There were a million ways that id could have handled the light issue, but they chose to pick the one game mechanic that slaps the player in the face with the fact it's just a game. It's a game, it has rules, and I am ripped out of the immersion.
This really upsets me with Doom 3, for those moments when I can stop playing it. It's not quite the letdown that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Crushing Disappointment turned out to be, but it's got the same sense of wasted potential.
I can see why gun-mounted lights got left out. It would take away a lot of the stress & fear that comes from playing the game. But here's just a few ways they could have accomplished the "Player's vision is severely restricted in the midst of a firefight" effect, without ripping the player out of the game:
1) Only the pistol can have the flashlight out. Think about it, modern-day cops have a flashlight and a pistol out simultaneously all the damn time (flashlight held high with the non-weapon hand, pistol in weapon hand). It wouldn't have been that hard, and then they could have stuck with the massive heavy mag-lite they modelled.
2) Helmet light. Make the flashlight bob a bit with the player movement, lead the camera on quick turns (Marine turns his head), jiggle with recoil, etc. Lots of opportunity to immerse.
3) Right-angle flashlight in a breast pocket, a la Silent Hill 3. This is my favorite of the ideas. Put the light a little bit lower, and then if the player moves to fire a two-handed weapon, the arms begin to obscure vision, casting massive shadows everywhere and bright light back from the Marine's pale white arm into the player's face. I mean, it's not like the marine gets much sun, he's pretty reflective.
I hope someone takes that last idea & runs with it, but I'm not optimistic.
On the other hand, for a game as deeply flawed as Doom 3 is turning out to be, it is undeniably stressful, entertaining, and has that "just one more corridor" hook to it. Much like a Renny Harlin film, I enjoy it in the moment, but take even greater pleasure in deriding it afterward to my friends.
This must be on a paper trail so I know who I voted for. Election monitors (the people, one from each party, who literally looked over the shoulders of the people counting ballots in Florida) need to be able to verify the count afterwards in some statistically valid way.
But with a printout from an electronic voting machine, all you've really verified is that the printout says you voted the way you thought you did, not that the machine will count your vote the way you wish for it to be counted.
This is why open source for the code in voting machines, from the firmware for each part of the device on up through the software that actually counts the votes, is so incredibly important. Only then will it be possible to verify that the software counts the votes in the way the user is told it is counting the votes.
And yet her cavefish eyes were somehow magically not seared from her skull the moment she became the first person to see sunlight in hundreds of years.
>Companies like CA and IBM are working to develop (or struggling to implement) single interfaces that will let you control and/or monitor the security of hundreds of systems at once, and monitor aggregates of the data so you can get both an overview and a detail view of the security status of your organization.
Badass, do they each come with their own clone of Penn Gillette to run them for me?
This happens around here all the time
on
Reverse Graffiti
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I live in an island community of about 70,000 people, accessible only by bridge & tunnel. The tunnels leading to and from the island are very old, and the white tile that lines them quickly grows covered in grime and soot. Every month or so a truck comes through and sprays everything down, but the dirt always collects again, seemingly thicker than before.
The local grafitti artists & taggers, some of whom I'm assuming come in from Oakland (the other end of the tunnel) have taken to using squeegees and water to make their signs. They just clean their tag into the wall of the tunnel and presto! It's there, reflecting in shiny white the headlights of passing cars, twice as noticeable as another spray tag we're all used to filtering out.
That was an accident like Slashdot is a hotbed of balanced, original political thought, or this is an on-topic post.
If you check the photos, you'll see a row of snaps on the outfit around the outside of Jackson's breast, and if you examine the photos of Timberlake holding up the piece of the costume he removed, you'll see it was designed to snap off. In addition, it had fabric sewn across it in such a way as to simulate Jackson's brasierre. Finally, that jewelry was obviously not intended for everyday wear.
Further, these shows are rehearsed for weeks prior to the day of the show, and the outfits are custom-designed for thousands of dollars.
If you honestly believe that was an accident, then I've got some evidence you might like to review proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction in a country that just HAPPENS to be located exactly between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Prison abuse sucks, yes. But here's why Abu Ghraib is on the front page, and those stories are not: They're Americans.
