"To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack."
My 7 year old introduced me to neopets, and I quickly learned two things:
1) Food that you have to pay for is really scarce, no matter how much money you have, and 2) You don't need to BUY food.
There's a section of the site where you can find "donations", and maybe someone dropped some food there. There's also a spot where you can get a free omelette once a day. After I discovered that, I don't have to spend an hour a day just trying to find food. I play a few games (btw, they have some really entertaining and addictive games there), make sure my critter's not dying of starvation, and I'm done.
those "couple of stories" both come from a rumor site. Grain of salt, and all that... of course, if those stories suddenly go away after a Cupertino landshark sees them, they might be a bit more believable.
Um, I don't know what you're smoking, but Synergy is a helluva lot more than "a single panel with three buttons".
Sure, it's got those butttons - in the menu bar, so you can have access to iTunes at any time, from any application. It ALSO allows you to control those buttons directly from the keyboard by any key combination of your choosing. It ALSO generates a nice little floating window with info about the song that's playing, including title, artist, artwork... and all this once again is totally customizable by the user. (There's also foofah about dozens of customizable skins, but that's not a concern for me.)
There is also NOTHING on the Synergy main page stating that he's abandoned the project; in fact, he just released version 1.3 last week. He suggested on a news page that he MIGHT give it up if the jackass pirates keep it up, but I've certainly gotten nothing off of the Synergy mailing list (good way for paying customers like myself to get news about updates and bug fixes) to indicate that Synergy has been abandoned.
If this program is so simple, let's see YOU write a clone of it in a Saturday afternoon.
I found that there's two kinds of stress: "good stress" - the kind where you've got a task to do, and you know what needs to be done to complete it, and "bad stress" - the kind where you've got a job to do, and you have no freaking clue how to get it done. The good stress gets you all fired up and focused on the task, and the bad stress puts the rock in your gut and the panic in your blood as you flail about, trying to cobble together a solution.
So it's not just a matter of how well you perform under stress, but how well you perform under *bad* stress - programming assignment #4 at school, that new job duty at work, driving in a new place with no map, etc., and learning how to appreciate when the "bad" stress converts to "good" stress.
...umm, and thus ends your geek philosopher moment of the day.:)
Walmarts are cleaner, cheaper, and better staffed...
Wow, where do you live? The Wal-Marts that I've been in have all been thoroughly trashed (half-eaten food stuffed in behind the unfolded piles of clothes in the display racks, unwanted clothes piled up alongside the stereo equipment), no less expensive than any other store in the area (unless you WANT something that MIGHT work the second time you use it), and staffed with people - regardless of age - that can't make change in their head (or even with the aid of the register) or realize that breakable items go in the TOP of the bag, and not the BOTTOM.
Give me a mom-and-pop store that actually CARES what they look like to - and how they treat - the customer any day.
I live in Ypsilanti, MI, where there's only one cable company, hence the high cable price, and 24k feet from the CO, hence the high price on the fastest DSL I can get - no, I take that back, I think they say I can get 384 SDSL for $100 a month now.
...an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there...
Actually, the problem is that it would be difficult to make it work, period.
In my experience with OS X from 10.0 up to present day 10.3.4 (yes, I know 10.3.5 was just released this evening - I'm not touching it until the bleeding edgers report in), one of the biggest problems has been, and continues to be, *performance*. Even when running an OSX install on a machine that's above minimum specs, there is eventually a slowdown or a choking of speed somewhere to be had. I will admit to having been quite impressed with the performance of Panther, even with all the latest gee-whizzery crammed into it.
Bear in mind that OS X's sometimes sluggish behavior comes about when running on a (relatively) low hardware set, where the developers have (what I assume to be) a fairly intimate experience with it (no, not like that, you sickos), it's performance, and it's components (CPU, memory, video, etc). Mac users, by and large, are a forgiving and tolerant lot regarding their machines and OS (even those of us who've had but a mere sip of the Cupertino kool-aid), and have come to accept that things will improve with each iteration of the OS, and by and large they have. This acceptance comes on the heels of expecting that the OS will perform well under *minimum* hardware configuration - a G3 / 600 processor with 128 meg of ram, for example - hardware that Apple knows (or should know) inside and out, and has had software crafted to suit it.
Now, mix into this "acceptable" situation a thousand other kinds of motherboards and CPUs and memory and hard drives and USB devices and FireWire devices... all manufactured by different companies with different standards, and different levels of support (if any at all)... and watch Apple try to keep to it's standards of performance and usability.
