From this thread: This thing sounds like a hovercraft when you turn on the PC.
From the article: However, for average consumers and business users, the GeForce FX 5200 offers better multimonitor software, more future-proof feature compatibility, and silent and reliable passive cooling.
It's amazing what actually reading the review on the product you know nothing about will do for you.
Go back about two years and you magazines regularly ran articles saying, "Flight Sims Are Dead".
Sure, you could find a few examples like Microsoft Flight Sim but they were dismissed and the genre was considered dead. Then the stunning IL2 came out, Combat Flight Sim 3, B17, Project One and a whole slew of others while Lawrence Holland, one of the biggest names in the classic era of PC flight sims is coming out with another in the Secret Weapons line.
Basically, the genre was in hibernation until several different sources came up with new tricks and new technologies to exploit and then, once there was something new to offer, it was back with a vengence.
Currently, adventure games are considered dead. There are examples of the genre that are still getting rave reviews such as American McGee's Strawberry... uh, I mean Alice, Syberia, Anacronox (or whatever it was called), etc. but they, just like the examples with flight sims before them, are getting dismissed.
Go in to other fields entirely... Guitar was "dead" during the dance music era, guitar soloing was "dead" a couple of years ago. Yet it all strangely comes back as soon as a couple of inovators coincide at the same time.
Declaring a game (or indeed any) genre dead generally proves one of two things:
1) You're a magazine after a sensational article title.
2) You've just not been in the field long enough to recognise a cycle when it hits you.
Adventure games may currently be in hibernation but they'll almost certainly return. Maybe it'll be through realtime Myst style graphics on modern cards (look at Links now compared to what it was like 10 years ago). Maybe it'll be in an FPS engine - ultimately, other than Counterstrike, what's made Halflife so popular is that fact it was the most Adventure Game like FPS out there and still is. Maybe, with the capacity of DVDs, someone'll figure out how to make the old CD-ROM interactive movies in to something that's actually any good. Maybe it'll be a new approach entirely. It'll almost certainly be a combination of several. However it happens though, it almost certainly will happen.
Then they can start writing about the Post Doom III death of the FPS genre or whatever it may be.
Maybe in the Utopian States of America. Unfortunately, this is the United States of America.
Sure, it's basis to sue. Go ahead...
First they file their motions to dismiss and waste a lot of your money this way. Then they file counter suits based on whatever they can come up with and waste your money that way. Then they request various postponements and waste your money that way. Then they put such a large legal team on it that, if you want a hope in hell of winning, you have to hire your own expensive legal team and they waste your money that way.
Eventually, if you're truly lucky, you win. Then they repeat the process with the damages portion, wasting your money that way.
While it's a nice notion that you can recoup your legal costs, that assumes they haven't managed to beat you on a technicality at any point along the way, that you haven't gone bankrupt fighting them, that you manage to out-argue them that this wasn't an entirely reasonable case to fight and there's no reason they should have to pay and that, after they bog it down in the courts for five to ten years, it makes any difference anyway.
If it looks, at any point, like you might win within a year or two, they buy a congressman or two and a couple of senators. They get a tiny piece of wording added to page three hundred and ninety of some obscure law - or even better The Patriot Act IV (questioning it is unpatriotic, you see) - that says, "Companies may lawfully use all means at their disposal to contact lawbreakers and warn them, regardless of terms of service limitations."
Then, assuming you had the massive resources to actually win against them and that you got a judgement any harsher than, "OK, we agree not to do it again." - you've wasted five to ten years of your company's resources for a ruling that's so small to them, they can shrug it off.
You don't sue, they win. You sue and lose, they win. You sue and go bankrupt, they win. You sue and win and it still costs you more, due to your relative size, than them - they win.
Oh, and while you're doing it, they use the judgement against Verizon to get to search your systems, find your MP3 collection and sue you for $150,000*NumSongs*NumDownloads and bankrupt you that way. Now, without any resources, you lose the expensive legal team you need to beat them in the first case - and lose that one too. If there's anything left over, I imagine they'd hand you over to the BSA too, with all the information they found in their search.
William Gibson got 21st century life way too accurately.:(
It looks like the lawsuit is totally justified. The Strawberry Shortcake comic is damaging to the trademark-holder's reputation, and the US has an enforce it or lose it trademark system.
This only applies if the user attemtps to pass their own work off as the original. US Copyright law permits
Copyright != Trademark
Yes, you can parody a copyright freely. No, you can't parody a trademark freely. It's a trademark.
It's a similar statement to someone saying, "He walked into the highschool with a gun and shot the other kid - it was clearly murder." and then coming back with, "US law permits the use of deadly force to defend your home." No one's disputing the second statement, it's just that the second case doesn't apply to the first.
And wouldn't it be cool to carry my MP3 player slung over my back when I go to class
It's only cool if it's unique and original. Carrying assault rifles in to high schools has so been done in the US already.