What was becoming known as the Iraqi Prisoner Torture Scandal is now known as the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Scandal, or even the Iraqi Prisoner Mistreatment Scandal. The word Torture is quickly becoming the elephant in the middle of the room. We all know that those people in those photographs are being tortured. What else can one call it when a jailer pours acid on a prisoner's head?
We're all accustomed to seeing torture in movies, or on the news. But in these situations, the torturer is always an alien figure, usually over-the-top, characterized in broad strokes. The great cinematic torturers, such as Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, or the captors in The Deer Hunter, have one thing in common: They're not Americans. The Vietnamese soldier photographed shooting his prisoner in the head: Not American. Lynndie England: American.
An American torturer is repellent, alien to our cultural mindset. We're so unaccustomed to the sight that it's doubly disgusting. The racist undercurrent of our popular media feeds back on us in this situation, and tells us that Americans, white Americans, don't do this. They're the good guys. But these soldiers are just average Joe and Jane America, and they did do this. We are they, and they are us, and that means that as a country, we are ashamed.
People in general don't deal with shame very well. We all of us, naturally, try to take shameful moments and acts and deal with them by softening the blow in our minds. One deals with the memory of keen embarrassment by finding the humor inherent in the situation. One deals with a past infidelity by rationalizing that since nobody will ever know, nobody will ever be hurt. The word adultery becomes fling, fling becomes indiscretion. These rationalized lies may even be necessary for us to move on with our lives, and not be locked into paralysis by our inability to deal with our darker natures. Certainly the press were quick to jump upon language which allowed them to lessen the shock. As anyone who's regularly read a newspaper in their lives knows, this is not something journalists are wont to do.
It is not yet time to move on. Let's at least agree in this instance to call it like it is: Torture. Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of these people.
Read it again. Say it out loud, hear it, listen to it, accept it. If you are a patriot, as I am, feel the way it hits your stomach and stays there, destroys your appetite, knocks down the straightness of your shoulders. Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of people. Don't let the words change for you, and slide the full truth of what has happened away. As one who loves this country, it's maybe too painful to look directly into the truth of this matter for too long. As one who loves this country, being seared by the shame our countrymen have brought down on us is a necessary step toward making things right. Gaze full-on into it, and let it make you humble again.
Stop your apologist comparison of the wrong thing we did in one situation to the wrong things other people do in similar situations, as if their abhorrent behavior somehow justifies or lessens the severity of our own.
As you wade through the mountain of rhetorical shit that is the inevitable reply to a comment such as this on a site such as this, I'd just like to offer you a small moment of appreciation.
You sir, are THE MAN. That was well-written, succinct, and intelligent in the extreme, and you deserve some congratulations. Best post I've read in quite a while.
Let's try this again. I've installed hundreds of BIOS updates in the course of my decade working in IT.
This one was supplied without CRC numbers for the.bin file, so the best I could do is just download the file three times and then check the byte size on the.bin file each time I downloaded it to make sure they were consistent.
Then I copied it to floppy, made sure again the byte size of the.bin file for the flashbios was consistent.
Then I ran Gateway's flashbios update program, and it updated the BIOS.
Where exactly in there do I not know what I'm doing flashing the BIOS?
re: robot, check out http://www.egain.com/ to see the demo of the software Gateway was using to drive the chat session.
It's been a little over 3 years, but the new BIOS' readme file claimed multiplier support for the faster 66Mhz FSB chip that I wanted to install in the PC, IIRC. It had a 233 in there and I wanted to drop in a 433 or something close to that.
In early 2001, after building my mom a computer from scratch, I received her old Gateway 233Mhz system to do with as I pleased. The first thing I did was flash the BIOS. When the system failed to POST after that, the next thing I did was contact Gateway support.
Thus began an odyssey that I hope never to repeat with any company, and certainly will never repeat with Gateway. They're never getting another dime out of me or my family for as long as I'm alive.
Below is why. The first two logs detail a chat session between Gateway and myself, conducted using a particularly nasty piece of customer service software called eGain. You can see how it made the live person on the other end of the chat session sound like a robot.