Apple can't just "release an X86 OSX", they'd have to actively support it... and everything it could possibly run on, which isn't something Apple's built to do (from my vantage point 3000 miles away, at least). They already seem to have their hands full supporting the OS on what it *does* run on.
to serve as a portable terminal. (I seem to recall this as a feature in the original model, but I can't find that listed on their site - and I'm on dialup, so I'm not scrounging through their flash hoohah to find it.) If I had something that small that would let me check my email or hop on irc anywhere, anytime, I'd be a happy geek:)
I had a tracfone... that is, until they switched the service in my area from analog to digital without notifying me, and then expecting me to cough up for a replacement phone that worked with the new network.
I got the tracfone because I needed... a phone. Not a camera, not a walkie talkie, not a jukebox, not a toilet paper dispenser, just a phone. And it served it's purpose... until they broke it. No more tracfone for me.
No more cell phone for me, for that matter. It took over a year before I NEEDED a cell phone again, so I got a new model with a color screen and web access and text messaging and games that I can download and dialtones that I can download... but I don't do any of that that (well, outside of the Peanuts / "Linus and Lucy" theme that I downloaded for a ring tone). That crap costs money! I'm tossing enough money at just having this phone working, I don't need to spend $2 a throw to download a chintzy game or tinny song! (The phone came with two games - one of them is basically a ROM lift from a 1981 Intellivision game!)
I still don't understand this whole "let's cram more useless toys into a cellphone" phenomenon. Divergance makes functional things better. Convergance leaves you with... a bunch of semi-functional things crammed into a chunk of plastic crap. That's why pockets were invented, folks, to carry all our stuff:)
secondly, it was over a wirelss connection... thirdly, it was at a neighborhood playground.
My kids wanted to go play, so I stuffed my Newt 2100 in my back pocket and shuffled them down. I realized halfway there that I had also stuffed my Orinoco WaveLAN card in another pocket, so I plugged it in (having already installed the Newton wireless software) and tried to make a connection. The playground is surrounded by houses, and I picked up an open base station in one of the houses. None of us wanted to leave the playground after that:)
because MS would have the college signing an agreement stating that their "mPods" would be the only type of mp3 player allowed on campus, and students could only use them to interface with sanctioned MS products, and that MS would be supplying those products to the college on the condition that they buy into future upgrades at $LUDICROUS pricing scheme...
THERE you'd see the freshmen being forced by a big corporation to buy their products. But not in this story.
They're sending devices that they'll basically be planting in the ground, and they're named MUM and DASI? Either they've got a sense of humor, or a green thumb. Maybe next they'll send the TULIP - Tunneling Underground Life Investigation Probe, or maybe the ROSE - Roving Observor / Sentience Explorer...
You don't collect iTMS files, you LISTEN to them. We're not talking about trading card or comic books here, we're talking about legally purchased and licensed music files that are designed to only play on a limited number of computers. It's not like you can swap these files between lots of other people.
40-50% of the Internet users in the United States still use dialup. That's TENS OF MILLIONS [/pinky] of users, many of which will NEVER get high-speed due to their location / technical savvy / budget. Someday, maybe modems will be obsolete, but by no means will it happen "soon"; I'd say 20-some-odd years from now, maybe.
what i'd really like to see is an x86 port of their operating system...
Umm... have you heard of this thing called Darwin? Mac OS X is basically Darwin layered with Apple's Aqua interface. (Well, that, plus all the nifty apps like iChat and iMovie and those other things that are OS X-only...)
Yes, you need to register, and yes, "slashdot" works for both:)
I gotta say, my boy had thighs like that when he was that age, and he's a normal skinny 7 year old now. That just looks like a pudgy baby leg to me; I was expecting bulky, sinewy, Marvel-esque musculature. Makes me wonder what the kid looks like now.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to theApple Store and buy a refurbished 1 Ghz G4 iBook for $700 from their "Special Deals" section.
You really don't want to get a G3 these days; even though OSX will run on it, it's going to run dead-slow.
And buy more ram. No matter what Apple says, you need more ram.
"To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack."
My 7 year old introduced me to neopets, and I quickly learned two things:
1) Food that you have to pay for is really scarce, no matter how much money you have, and
2) You don't need to BUY food.
