Re:They forgot the most important thing
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 1
Didn't Microsoft patent the letter 'X' for their buzzwords?
I'm not sure if Yuri is still alive.
Yuri died in a test-plane crash some years later, so if you could get his signature on that capsule you'd have really worth something. Besides Google is your friend on this one: I found a short biography in less than two minutes;-)
On a centralized service like AIM or ICQ, however, there is little reason to change one's user ID.
Ahem, have you got any online friends that are not computer-literate? I use ICQ (versionb 99b) on a daily basis and I can really assure you that some people do re-register. Mostly because they got a new computer (or computer was reinstalled by a recovery CD). Why? Simple: they do not remember their ICQ number, and don't have the reflex to go to www.icq.com (does www.mirabilis.com still exist, by the way?) and search on their own nick/email address to find it again. Even then, they tend to have forgotten the password.
Luckily these users tend to have written down the ICQ numbers of their dearest friends and you will be contacted in no-time again. When this happens, I tell them to backup their ICQ database files, and write down their own number/password somewhere safe.... But of course, backing-up is not a strong point of computer-illiterate people, so it happens again and again.
Now, I know this will sound lame but you could try donations. If your "community" is quite large and you think you can ask them for something in return on a voluntary base. It just might work.
One service that took this approach is Crosswinds.net which hosts free email addresses (POP3/Webmail hybrid) and gives unlimited homepage-space (I only use the mail). They have an absolute no-SPAM policy which is why I stick to them even with the occasional outage. Last year they started to have financial trouble due to the lost of revenue in ad-sales and they did a "plead" during christmas time. Needless to say, I was one of the first that contributed... If I had waited 2 weeks longer, I would have gotten a T-shirt, but what the heck. Anyway, if they keep in bussiness, I'm pretty sure I will donate again around christmas next year.
So perhaps in your case donations are the way to go. I wish you good luck on with your website (I'll check it out when not at work).
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Well, in that case: as a consumer I woudn't even consider buying a 15" CRT that flickers that much. Perhaps the refresh rates were set on the lowest possible value, could be? The screen my sister uses is a 'Cheapo 15"' monitor I recovered from the garbage can: that one flickers less! And my sister is a "consumer", and she is very happy with it. :-)
Besides, I'm not a designer, I'm a lamo-o-programmer
And I only smoke cigars :-) Nothing stronger.
Now don't get me wrong, I like the looks of apples and I found their iMacs quite cute. I even considered buying one for experimentation, but honestly all iMacs I saw on display had horribles monitors: flickering, too much contrast... Really :-(
I by far prefer my 15" Sony LCD screen attached to my home box (Not even that expensive, about 1150$). Of course the 21" aquarium here at work doesn't suck either, but then I'm glad I don't have to move it.
Normally it would fix after a few on/off cycles: I thought of it as 'warming it up' ;-) The game I had the most trouble with was 'Sonic 2' which is from Sega itself. Perhaps it was a hardware defect, I'll never know.
Too bad it sucked so many batteries...well I still have my memories playing "Lemmings" for hours on it :-)
I know, but you know what you are doing, don't you? Linux has the advantage that you can get into the config files with a bootdisk, repair your mess, and reboot. (Which saved my *ss many many times because in Linux i'm just a newbie!) .reg scripts). The only option is to reinstall, and best not over the old installation because risks of contamination of the problem is high.
With windows, forget that, it's in the registry anyway (Yes, I know, regedit works under command line and you can load
Also Windows tends to freak out on unknown hardware, but Linux just ignores it (the better approach IMHO)
So technically, Linux never screwed for me because a reinstall was not needed, but it is just inherent to the way it works.
Besides, you did ignore all other things I said (tweaking, partitioning, etc). I was not talking about soley the installation of the bare OS: I don't call that an installation, but raw material to work with.
Besides, people call "the friend who claims to know everything" all the time, even for Windows 9x, and guess what: if *he* fucks up, they call me! Or go back to the shop where the will put in the restore-CD and charge big buck for it.
And no, Linux is not ready for the broad public, and I never claimed that, did I?