After that follows a series of e-mail correspondence. This log has been edited both to cover my tracks a bit, and to get around the slashdot filters, as the characters per line ratio of the post is otherwise too low.
Chat Session 1
Question: I updated my BIOS and the system boots, displays gateway logo, but does not POST.
A Chat Agent will be with you shortly.
Wendell: Hello Fahr, welcome to the Gateway Chat Support Service. I am Wendell here to help you with your issue.
Fahr Vergnugen: Hi. Have a system here that's not terribly happy.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the exact problem you are facing with your Computer?
Fahr Vergnugen: Need S/N?
Wendell: Fahr, please provide me your Serial number.
Fahr Vergnugen: Okay, older PII-233Mhz / LX chipset board. tried to slap in a newer celeron, it didn't take, decided to update the bios.
Wendell: Okay , Fahr.
Fahr Vergnugen: sure 0009589521
Wendell: Thanks , Fahr.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the problem you are facing with your System?
Fahr Vergnugen: grabbed BIOS 4A4LL0X0.15A.0023.P18 from the gateway support site (was running P11) and flashed the board.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: now, the system fires up, displays a gateway logo, and a small progress bar in the top left fills from grey to white, and the system acts like it's going to POST normally, but it never happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: the bar takes between 3 and 4 minutes to reach 100%.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: and from there it just sits. If I hit TAB to view system messages, it acts normally, but again, no POST. Nothing happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: no error message. Just doesn't beep and post.
Fahr Vergnugen: I think it's probably pretty shafted, but I thought I'd check with you guys.
Wendell: Fahr, please hold on while I search for your resolution.
Fahr Vergnugen: np, holdin' on.
Wendell: Thank you for waiting. Please review the following information, which I think will help you.
Wendell: [Item sent - Astro and Profile 2 - Computer stops responding after power-on self-test (POST)] http://www.gateway.com/support/techdocs/astro/trsh oot/1106.shtml
Wendell: Did you get the page , Fahr?
Fahr Vergnugen: yep, but no help I can tell already, since it assumes I can get to Windows, which is not the case.
Wendell: I realize your time is valuable, please wait one minute while I research this further.
If you'd spent any time driving in greater Boston at all, you'd know that Roundabouts are a terrible idea. I used to pass through about a half-dozen of them on my daily 40-mile commute and it was easily the worst part of the trip.
Wow! That's incredibly flattering, thank you. You've seriously made my day.
I've gone ahead and used this slashdot post as the basis for a weblog entry, so if you'd like an edited and expanded version of the same text, it's available on my site as well.
The RIAA loves the new Napster, or at least, part of it. For those who aren't quite familiar with how the service works, users pay a monthly fee to subscribe to Napster. Then, based on the preferences of the copyright holder, users can either stream or download tracks for a one-time fee. Once the fee is paid, the user can listen to the song as many times as they want, but only downloaded songs can be loaded onto mp3 players, etc. for use away from the computer.
The rub, of course, is that if a subscriber stop paying Napster a monthly subscription fee, she loses access to the music streams she's already paid for. It's brilliant, because in the end, the consumer gets nothing for their dollar but instant gratification. No file, no archived recording, just the experience of having heard Outkast encouraging them to "shake it like a Polaroid picture" to file away in their memory.
The RIAA adores this. It makes them happy like dogs rolling in some particularly nasty filth. They look out and see the incredible use statistics counting the users of p2p and iTunes, and they start multiplying subscription fees on top of those numbers. It's the best deal possible for them, because they manage to make money by selling us no real assets.
But iTunes style stores, where users are given individual copies of songs to keep and own, and use in perpetuity for a one-time fee? The RIAA hates this. It makes them sad, like a pet owner discovering that his dog has rolled in some particularly nasty filth. Instead of a recurring revenue stream that's locked into continuing to pay for the RIAA's existing products for life, each consumer instead is a fair deal. They get songs for a low one-time fee, they're able to get their music a la carte without having to buy dozens of filler tracks, and they're still offered the instant gratification that is the only real selling point the streaming model has to offer. The RIAA, in turn, is forced to continue producing new product at a high enough quality that they can continue to sell it to customers.