Really does need Rage Against The Machine playing though. Either Killing In The Name or, if you really must take it in to class, "The teacher stands in front of the class, the lesson plan she can't recall. The students eyes, don't perceive the lies, written on every fucking wall." That'd go down well.;)
I've been going through about one a year as well. I don't buy cartridges anymore, just printers.
Quite a few of the posts mention the logic of a $50 printer with a $25 mail in rebate being cheaper than a $35 ink cartridge. So buy a new printer not a cartridge, right?
Wrong. That $50 printer comes with a "sample" cartridge. What that means is you get a cartridge that's deliberately only 25% or whatever full.
It's enough to make you think you're getting a deal, buy the printer, install the drivers, print maybe 100 pages and then go to the store and buy politely buy a series of $15 cartridges for $35.
Or, even better, you come up with a cunning plan to get a $35 cartridge in a discounted, now $25 printer. Only you get a $10 plastic print unit and a quarter full cartridge that's only worth $3.50. Plus, with luck, you'll forget to mail in that rebate and you paid $50 for a $13.50 product as opposed to $35 for a $15 one.
Don't feel bad. Some idiots buy a Lexmark Z22 and get a color sample cartridge. Now it uses all three inks to print murky brown when you just want black and runs out after 40 pages of wasted ink. I know. I did. Once.
I can buy a somewhat useable printer at the grocery store for $30. At that price I could see using it once or twice in a pinch and tossing it.
If you're paying $15/copy, there's this wonderful device called Kinkos. Dump your file to their website, preview it exactly as it'll come out, pick a binding option and, if you hassle them enough on the phone, it'll be ready to collect by the time you get to your local store. Best of all, some other poor guy gets to make sure all the pages are in order, it gets bound properly and printed by a decent printer on to decent paper - all of which you can control without having to buy a ream-ful.
Sure, it's not cheap and the drive down there's a mild inconvenience but it's still a hell of a lot better than buying a $30 printer, spending time in Walmart's Queue'O'Death, that drive and then the time of installing the printer, aligning cartridges, getting cheap inkjet ink all over your hands and getting an unbound copy at the end - all for two print jobs.
I guess its not strange that you think Israel could have done all this by itself. Seems most of the delusional people who are anti-war think that all it takes for peace is for one side to stop fighting. Sadly, things don't work that way.
Seems most of the delusional people who are pr-war think that all it takes for peace is for one side to breach the law and fight just as dirtily. Sadly things don't work that way.
In Vietnam, one of the problems the US had was that they'd find a village that supported the VC and they'd burn it - occasionally stooping lower still. End result, the people you're trying to "save" hate you and ten other villages start supporting the VC. If anyone recalls, the US lost that one.
In Northern Ireland in the late 70s, the British tried something called internment. Rather than acting within the law, they got pissed off with the murderous bastards that the IRA were and started interning people without the right to a trial or lawyer. They also took to beating a lot of the people they'd arrested to force confessions out of them.
End result, for every 1 member of the IRA the Brits pulled off the streets, three more Irishmen were so outraged at what happened that they joined the IRA.
Finally, Britain learned, started behaving within the law and took its beatings. It hurt, it hurt a hell of a lot for about a decade. But, you know what? Opinion on the streets is no so anti-IRA that they're barely a credible organisation anymore. No one joins, they blow the odd minor thing up and they get turned in by their own people. Most of them have left terrorism and entered in to regular crime.
So, next time you try telling people that turning the other cheek doesn't work, just take a look at the simple facts. Yes, it's slow but it does absolutely work.
Of course, don't let history get in the way of angry rehoric. If that's what floats your boat, you go right ahead.
One last point: I do blame the PLO. I'm just realistic enough to realise that killing civilians by the thousand only adds to their support, not diminishes it.
The US isn't concerned that Israel will sell or use WMD on the world or their neighbors either.
Israel illegally (read: Just like Saddam is accused of doing) gained nuclear weapons, breaching the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. The only difference being that Israel definitely has nuclear weapons while Saddam is simply believed to be trying to gain them.
Israel has demonstrated a willingness to attack (granted, retaliate) against its neighbours.
Mind you, your point is valid: Apparently the US isn't concerned. Not sure how that makes it better though.
Israel doesn't have a regime in power that has killed, starved, or gased more than 200,00 of it's people either.
True. It only gets through a few thousand Palestinians each year that is does kill, does starve but, granted, doesn't gas. It prefers flechette munitions that're internationally condemned. It does all this without the need for a no-fly zone like Iraq got when it did the same to its unwanted (Kurdish) population.
Seems to me to be a pretty big distinction.
Seems to me like a smaller and smaller one by the minute.
Pretty much your sole argument, once the complete misrepresentations are removed, reduces down to "The US doesn't care about Israel doing what it does." That was pretty much my original point. What can I say - thank you for arguing my point.
'It portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.'
Thank god. We can finally get rid of chess too.