I know you are kidding, but considering the fact that installing MS-OSes is not always easy (think NT4) HOW-TO's on that subject might even be very useful. Now the installation works quite well most of the time, but optimizing it, and tweaking it to your needs helps. Correct partitioning (yes, even that is *very* usefull on a WinOS machine! Especially if you want to keep your data safe), ect. ;-) On the other hand, nobody who would *need* this stuff would ever think of searching and reading such a HOW-TO...
Explaining to joe-normal-user that all those icons in the icon tray *eat* memory and that if you don't need them you can kill them (Run/Services in registry), explanations of how to keep your start menu clean and small (removing README, docs, helpfiles which you can access from the program itself).
Well now that I think of it, I should get started
Ehm, as far as I know, SCSI was the standard hard-disk-interface on all pre-fancy-colours models. At that moment the started to use IDE disks. I know it's a cost decision (IDE is cheaper), but then I love SCSI and I hate IDE (and am willing to pay for that love)
There is by the way no problem to get a SCSI card for your G3 (or G4), I saw that numerous times.
But then IANAMU (I am not a Mac user)...
You sir, need a 3D accelerated graphics card. Now I do agree that games use a lot of CPU power but the most strain is put on the graphics card. I have a Pentium Pro 200 with a Matrox Mystique (for 2D) and a VooDoo2 card. This system is very very outdated for gaming standards.
I especially like strategy games, and there CPU power is nearly not used. It plays strategy games without a problem. Well, lots of RAM seems to enhance performance.
While First Person Shooters are just *unplayable* when NOT using the VooDoo2 card, I can assure you that they work very smooth and fast at 800x600 resolution.
Note: I talk games like Quake, HalfLife, Unreal and the like. I didn't touch new games made in the last year (?) because of lack of time, but as far as I heard they are still based on the same engines, so probably they will run.
Now I do agree with a lot of your points. There is a strong puritanic feeling in the USA but you may not forget the historic part of it: don't forget that the puritans were some of the first pioneers in the "New World", pursued for their religious beliefs here. So it seems quite logical that puritanic beliefs have still a big impact on the thinking of some Americans.
What I personally do not like with their puritanic feelings is the huge hypocrisy:
Here in Europe we have quite a lot of very conservative people, but it seems that we just ignore them and they keep quite down in the media.
Your main point seems to be that it is up to the parents to educate their kids about sexuality. Sex is just so personal, and if parents haven't got a free mind about sexuality, you can't expect that they are able to educate their kids properly. As matter of fact, I think good sex education at school could be a very big help, in every country, be it US or Europe or Japan or name-a-country-yourself. I mean by good sex education, not the usual anatomical talk but the more practical (yeah! really!) talk: emotions, contraception, foreplay. It seems quite straightforward, but I think it would really help.
As for censorship, I can only say that I never ever fell on a porn site on the internet without searching it. Yes, porn, is out there and the worst kinds I can even try to imagine but that's not the point. It is not up to the ISP to regulate that (well, at least not by default) and laws are not very usefull for regulating that. If I happen to like blowjob pictures, there are a lot of places where that sexual activity is considered illegal. Furthermore, laws will be passed in the context of a certain ideology that reigns during the time: laws get obsolete very very fast IMHO and are unfortunately not kept up to date in a timely fashion.
Well, my points of view of course....
Luxembourg/Europe here (for those who don't know me....which is about slashdot minus andr0meda)
Are you sure about the "cheapshit Taiwanese generic" products of TDK? ;-)
I don't think so: I happen to live in the country that hosts the European Headquarters of TDK. Go and look for some facts. Look at the bottom of the page: "Production Sites".
And yes, of course, I also buy TDK because it supports local employment. So call me a nationalist
My fav brand is TDK. Never had a CD-R that didn't work or lose data with that brand. Last time I bought some (I burn quite rarely, max 2 CD's / month, but my sister is a big consumer) it was 0.6$ per CD (spindle of 50 CDs). Quite expensive compared to the 0.15$ as stated in some comments, but at least I know they work well.
(Prices I state are for Europe...)
You forget we are talking about politics and not about science. Politics typically do not need a causes that are directly connected to each other. This is especially true for international politics. A decision may well be taken to boycott a certain country because of some other "unacceptable" (from point of view of the first country) event.