Once you understand this, it's easy to see what the RIAA is doing: They're trying to shut down iTunes.
By raising the cost of songs to $1.25, they're breaking the magic $1 price point. Anything under a buck, well hell, that's just a candy bar. Why not buy it? But $1.25, that's a 20oz. bottle of soda, a purchase that must be considered a little more carefully. They've broken the psychological barrier to impulse purchases that $.99 magically hovers below.
By raising the price of full albums on iTunes to be equivalent to the cost of a physical CD bought in the store, the RIAA looks on the surface like they're creating a financial incentive to go and buy the album at a music store. But we all know that's not how this will work out.
What will happen is that iTunes' sales will drop, but they won't be met with a commeasurate increase in sales at music stores. The RIAA knows that people accustomed to the iTunes Music Store will return to illegal acquisition of music via filesharing before they'll go to the store and buy it.
In fact, they're counting on it, because once the iTunes music store is dead, they can say, "See? We tried, we put our best foot forward, but it just didn't work. These pirates aren't interested in paying." Then the lawyers can go to town, until there is no technological nor legal recourse available to escape their stranglehold on recorded music.
Yup, I do like my Dreamcast, I enjoy many games on it, including btw. a version of Rez that is superior in every way to the PS2 incarnation of the same game.
However, unlike you, I'm neither a system partisan nor a troll. I'm more than willing to talk about the relative merits of different game platforms in contrast to one another, because hey, guess what? I've already bought all of them. I'm not bound to one as being the One True Way toward gaming, because I have no personal stake based in either honor nor finance to justify my purchase.
Sony's PR department has a history of doing this sort of thing.
Dreamcast is about to ship? Announce the PS2. Show clips of amazing rendered video being run through an Emotion Engine chip, and claim it's being generated in realtime by a Playstation 2. Claim a near release date. Get everyone so excited about the PS2 that they're willing to wait. Push the release date back once it gets too near.
PS2 Ships. Aside from SSX, launch games are a crushing disappointment, as not one of them beyond this title demonstrates clear technical superiority to the aging Dreamcast, despite the huge gap in their release dates.
X-Box ships. X-Box Live! ships. Christmas buying season approaches. Sony announces the PS3. Talk about the fantastic power of grid processing and cell chips. Imply that the backward compatability of the PS2 will also be in the PS3.
Nintendo ships GBA SP. Sony announces PSP in concept, claims a near release date. Push back as release date approaches.
Nintendo is about to announce portable dual-screen system. Sony re-hypes PSP, releases a few more tidbits of detail, the tech press predictably goes rabid.
Gamers decide to wait for the PSP.
As gamers, how long are we going to put up with this shit from Sony? Haven't we learned from our mistakes by now?
PSP is vapor, and shitty vapor at that, until proven otherwise.
Sorry for the sales pitch, but it's not often I'm given an appropriate forum in which to evangelize about this:
Mary Hunt's site Cheapskate Monthly is a lot of what's wrong with the internet, & self-help She wants you to buy a subscription, buy her books, spend money you might not have, in order to learn how to save money. It reeks of spam, get-rich-quick schemes, do-nothing credit repair programs, and all that other worthless crap.
She's a shitty writer, she biblethumps, she spends chapters selling the reader on concepts she hasn't yet introduced.
Here's the thing though: Her advice? It works.
To be blunt, money used to flow through my fingers like water, and I had no idea where it went. I might be able to point to a few DVDs, and my computer was usually up to date, but on the whole? No idea where it went. Nothing in savings, Bills were paid late, rent was a scrounge, etc. etc. I was screwed if my job disappeared, and I'm in IT in the SF Bay, so it's not like that's a remote possibility.
Using the techniques in one of Hunt's books as a starting point, I managed to turn it around within a year. In the last year I paid down five grand in credit card debt, put that much again into savings, caught up on, eliminated, or cut all of my bills.
I still have an up-to-date computer and a big stack o' DVDs, too. I feel confident that if the transmission drops out of my car tomorrow, I won't be back in the poor house. It's a great feeling.
Gerrymandering is par for the course here. See the recent Texas re-districting hoopla for an example.