Even if it is really just based on that musical, it's still a game that portrays war as the only way to resolve your conflicts. And those horseys moved in weird ways - clearly concealing some kind of weapons program. AND... [the list is long, can you tell?] it allows you to knock over (surrender) your leadership to avoid the destruction of your armies - Bush clearly based his whole pre-war strategy on the evil game.
Please note also that we are acting currently to enforce UN Security Council resolutions (most of them unanimous, if memory serves) that have been on the books for an even dozen years.
And, as Robin Cook pointed out while resigning from the British government over the matter... Full Text
"Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.
I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted.
Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply."
I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.
Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq."
Many people's problem with the war is simply that: Iraq breaches resolutions for 12 years, Israel for 30+; Iraq has oil, Israel doesn't; Iraq gets invaded, Israel doesn't. I'm not advocating attacking Israel or supporting Saddam. I'm simply pointing out the double standards and how they lead to assumptions that many in the US feel are unfair.
The justification for war on the back of defending a UN resolution, on the back of the weak UN, while the US has been one of the main forces stopping other resolutions from being enforced, is somewhat laughable.
Were I more petit, I'd add "In that, you, sir, are ill-informed."
Wow! Thanks for providing a link that's in the article. You're the best.
<tongue firmly in cheek> I'll be gentle, seeing as you're clearly a newbie...
In time, when you've had a chance to read more heated arguments on Slashdot, you'll soon learn that we rarely take the time to actually read the articles. We just get on with ranting on them. I blame Hillary Rosen, the RIAA and Microsoft for that - in no particular order.
Now, if you'll just go to the second doorway down the hall, I hear there's an opening for a Grammar Nazi. </tongue firmly in cheek>
For those of use who've grown used to making "Woo, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!" jokes yet have no clue what a Beowulf cluster actually is, the definition, history and so on is available at:
In brief overview: In the summer of 1994 Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, working at CESDIS under the sponsorship of the ESS project, built a cluster computer consisting of 16 DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet. They called their machine Beowulf. The machine was an instant success and their idea of providing COTS (Commodity off the shelf) base systems to satisfy specific computational requirements quickly spread through NASA and into the academic and research communities. The development effort for this first machine quickly grew into a what we now call the Beowulf Project. Some of the major accomplishment of the Beowulf Project will be chronicled below, but a non-technical measure of success is the observation that researcher[s(sp)] within the High Performance Computer community are now referring to such machines as "Beowulf Class Cluster Computers." That is, Beowulf clusters are now recognized as genre within the HPC community./i
GODSON-2, now 50%* faster at performing miracles than our original GODSON-1 (Jesus) line without the overheating issues associated with the FIRSTANGEL (Lucifer) series.
Note: 50% speed improvement is valid. PhilosopherMark2003 does not take in to account issues that need to be addressed in the new millenium and therefore produces unbalanced results in favor of BhuddaTechnologies's processor line.
"Thank You Slashdot! (you just made me $0.05 richer) RCTOYS.COM Close Window 4423 x $0.05 = my money"
Rather than bitch about being slashdotted, the guy has style and, put up a banner to a cool geek toy site and let us pay for slashdotting him. That's so much cooler than complaining about it. Kudos.
Re:I don't get it
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I mean, who were these evil people that gave you such a hard time that you still care about them tens of years later?
I absolutely remember who they are. Ten years on, they do still affect me and, if honest with ourselves, I think most people will admit the same...
Sure there are negatives: I talk too much and make bad jokes out of the remainder of the social nervousness they instilled; I find it hard to believe that my wife finds me physically attractive. But those are just some of the legacy they left me with.
My desire to work hard, get a good job, do the things I want to do - they all come from them. When I moved from London to California, part of what made the decision easier (and it is scary making a move like that) is the thought that, at reunions, I'll be able to go back and laud my exciting life over them.
They told me, for years, that I wasn't cool, couldn't do anything cool. I play guitar now, can snowboard, fly power kites. Every time I find myself thinking, "Nah, I can't be bothered." a part of me remembers them and gives me that extra push to try something new and cool, to stick with it, to be everything they told me I couldn't be.
They told me I wasn't attractive, that I could never get a girl as hot as the "models" they were dating, from another school, in the year below. Years later, I still smile when I remember, just before we left high school, aged 18, a friend telling them about the 21 year old nurse I was dating. Their telling me I couldn't gave me the impetus to try harder, to work out, change my look, whatever and find people who found me attractive.
They told me I was fat and ugly. While I refuse to go down the overcompensating paths of eating disorders and all the rest of it, remembering their derrision is what pushes me to do that extra thirty two lengths in the pool or get out of bed and go to the gym when I really don't want to.
To pretend that bullies don't have an affect on my life, years later, is to pretend that my personality didn't develop at all in highschool. Maybe a few people were lucky enough to never be bullied but I think most other people, if honest, will agree with me.
The thing is... Sure, they gave me some issues, but they also gave me a lot of strengths. It's that old thing of the former geek tipping the former jock who delivers his pizza. I was lucky and managed to turn the abuse in to a desire to always be more than them. So, in my own, warped, over generous way, perhaps I should just try thanking them, rather than hating them any more.