A typical example would be that during country-to-country conflicts it happens that emabassies (sp?) are closed. In a conflict (well non-wartime of course), you need dialogue and so it would be illogical to close an embassy. Why is this done? Well, it could be a symbolic act, but it could also be to promote dialogue to a higher level(president-to-president). Who knows? My point is just that politics is a dirty game where everything is connected to everything or nothing to nothing.
But then of course IANAP (I am not a politician).
...and Ginux sounds cuter, but that's probably just me.
Well, I may be wrong, but as far as I remember she was a teacher chosen amongst thousands to give some lessons from orbit to eath over video. This is not in the same leage as Tito and this wacko, because she woudn't have funded it herself. She was lucky to be chosen, unlucky to pick the only space shuttle that blew up in history.
|| is a concatenate operator in SQL...and that for a long time.
Yeah, great....and then hoping that M$ implements a Visual Basic API for ActiveSmell(tm)(c)(r)! That way, you can smell an ISMELLYOU infected Outlook from miles away.
I wonder if this is true: if it were my software I would be able to disassemble it and make modifications to it. (Well, provided I knew assembler which I only know in very basic terms) I clearly am not allowed to do that as far as I know. As for the painting: I am free to rip it apart and make my own artwork from it, called "decadence of a disturbed mind" or so. You see ownership of software is quite "vage" and ownership of real things isn't.
As for the web-site approvals-click: I agree, you are right. I didn't think of it as an agreement of terms and services...but it is! I didn't pay a thing yet, and can still decide not to agree. I fear that I am not the only one who didn't realise the difference between the two.
My problem is that I can't read legalese and my guess is that most people can't. But of course I also signed the insurance of my car with just roughly skimming over terms and conditions. I guess real life and virtual life don't differ much in this question.
I wonder why my post was moderated "Troll", it wasn't meant that way...I was very serious.
But on topic again: I suspect that you are right. Mangling the setup program could work too...perhaps someone already implemented such a thing. Of course, I fear that any court would rule such manipulation of executables as "criminal usage" or so.
The case that I actually removed the lisence file was accidental (just forgot to copy it...) I never claimed it would work on every setup.
Now as a European I don't really bother too much about the UCITA, but woudn't there be a way around it? Consider this: I had a case where I copied the installable product from CD to harddisk, removed a text file called 'lisence.txt' and then launched the setup. The click through agreement said exactly nothing (empty textfield), so I clicked accept for a empty agreement. And don't say, I coudn't remove the lisence.txt file because up until then I did not agree to anything.
Oh, besides...does anyone remember those diskette pakages that said "if you open this package you agree to the encosed lisence agreement". I didn't notice them in ages, do they still exist?
Didn't Microsoft patent the letter 'X' for their buzzwords?
I'm not sure if Yuri is still alive. ;-)
Yuri died in a test-plane crash some years later, so if you could get his signature on that capsule you'd have really worth something.
Besides Google is your friend on this one: I found a short biography in less than two minutes
Ahem, have you got any online friends that are not computer-literate? I use ICQ (versionb 99b) on a daily basis and I can really assure you that some people do re-register. Mostly because they got a new computer (or computer was reinstalled by a recovery CD). Why? Simple: they do not remember their ICQ number, and don't have the reflex to go to www.icq.com (does www.mirabilis.com still exist, by the way?) and search on their own nick/email address to find it again. Even then, they tend to have forgotten the password.
Luckily these users tend to have written down the ICQ numbers of their dearest friends and you will be contacted in no-time again. When this happens, I tell them to backup their ICQ database files, and write down their own number/password somewhere safe.... But of course, backing-up is not a strong point of computer-illiterate people, so it happens again and again.
One service that took this approach is Crosswinds.net which hosts free email addresses (POP3/Webmail hybrid) and gives unlimited homepage-space (I only use the mail). They have an absolute no-SPAM policy which is why I stick to them even with the occasional outage.
Last year they started to have financial trouble due to the lost of revenue in ad-sales and they did a "plead" during christmas time. Needless to say, I was one of the first that contributed... If I had waited 2 weeks longer, I would have gotten a T-shirt, but what the heck.
Anyway, if they keep in bussiness, I'm pretty sure I will donate again around christmas next year.
So perhaps in your case donations are the way to go. I wish you good luck on with your website (I'll check it out when not at work).