There's a section of the site where you can find "donations", and maybe someone dropped some food there. There's also a spot where you can get a free omelette once a day. After I discovered that, I don't have to spend an hour a day just trying to find food. I play a few games (btw, they have some really entertaining and addictive games there), make sure my critter's not dying of starvation, and I'm done.
for providing a Coral link with his article. Good jorb!
Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server... -- Apple's Tiger preview page
:)
Ouch. I stand corrected.
But my point about rumor sites is still valid, you know.
those "couple of stories" both come from a rumor site. Grain of salt, and all that... of course, if those stories suddenly go away after a Cupertino landshark sees them, they might be a bit more believable.
Um, I don't know what you're smoking, but Synergy is a helluva lot more than "a single panel with three buttons".
Sure, it's got those butttons - in the menu bar, so you can have access to iTunes at any time, from any application. It ALSO allows you to control those buttons directly from the keyboard by any key combination of your choosing. It ALSO generates a nice little floating window with info about the song that's playing, including title, artist, artwork... and all this once again is totally customizable by the user. (There's also foofah about dozens of customizable skins, but that's not a concern for me.)
There is also NOTHING on the Synergy main page stating that he's abandoned the project; in fact, he just released version 1.3 last week. He suggested on a news page that he MIGHT give it up if the jackass pirates keep it up, but I've certainly gotten nothing off of the Synergy mailing list (good way for paying customers like myself to get news about updates and bug fixes) to indicate that Synergy has been abandoned.
If this program is so simple, let's see YOU write a clone of it in a Saturday afternoon.
I found that there's two kinds of stress: "good stress" - the kind where you've got a task to do, and you know what needs to be done to complete it, and "bad stress" - the kind where you've got a job to do, and you have no freaking clue how to get it done. The good stress gets you all fired up and focused on the task, and the bad stress puts the rock in your gut and the panic in your blood as you flail about, trying to cobble together a solution.
...umm, and thus ends your geek philosopher moment of the day. :)
So it's not just a matter of how well you perform under stress, but how well you perform under *bad* stress - programming assignment #4 at school, that new job duty at work, driving in a new place with no map, etc., and learning how to appreciate when the "bad" stress converts to "good" stress.
Walmarts are cleaner, cheaper, and better staffed...
Wow, where do you live? The Wal-Marts that I've been in have all been thoroughly trashed (half-eaten food stuffed in behind the unfolded piles of clothes in the display racks, unwanted clothes piled up alongside the stereo equipment), no less expensive than any other store in the area (unless you WANT something that MIGHT work the second time you use it), and staffed with people - regardless of age - that can't make change in their head (or even with the aid of the register) or realize that breakable items go in the TOP of the bag, and not the BOTTOM.
Give me a mom-and-pop store that actually CARES what they look like to - and how they treat - the customer any day.
I live in Ypsilanti, MI, where there's only one cable company, hence the high cable price, and 24k feet from the CO, hence the high price on the fastest DSL I can get - no, I take that back, I think they say I can get 384 SDSL for $100 a month now.
$60 a month is a "low price" for cable - or (where I live) $100 a month for 144 DSL, when compared to $15 a month for "optimized" dialup?
Every time I see that acronym, I keep thinking of this cartoon. Having never used VoIP (as far as I know), I prefer the second usage of the term :)
...an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there...
Actually, the problem is that it would be difficult to make it work, period.
In my experience with OS X from 10.0 up to present day 10.3.4 (yes, I know 10.3.5 was just released this evening - I'm not touching it until the bleeding edgers report in), one of the biggest problems has been, and continues to be, *performance*. Even when running an OSX install on a machine that's above minimum specs, there is eventually a slowdown or a choking of speed somewhere to be had. I will admit to having been quite impressed with the performance of Panther, even with all the latest gee-whizzery crammed into it.
Bear in mind that OS X's sometimes sluggish behavior comes about when running on a (relatively) low hardware set, where the developers have (what I assume to be) a fairly intimate experience with it (no, not like that, you sickos), it's performance, and it's components (CPU, memory, video, etc). Mac users, by and large, are a forgiving and tolerant lot regarding their machines and OS (even those of us who've had but a mere sip of the Cupertino kool-aid), and have come to accept that things will improve with each iteration of the OS, and by and large they have. This acceptance comes on the heels of expecting that the OS will perform well under *minimum* hardware configuration - a G3 / 600 processor with 128 meg of ram, for example - hardware that Apple knows (or should know) inside and out, and has had software crafted to suit it.