Go see live music. If you live in a city larger than 50,000 people, there should be a few bars that get live music. Go see them. If you like them, buy their music. No record company required. No inernet piracy required. Just good music.
Thanks to the joys of deregulated radio...
Clear Channel owns the air time. Clear Channel owns the play lists. Clear Channel owns the concert venues. Clear Channel owns the concert promotion. Clear Channel owns the ticketing companies.
So, unless you want to play in a bus shelter, unadvertised, playing songs that no one has ever heard of, guess who makes all the money?
Why do you think all those radio stations that sound exactly the same as each other have exactly the same bland "Front Row Seats!" competitions, the same bland "Sold Out Seats!" competitions and the same bland DJs who're supposedly on "Hard Rock" stations giving out tickets to go and see Britney Spears with them at the same three venues as every other gig you ever hear about? Clear Channel owns the entire chain from start to finish, nationwide. Even when there is a chink in their defence, the artists all know damn well that if they dodge Clear Channel in one city, they'll be blacklisted from every other one across the nation.
Everyone criticises the RIAA on slashdot. After all, they're the evil monopolies, making all the money at the artists' expense. The problem is, to get their product out, they have to deal with a monopoly. I'm not defending them but they're also not making money hand over fist either - not because of piracy but because Clear Channel squeezes every last penny out of music, shoe-horning it in to an easy to sell, nationwide generic sludge. Bad as the RIAA are, perhaps it's worth going after the real culprits.
Kansas House of Representatives that oversees the telecomm industry has voted against such deregulation, citing concerns on monopolies and competition...
...SBC has stated that they will now put their broadband deployment plans in Kansas on hold.
Translation:
"We're not a monopoly, nor will this make us more of one. Now, if you don't do exactly what we want, we'll use the monopoly that we don't have to punish you."
Looks like Kansas were right then - they just should have stopped the Baby Bells years ago, before they got this bad. A lesson that's probably worth learning by all of the other states that are bending over and lubing up.
By contrast, Sydney Uni says it knows of one student with a handful of files on a website...
By contrast, I only hear about very occasional instances of human rights violations. Thank god the world has become a safe place. Or, alternatively, I don't look that hard.
Just because you don't look very hard and therefore aren't aware of many issues, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
In other news, Sydney Uni has received a $10m grant to study Ostrich Problem Solving Methodologies.
And that, sir, is the reason companies have every right to do thorough background checks. To avoid inadvertantly hiring people with these scruples.
Actually, the background checks just help them avoid inadvertantly hiring people who were stupid enough to get caught. In a world where former employees sue you for a bad reference, anything that isn't 100% provable tends not to get repeated.
Of course it does lead to some fun "bad" references where you want to screw them without saying anything you can be sued for:
"Bob was often punctual."
"Were I to take the median case, I would have to say Sally made her deadlines."
"Despite a strict and limiting dresscode, Dave's originality meant he regularly brightened the office with his eclectic attire."
"I can't think of a single one of the days Jennifer turned up to work that her special work ethic wasn't noted."
Federal law prohibits keeping credit reports in personnel files.
The law also prohibits demanding home phone numbers and threatening punitive action if they're not handed over... Had that happen.
It prohibits repeated humor at the expense of your nationality... Had that happen.
It has legal minimum rest periods... Had them ignored.
It requires a six month period between laying someone off and rehiring for the same position (at a lower wage)... Watched that get ignored.
Unfortunately, just because something is a legal requirement doesn't always mean that managers (and HR departments) either know about it nor abide by it.
Sure, you can quote it - and not get hired because they decide you're a trouble maker. You can sue them but that can be difficult to prove and ensures that when every other company does a background check, they too decide you're a troublemaker.
I miss the dotcom boom when we could ignore every law and still know we'd be hired again in an instant. Now the managers know it's their turn to ignore the laws because there are a million other hungry devs who'd kill for the job.
Bend over, take it (principle aside, it's almost certainly meaningless anyway), work late one night, walk over to HR, pull all senior management's credit ratings, post them to f'dcompany or similar.
On a more genuinine note. The counter to the "everyone has had to do it for the last year" is "Why only the last year? If you retroactively went back and did everyone, I'd consent, but this is clearly a discriminatory policy put in place by people who knew they couldn't be affected by it."
CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register.
Fry's do exactly the same thing. However you'll also notice a sign by the registers stating that their till receipts contain chemicals believed by the state of California to cause cancer and reproductive issues.
I've put the receipt in to my pocket and walked straight out the door. When challenged, I pointed out that their own signs state, "Touching the damn thing is dangerous and I'm not doing it again - unless you want to sign that Fry's takes full liability for any cancer/birth issues I ever get. If you want it, you can reach in to my pocket and take it." They always seem to decline.
Slashdot Mirror
From this thread:
This thing sounds like a hovercraft when you turn on the PC.