If you're not familiar with state politics in the USA (and who could blame you for not caring), the Republican-controlled state congress of Texas re-drew the districts such that wherever there had been a Democratic stronghold, it was split up and absorbed as a small percentage of a neighboring Republican stronghold. To use an analogy, they re-divided the districts so that opposition stronghold districts were like the center of a pizza pie. Suddenly they're a dozen small blocks of democrat votes inside large republican districts, instead of a united democrat bloc, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.
Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.
With that in mind, it's no wonder everyone's quick to point fingers at Diebold, or to suspect that these machines are used to rig elections. It's what our politicians do best.
they never show the poor truck driver, driving for 20 hours straight just to earn a living, fighting exhaustion but alert enough to avoid swerving his big white truck into oncoming traffic
Jet Set Radio? You mean the games about street gangs on rollerblades, each one based on a ridiculous* theme like sharks, love droids, and 3-year-out-of-date raver culture stereotypes, sticking it to the man via rail grinds, graffiti and pirate radio?
The one that ends (depending on the game in the series) in either a skyscraper rooftop battle on a giant spinning record against an evil dj booth, or a battle with a three story disco mind-control robot?
Is Kevin Parker seriously trying to say that game has an overtly political message? This just goes to show; some people have a vivid imagination, but little common sense.
*holy fucking shit, Slashdot posters, what's with all the high mod posts with the mis-spelling of this word as 'rediculous' lately? Buy a damn dictionary.
But... but... but... Microsoft did this years ago (minus.net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
I believe this turned into Outlook Web Access, which is an integrated component of Exchange servers. It's also pretty damn slick.
Hook up a 3-button wheel-mouse to your mac. Bind expose's "display all open windows" feature to middle mouse. Then click middle mouse, move your cursor over the the app you want, and let go.
It's a gajillion times more elegant than any keyboard-based solution.
Slashdot Mirror
There were a million ways that id could have handled the light issue, but they chose to pick the one game mechanic that slaps the player in the face with the fact it's just a game. It's a game, it has rules, and I am ripped out of the immersion.
This really upsets me with Doom 3, for those moments when I can stop playing it. It's not quite the letdown that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Crushing Disappointment turned out to be, but it's got the same sense of wasted potential.
I can see why gun-mounted lights got left out. It would take away a lot of the stress & fear that comes from playing the game. But here's just a few ways they could have accomplished the "Player's vision is severely restricted in the midst of a firefight" effect, without ripping the player out of the game:
1) Only the pistol can have the flashlight out. Think about it, modern-day cops have a flashlight and a pistol out simultaneously all the damn time (flashlight held high with the non-weapon hand, pistol in weapon hand). It wouldn't have been that hard, and then they could have stuck with the massive heavy mag-lite they modelled.
2) Helmet light. Make the flashlight bob a bit with the player movement, lead the camera on quick turns (Marine turns his head), jiggle with recoil, etc. Lots of opportunity to immerse.
3) Right-angle flashlight in a breast pocket, a la Silent Hill 3. This is my favorite of the ideas. Put the light a little bit lower, and then if the player moves to fire a two-handed weapon, the arms begin to obscure vision, casting massive shadows everywhere and bright light back from the Marine's pale white arm into the player's face. I mean, it's not like the marine gets much sun, he's pretty reflective.
I hope someone takes that last idea & runs with it, but I'm not optimistic.
On the other hand, for a game as deeply flawed as Doom 3 is turning out to be, it is undeniably stressful, entertaining, and has that "just one more corridor" hook to it. Much like a Renny Harlin film, I enjoy it in the moment, but take even greater pleasure in deriding it afterward to my friends.
This must be on a paper trail so I know who I voted for. Election monitors (the people, one from each party, who literally looked over the shoulders of the people counting ballots in Florida) need to be able to verify the count afterwards in some statistically valid way.
But with a printout from an electronic voting machine, all you've really verified is that the printout says you voted the way you thought you did, not that the machine will count your vote the way you wish for it to be counted.
This is why open source for the code in voting machines, from the firmware for each part of the device on up through the software that actually counts the votes, is so incredibly important. Only then will it be possible to verify that the software counts the votes in the way the user is told it is counting the votes.