Now, mix into this "acceptable" situation a thousand other kinds of motherboards and CPUs and memory and hard drives and USB devices and FireWire devices... all manufactured by different companies with different standards, and different levels of support (if any at all)... and watch Apple try to keep to it's standards of performance and usability.
Apple can't just "release an X86 OSX", they'd have to actively support it... and everything it could possibly run on, which isn't something Apple's built to do (from my vantage point 3000 miles away, at least). They already seem to have their hands full supporting the OS on what it *does* run on.
to serve as a portable terminal. (I seem to recall this as a feature in the original model, but I can't find that listed on their site - and I'm on dialup, so I'm not scrounging through their flash hoohah to find it.) If I had something that small that would let me check my email or hop on irc anywhere, anytime, I'd be a happy geek :)
I had a tracfone... that is, until they switched the service in my area from analog to digital without notifying me, and then expecting me to cough up for a replacement phone that worked with the new network.
:)
I got the tracfone because I needed... a phone. Not a camera, not a walkie talkie, not a jukebox, not a toilet paper dispenser, just a phone. And it served it's purpose... until they broke it. No more tracfone for me.
No more cell phone for me, for that matter. It took over a year before I NEEDED a cell phone again, so I got a new model with a color screen and web access and text messaging and games that I can download and dialtones that I can download... but I don't do any of that that (well, outside of the Peanuts / "Linus and Lucy" theme that I downloaded for a ring tone). That crap costs money! I'm tossing enough money at just having this phone working, I don't need to spend $2 a throw to download a chintzy game or tinny song! (The phone came with two games - one of them is basically a ROM lift from a 1981 Intellivision game!)
I still don't understand this whole "let's cram more useless toys into a cellphone" phenomenon. Divergance makes functional things better. Convergance leaves you with... a bunch of semi-functional things crammed into a chunk of plastic crap. That's why pockets were invented, folks, to carry all our stuff
It was made known it whatever car forum he hung out in that he died recently. I guess he got better...
secondly, it was over a wirelss connection...
:)
thirdly, it was at a neighborhood playground.
My kids wanted to go play, so I stuffed my Newt 2100 in my back pocket and shuffled them down. I realized halfway there that I had also stuffed my Orinoco WaveLAN card in another pocket, so I plugged it in (having already installed the Newton wireless software) and tried to make a connection. The playground is surrounded by houses, and I picked up an open base station in one of the houses. None of us wanted to leave the playground after that
because MS would have the college signing an agreement stating that their "mPods" would be the only type of mp3 player allowed on campus, and students could only use them to interface with sanctioned MS products, and that MS would be supplying those products to the college on the condition that they buy into future upgrades at $LUDICROUS pricing scheme...
THERE you'd see the freshmen being forced by a big corporation to buy their products. But not in this story.
They're sending devices that they'll basically be planting in the ground, and they're named MUM and DASI? Either they've got a sense of humor, or a green thumb. Maybe next they'll send the TULIP - Tunneling Underground Life Investigation Probe, or maybe the ROSE - Roving Observor / Sentience Explorer...
Not just to Apollo 11, but to me! :)
What about other portable drives?
:)
What about USB keychain storage thingies?
What about FLOPPIES?!?
Of course, the whole "malware" argument is only a concern if you're running in an insecure Windows environment... am I being redundant?
You don't collect iTMS files, you LISTEN to them. We're not talking about trading card or comic books here, we're talking about legally purchased and licensed music files that are designed to only play on a limited number of computers. It's not like you can swap these files between lots of other people.
40-50% of the Internet users in the United States still use dialup. That's TENS OF MILLIONS [/pinky] of users, many of which will NEVER get high-speed due to their location / technical savvy / budget. Someday, maybe modems will be obsolete, but by no means will it happen "soon"; I'd say 20-some-odd years from now, maybe.
what i'd really like to see is an x86 port of their operating system...
Umm... have you heard of this thing called Darwin? Mac OS X is basically Darwin layered with Apple's Aqua interface. (Well, that, plus all the nifty apps like iChat and iMovie and those other things that are OS X-only...)
Yes, you need to register, and yes, "slashdot" works for both :)
I gotta say, my boy had thighs like that when he was that age, and he's a normal skinny 7 year old now. That just looks like a pudgy baby leg to me; I was expecting bulky, sinewy, Marvel-esque musculature. Makes me wonder what the kid looks like now.
...title for a pr0n flick:
"Kockums and the Swedish Navy"