From the article:
However, for average consumers and business users, the GeForce FX 5200 offers better multimonitor software, more future-proof feature compatibility, and silent and reliable passive cooling.
It's amazing what actually reading the review on the product you know nothing about will do for you.
Go back about two years and you magazines regularly ran articles saying, "Flight Sims Are Dead".
Sure, you could find a few examples like Microsoft Flight Sim but they were dismissed and the genre was considered dead. Then the stunning IL2 came out, Combat Flight Sim 3, B17, Project One and a whole slew of others while Lawrence Holland, one of the biggest names in the classic era of PC flight sims is coming out with another in the Secret Weapons line.
Basically, the genre was in hibernation until several different sources came up with new tricks and new technologies to exploit and then, once there was something new to offer, it was back with a vengence.
Currently, adventure games are considered dead. There are examples of the genre that are still getting rave reviews such as American McGee's Strawberry... uh, I mean Alice, Syberia, Anacronox (or whatever it was called), etc. but they, just like the examples with flight sims before them, are getting dismissed.
Go in to other fields entirely... Guitar was "dead" during the dance music era, guitar soloing was "dead" a couple of years ago. Yet it all strangely comes back as soon as a couple of inovators coincide at the same time.
Declaring a game (or indeed any) genre dead generally proves one of two things:
1) You're a magazine after a sensational article title.
2) You've just not been in the field long enough to recognise a cycle when it hits you.
Adventure games may currently be in hibernation but they'll almost certainly return. Maybe it'll be through realtime Myst style graphics on modern cards (look at Links now compared to what it was like 10 years ago). Maybe it'll be in an FPS engine - ultimately, other than Counterstrike, what's made Halflife so popular is that fact it was the most Adventure Game like FPS out there and still is. Maybe, with the capacity of DVDs, someone'll figure out how to make the old CD-ROM interactive movies in to something that's actually any good. Maybe it'll be a new approach entirely. It'll almost certainly be a combination of several. However it happens though, it almost certainly will happen.
Then they can start writing about the Post Doom III death of the FPS genre or whatever it may be.
Isn't that basis enough to sue the RIAA ?
:(
Maybe in the Utopian States of America. Unfortunately, this is the United States of America.
Sure, it's basis to sue. Go ahead...
First they file their motions to dismiss and waste a lot of your money this way. Then they file counter suits based on whatever they can come up with and waste your money that way. Then they request various postponements and waste your money that way. Then they put such a large legal team on it that, if you want a hope in hell of winning, you have to hire your own expensive legal team and they waste your money that way.
Eventually, if you're truly lucky, you win. Then they repeat the process with the damages portion, wasting your money that way.
While it's a nice notion that you can recoup your legal costs, that assumes they haven't managed to beat you on a technicality at any point along the way, that you haven't gone bankrupt fighting them, that you manage to out-argue them that this wasn't an entirely reasonable case to fight and there's no reason they should have to pay and that, after they bog it down in the courts for five to ten years, it makes any difference anyway.
If it looks, at any point, like you might win within a year or two, they buy a congressman or two and a couple of senators. They get a tiny piece of wording added to page three hundred and ninety of some obscure law - or even better The Patriot Act IV (questioning it is unpatriotic, you see) - that says, "Companies may lawfully use all means at their disposal to contact lawbreakers and warn them, regardless of terms of service limitations."
Then, assuming you had the massive resources to actually win against them and that you got a judgement any harsher than, "OK, we agree not to do it again." - you've wasted five to ten years of your company's resources for a ruling that's so small to them, they can shrug it off.
You don't sue, they win. You sue and lose, they win. You sue and go bankrupt, they win. You sue and win and it still costs you more, due to your relative size, than them - they win.
Oh, and while you're doing it, they use the judgement against Verizon to get to search your systems, find your MP3 collection and sue you for $150,000*NumSongs*NumDownloads and bankrupt you that way. Now, without any resources, you lose the expensive legal team you need to beat them in the first case - and lose that one too. If there's anything left over, I imagine they'd hand you over to the BSA too, with all the information they found in their search.
William Gibson got 21st century life way too accurately.
Copyright != Trademark
Yes, you can parody a copyright freely. No, you can't parody a trademark freely. It's a trademark.
It's a similar statement to someone saying, "He walked into the highschool with a gun and shot the other kid - it was clearly murder." and then coming back with, "US law permits the use of deadly force to defend your home." No one's disputing the second statement, it's just that the second case doesn't apply to the first.
I think, if you slashdot a cathedral, you go to hell.
Book your tickets to Redmond now, Hemos.
And wouldn't it be cool to carry my MP3 player slung over my back when I go to class
;)
It's only cool if it's unique and original. Carrying assault rifles in to high schools has so been done in the US already.
Really does need Rage Against The Machine playing though. Either Killing In The Name or, if you really must take it in to class, "The teacher stands in front of the class, the lesson plan she can't recall. The students eyes, don't perceive the lies, written on every fucking wall." That'd go down well.