And yet her cavefish eyes were somehow magically not seared from her skull the moment she became the first person to see sunlight in hundreds of years.
>Companies like CA and IBM are working to develop (or struggling to implement) single interfaces that will let you control and/or monitor the security of hundreds of systems at once, and monitor aggregates of the data so you can get both an overview and a detail view of the security status of your organization.
Badass, do they each come with their own clone of Penn Gillette to run them for me?
I live in an island community of about 70,000 people, accessible only by bridge & tunnel. The tunnels leading to and from the island are very old, and the white tile that lines them quickly grows covered in grime and soot. Every month or so a truck comes through and sprays everything down, but the dirt always collects again, seemingly thicker than before.
The local grafitti artists & taggers, some of whom I'm assuming come in from Oakland (the other end of the tunnel) have taken to using squeegees and water to make their signs. They just clean their tag into the wall of the tunnel and presto! It's there, reflecting in shiny white the headlights of passing cars, twice as noticeable as another spray tag we're all used to filtering out.
It's one of the reasons I love living here.
That was an accident like Slashdot is a hotbed of balanced, original political thought, or this is an on-topic post.
If you check the photos, you'll see a row of snaps on the outfit around the outside of Jackson's breast, and if you examine the photos of Timberlake holding up the piece of the costume he removed, you'll see it was designed to snap off. In addition, it had fabric sewn across it in such a way as to simulate Jackson's brasierre. Finally, that jewelry was obviously not intended for everyday wear.
Further, these shows are rehearsed for weeks prior to the day of the show, and the outfits are custom-designed for thousands of dollars.
If you honestly believe that was an accident, then I've got some evidence you might like to review proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction in a country that just HAPPENS to be located exactly between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
I just did this, and it is unbelievably fast!
WOW, thank you!
Prison abuse sucks, yes. But here's why Abu Ghraib is on the front page, and those stories are not: They're Americans.
What was becoming known as the Iraqi Prisoner Torture Scandal is now known as the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Scandal, or even the Iraqi Prisoner Mistreatment Scandal. The word Torture is quickly becoming the elephant in the middle of the room. We all know that those people in those photographs are being tortured. What else can one call it when a jailer pours acid on a prisoner's head?
We're all accustomed to seeing torture in movies, or on the news. But in these situations, the torturer is always an alien figure, usually over-the-top, characterized in broad strokes. The great cinematic torturers, such as Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, or the captors in The Deer Hunter, have one thing in common: They're not Americans. The Vietnamese soldier photographed shooting his prisoner in the head: Not American. Lynndie England: American.
An American torturer is repellent, alien to our cultural mindset. We're so unaccustomed to the sight that it's doubly disgusting. The racist undercurrent of our popular media feeds back on us in this situation, and tells us that Americans, white Americans, don't do this. They're the good guys. But these soldiers are just average Joe and Jane America, and they did do this. We are they, and they are us, and that means that as a country, we are ashamed.
People in general don't deal with shame very well. We all of us, naturally, try to take shameful moments and acts and deal with them by softening the blow in our minds. One deals with the memory of keen embarrassment by finding the humor inherent in the situation. One deals with a past infidelity by rationalizing that since nobody will ever know, nobody will ever be hurt. The word adultery becomes fling, fling becomes indiscretion. These rationalized lies may even be necessary for us to move on with our lives, and not be locked into paralysis by our inability to deal with our darker natures. Certainly the press were quick to jump upon language which allowed them to lessen the shock. As anyone who's regularly read a newspaper in their lives knows, this is not something journalists are wont to do.
It is not yet time to move on. Let's at least agree in this instance to call it like it is: Torture. Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of these people.
Read it again. Say it out loud, hear it, listen to it, accept it. If you are a patriot, as I am, feel the way it hits your stomach and stays there, destroys your appetite, knocks down the straightness of your shoulders. Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of people. Don't let the words change for you, and slide the full truth of what has happened away. As one who loves this country, it's maybe too painful to look directly into the truth of this matter for too long. As one who loves this country, being seared by the shame our countrymen have brought down on us is a necessary step toward making things right. Gaze full-on into it, and let it make you humble again.