In other news, Carmack has been dethroned as the God of PC Geeks as the dirty Apple (not even with cool BSD based OS) secret from his past comes out:
"After being thrown into a juvenile home for stealing an Apple II at age 14"
Still, bonus geek points awarded for stealing a whole computer at a time when most people were blowing cereal whistles in to pay phones.
I've been going through about one a year as well. I don't buy cartridges anymore, just printers.
Quite a few of the posts mention the logic of a $50 printer with a $25 mail in rebate being cheaper than a $35 ink cartridge. So buy a new printer not a cartridge, right?
Wrong. That $50 printer comes with a "sample" cartridge. What that means is you get a cartridge that's deliberately only 25% or whatever full.
It's enough to make you think you're getting a deal, buy the printer, install the drivers, print maybe 100 pages and then go to the store and buy politely buy a series of $15 cartridges for $35.
Or, even better, you come up with a cunning plan to get a $35 cartridge in a discounted, now $25 printer. Only you get a $10 plastic print unit and a quarter full cartridge that's only worth $3.50. Plus, with luck, you'll forget to mail in that rebate and you paid $50 for a $13.50 product as opposed to $35 for a $15 one.
Don't feel bad. Some idiots buy a Lexmark Z22 and get a color sample cartridge. Now it uses all three inks to print murky brown when you just want black and runs out after 40 pages of wasted ink. I know. I did. Once.
I can buy a somewhat useable printer at the grocery store for $30. At that price I could see using it once or twice in a pinch and tossing it.
If you're paying $15/copy, there's this wonderful device called Kinkos. Dump your file to their website, preview it exactly as it'll come out, pick a binding option and, if you hassle them enough on the phone, it'll be ready to collect by the time you get to your local store. Best of all, some other poor guy gets to make sure all the pages are in order, it gets bound properly and printed by a decent printer on to decent paper - all of which you can control without having to buy a ream-ful.
Sure, it's not cheap and the drive down there's a mild inconvenience but it's still a hell of a lot better than buying a $30 printer, spending time in Walmart's Queue'O'Death, that drive and then the time of installing the printer, aligning cartridges, getting cheap inkjet ink all over your hands and getting an unbound copy at the end - all for two print jobs.
I guess its not strange that you think Israel could have done all this by itself. Seems most of the delusional people who are anti-war think that all it takes for peace is for one side to stop fighting. Sadly, things don't work that way.
Seems most of the delusional people who are pr-war think that all it takes for peace is for one side to breach the law and fight just as dirtily. Sadly things don't work that way.
In Vietnam, one of the problems the US had was that they'd find a village that supported the VC and they'd burn it - occasionally stooping lower still. End result, the people you're trying to "save" hate you and ten other villages start supporting the VC. If anyone recalls, the US lost that one.
In Northern Ireland in the late 70s, the British tried something called internment. Rather than acting within the law, they got pissed off with the murderous bastards that the IRA were and started interning people without the right to a trial or lawyer. They also took to beating a lot of the people they'd arrested to force confessions out of them.
End result, for every 1 member of the IRA the Brits pulled off the streets, three more Irishmen were so outraged at what happened that they joined the IRA.
Finally, Britain learned, started behaving within the law and took its beatings. It hurt, it hurt a hell of a lot for about a decade. But, you know what? Opinion on the streets is no so anti-IRA that they're barely a credible organisation anymore. No one joins, they blow the odd minor thing up and they get turned in by their own people. Most of them have left terrorism and entered in to regular crime.
So, next time you try telling people that turning the other cheek doesn't work, just take a look at the simple facts. Yes, it's slow but it does absolutely work.
Of course, don't let history get in the way of angry rehoric. If that's what floats your boat, you go right ahead.
One last point: I do blame the PLO. I'm just realistic enough to realise that killing civilians by the thousand only adds to their support, not diminishes it.
The US isn't concerned that Israel will sell or use WMD on the world or their neighbors either.
Israel illegally (read: Just like Saddam is accused of doing) gained nuclear weapons, breaching the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. The only difference being that Israel definitely has nuclear weapons while Saddam is simply believed to be trying to gain them.
Israel has demonstrated a willingness to attack (granted, retaliate) against its neighbours.
Mind you, your point is valid: Apparently the US isn't concerned. Not sure how that makes it better though.
Israel doesn't have a regime in power that has killed, starved, or gased more than 200,00 of it's people either.
True. It only gets through a few thousand Palestinians each year that is does kill, does starve but, granted, doesn't gas. It prefers flechette munitions that're internationally condemned. It does all this without the need for a no-fly zone like Iraq got when it did the same to its unwanted (Kurdish) population.
Seems to me to be a pretty big distinction.
Seems to me like a smaller and smaller one by the minute.
Pretty much your sole argument, once the complete misrepresentations are removed, reduces down to "The US doesn't care about Israel doing what it does." That was pretty much my original point. What can I say - thank you for arguing my point.
'It portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.'
Thank god. We can finally get rid of chess too.
Even if it is really just based on that musical, it's still a game that portrays war as the only way to resolve your conflicts. And those horseys moved in weird ways - clearly concealing some kind of weapons program. AND... [the list is long, can you tell?] it allows you to knock over (surrender) your leadership to avoid the destruction of your armies - Bush clearly based his whole pre-war strategy on the evil game.
And, as Robin Cook pointed out while resigning from the British government over the matter...
Full Text
Many people's problem with the war is simply that: Iraq breaches resolutions for 12 years, Israel for 30+; Iraq has oil, Israel doesn't; Iraq gets invaded, Israel doesn't. I'm not advocating attacking Israel or supporting Saddam. I'm simply pointing out the double standards and how they lead to assumptions that many in the US feel are unfair.
The justification for war on the back of defending a UN resolution, on the back of the weak UN, while the US has been one of the main forces stopping other resolutions from being enforced, is somewhat laughable.
Were I more petit, I'd add "In that, you, sir, are ill-informed."
Wow! Thanks for providing a link that's in the article. You're the best.
<tongue firmly in cheek>
I'll be gentle, seeing as you're clearly a newbie...
In time, when you've had a chance to read more heated arguments on Slashdot, you'll soon learn that we rarely take the time to actually read the articles. We just get on with ranting on them. I blame Hillary Rosen, the RIAA and Microsoft for that - in no particular order.
Now, if you'll just go to the second doorway down the hall, I hear there's an opening for a Grammar Nazi.
</tongue firmly in cheek>
For those of use who've grown used to making "Woo, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!" jokes yet have no clue what a Beowulf cluster actually is, the definition, history and so on is available at:
NASA's Beowulf site
In brief overview:
In the summer of 1994 Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, working at CESDIS under the sponsorship of the ESS project, built a cluster computer consisting of 16 DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet. They called their machine Beowulf. The machine was an instant success and their idea of providing COTS (Commodity off the shelf) base systems to satisfy specific computational requirements quickly spread through NASA and into the academic and research communities. The development effort for this first machine quickly grew into a what we now call the Beowulf Project. Some of the major accomplishment of the Beowulf Project will be chronicled below, but a non-technical measure of success is the observation that researcher[s(sp)] within the High Performance Computer community are now referring to such machines as "Beowulf Class Cluster Computers." That is, Beowulf clusters are now recognized as genre within the HPC community./i
GODSON-2, now 50%* faster at performing miracles than our original GODSON-1 (Jesus) line without the overheating issues associated with the FIRSTANGEL (Lucifer) series.
Note: 50% speed improvement is valid. PhilosopherMark2003 does not take in to account issues that need to be addressed in the new millenium and therefore produces unbalanced results in favor of BhuddaTechnologies's processor line.
I just got the message:
"Thank You Slashdot!
(you just made me $0.05 richer)
RCTOYS.COM
Close Window
4423 x $0.05 = my money"
Rather than bitch about being slashdotted, the guy has style and, put up a banner to a cool geek toy site and let us pay for slashdotting him. That's so much cooler than complaining about it. Kudos.
I mean, who were these evil people that gave you such a hard time that you still care about them tens of years later?
I absolutely remember who they are. Ten years on, they do still affect me and, if honest with ourselves, I think most people will admit the same...
Sure there are negatives: I talk too much and make bad jokes out of the remainder of the social nervousness they instilled; I find it hard to believe that my wife finds me physically attractive. But those are just some of the legacy they left me with.
My desire to work hard, get a good job, do the things I want to do - they all come from them. When I moved from London to California, part of what made the decision easier (and it is scary making a move like that) is the thought that, at reunions, I'll be able to go back and laud my exciting life over them.
They told me, for years, that I wasn't cool, couldn't do anything cool. I play guitar now, can snowboard, fly power kites. Every time I find myself thinking, "Nah, I can't be bothered." a part of me remembers them and gives me that extra push to try something new and cool, to stick with it, to be everything they told me I couldn't be.
They told me I wasn't attractive, that I could never get a girl as hot as the "models" they were dating, from another school, in the year below. Years later, I still smile when I remember, just before we left high school, aged 18, a friend telling them about the 21 year old nurse I was dating. Their telling me I couldn't gave me the impetus to try harder, to work out, change my look, whatever and find people who found me attractive.
They told me I was fat and ugly. While I refuse to go down the overcompensating paths of eating disorders and all the rest of it, remembering their derrision is what pushes me to do that extra thirty two lengths in the pool or get out of bed and go to the gym when I really don't want to.
To pretend that bullies don't have an affect on my life, years later, is to pretend that my personality didn't develop at all in highschool. Maybe a few people were lucky enough to never be bullied but I think most other people, if honest, will agree with me.
The thing is... Sure, they gave me some issues, but they also gave me a lot of strengths. It's that old thing of the former geek tipping the former jock who delivers his pizza. I was lucky and managed to turn the abuse in to a desire to always be more than them. So, in my own, warped, over generous way, perhaps I should just try thanking them, rather than hating them any more.
Go see live music. If you live in a city larger than 50,000 people, there should be a few bars that get live music. Go see them. If you like them, buy their music. No record company required. No inernet piracy required. Just good music.
Thanks to the joys of deregulated radio...
Clear Channel owns the air time.
Clear Channel owns the play lists.
Clear Channel owns the concert venues.
Clear Channel owns the concert promotion.
Clear Channel owns the ticketing companies.
So, unless you want to play in a bus shelter, unadvertised, playing songs that no one has ever heard of, guess who makes all the money?
Why do you think all those radio stations that sound exactly the same as each other have exactly the same bland "Front Row Seats!" competitions, the same bland "Sold Out Seats!" competitions and the same bland DJs who're supposedly on "Hard Rock" stations giving out tickets to go and see Britney Spears with them at the same three venues as every other gig you ever hear about? Clear Channel owns the entire chain from start to finish, nationwide. Even when there is a chink in their defence, the artists all know damn well that if they dodge Clear Channel in one city, they'll be blacklisted from every other one across the nation.
Everyone criticises the RIAA on slashdot. After all, they're the evil monopolies, making all the money at the artists' expense. The problem is, to get their product out, they have to deal with a monopoly. I'm not defending them but they're also not making money hand over fist either - not because of piracy but because Clear Channel squeezes every last penny out of music, shoe-horning it in to an easy to sell, nationwide generic sludge. Bad as the RIAA are, perhaps it's worth going after the real culprits.
Kansas House of Representatives that oversees the telecomm industry has voted against such deregulation, citing concerns on monopolies and competition...
...SBC has stated that they will now put their broadband deployment plans in Kansas on hold.
Translation:
"We're not a monopoly, nor will this make us more of one. Now, if you don't do exactly what we want, we'll use the monopoly that we don't have to punish you."
Looks like Kansas were right then - they just should have stopped the Baby Bells years ago, before they got this bad. A lesson that's probably worth learning by all of the other states that are bending over and lubing up.
By contrast, Sydney Uni says it knows of one student with a handful of files on a website...
By contrast, I only hear about very occasional instances of human rights violations. Thank god the world has become a safe place. Or, alternatively, I don't look that hard.
Just because you don't look very hard and therefore aren't aware of many issues, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
In other news, Sydney Uni has received a $10m grant to study Ostrich Problem Solving Methodologies.
And that, sir, is the reason companies have every right to do thorough background checks. To avoid inadvertantly hiring people with these scruples.
Actually, the background checks just help them avoid inadvertantly hiring people who were stupid enough to get caught. In a world where former employees sue you for a bad reference, anything that isn't 100% provable tends not to get repeated.
Of course it does lead to some fun "bad" references where you want to screw them without saying anything you can be sued for:
"Bob was often punctual."
"Were I to take the median case, I would have to say Sally made her deadlines."
"Despite a strict and limiting dresscode, Dave's originality meant he regularly brightened the office with his eclectic attire."
"I can't think of a single one of the days Jennifer turned up to work that her special work ethic wasn't noted."
Federal law prohibits keeping credit reports in personnel files.
The law also prohibits demanding home phone numbers and threatening punitive action if they're not handed over... Had that happen.
It prohibits repeated humor at the expense of your nationality... Had that happen.
It has legal minimum rest periods... Had them ignored.
It requires a six month period between laying someone off and rehiring for the same position (at a lower wage)... Watched that get ignored.
Unfortunately, just because something is a legal requirement doesn't always mean that managers (and HR departments) either know about it nor abide by it.
Sure, you can quote it - and not get hired because they decide you're a trouble maker. You can sue them but that can be difficult to prove and ensures that when every other company does a background check, they too decide you're a troublemaker.
I miss the dotcom boom when we could ignore every law and still know we'd be hired again in an instant. Now the managers know it's their turn to ignore the laws because there are a million other hungry devs who'd kill for the job.
Bend over, take it (principle aside, it's almost certainly meaningless anyway), work late one night, walk over to HR, pull all senior management's credit ratings, post them to f'dcompany or similar.
On a more genuinine note. The counter to the "everyone has had to do it for the last year" is "Why only the last year? If you retroactively went back and did everyone, I'd consent, but this is clearly a discriminatory policy put in place by people who knew they couldn't be affected by it."
CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register.
Fry's do exactly the same thing. However you'll also notice a sign by the registers stating that their till receipts contain chemicals believed by the state of California to cause cancer and reproductive issues.
I've put the receipt in to my pocket and walked straight out the door. When challenged, I pointed out that their own signs state, "Touching the damn thing is dangerous and I'm not doing it again - unless you want to sign that Fry's takes full liability for any cancer/birth issues I ever get. If you want it, you can reach in to my pocket and take it." They always seem to decline.