Stop your apologist comparison of the wrong thing we did in one situation to the wrong things other people do in similar situations, as if their abhorrent behavior somehow justifies or lessens the severity of our own.
As you wade through the mountain of rhetorical shit that is the inevitable reply to a comment such as this on a site such as this, I'd just like to offer you a small moment of appreciation.
You sir, are THE MAN. That was well-written, succinct, and intelligent in the extreme, and you deserve some congratulations. Best post I've read in quite a while.
*sigh*
.bin file, so the best I could do is just download the file three times and then check the byte size on the .bin file each time I downloaded it to make sure they were consistent.
.bin file for the flashbios was consistent.
Let's try this again. I've installed hundreds of BIOS updates in the course of my decade working in IT.
This one was supplied without CRC numbers for the
Then I copied it to floppy, made sure again the byte size of the
Then I ran Gateway's flashbios update program, and it updated the BIOS.
Where exactly in there do I not know what I'm doing flashing the BIOS?
re: robot, check out http://www.egain.com/ to see the demo of the software Gateway was using to drive the chat session.
(I know, I know, I'm feeding the trolls)
It's been a little over 3 years, but the new BIOS' readme file claimed multiplier support for the faster 66Mhz FSB chip that I wanted to install in the PC, IIRC. It had a 233 in there and I wanted to drop in a 433 or something close to that.
Good enough reason for you, troll?
In early 2001, after building my mom a computer from scratch, I received her old Gateway 233Mhz system to do with as I pleased. The first thing I did was flash the BIOS. When the system failed to POST after that, the next thing I did was contact Gateway support.
Thus began an odyssey that I hope never to repeat with any company, and certainly will never repeat with Gateway. They're never getting another dime out of me or my family for as long as I'm alive.
Below is why. The first two logs detail a chat session between Gateway and myself, conducted using a particularly nasty piece of customer service software called eGain. You can see how it made the live person on the other end of the chat session sound like a robot.
After that follows a series of e-mail correspondence. This log has been edited both to cover my tracks a bit, and to get around the slashdot filters, as the characters per line ratio of the post is otherwise too low.
Chat Session 1
Question: I updated my BIOS and the system boots, displays gateway logo, but does not POST.
A Chat Agent will be with you shortly.
Wendell: Hello Fahr, welcome to the Gateway Chat Support Service. I am Wendell here to help you with your issue.
Fahr Vergnugen: Hi. Have a system here that's not terribly happy.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the exact problem you are facing with your Computer?
Fahr Vergnugen: Need S/N?
Wendell: Fahr, please provide me your Serial number.
Fahr Vergnugen: Okay, older PII-233Mhz / LX chipset board. tried to slap in a newer celeron, it didn't take, decided to update the bios.
Wendell: Okay , Fahr.
Fahr Vergnugen: sure 0009589521
Wendell: Thanks , Fahr.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the problem you are facing with your System?
Fahr Vergnugen: grabbed BIOS 4A4LL0X0.15A.0023.P18 from the gateway support site (was running P11) and flashed the board.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: now, the system fires up, displays a gateway logo, and a small progress bar in the top left fills from grey to white, and the system acts like it's going to POST normally, but it never happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: the bar takes between 3 and 4 minutes to reach 100%.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: and from there it just sits. If I hit TAB to view system messages, it acts normally, but again, no POST. Nothing happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: no error message. Just doesn't beep and post.
Fahr Vergnugen: I think it's probably pretty shafted, but I thought I'd check with you guys.
Wendell: Fahr, please hold on while I search for your resolution.
Fahr Vergnugen: np, holdin' on.
Wendell: Thank you for waiting. Please review the following information, which I think will help you.
Wendell: [Item sent - Astro and Profile 2 - Computer stops responding after power-on self-test (POST)] http://www.gateway.com/support/techdocs/astro/trsh oot/1106.shtml
Wendell: Did you get the page , Fahr?
Fahr Vergnugen: yep, but no help I can tell already, since it assumes I can get to Windows, which is not the case.
Wendell: I realize your time is valuable, please wait one minute while I research this further.
Fahr Vergnugen: np
Wendell: Fahr, I apologize for the delay
RE: Your sig.
If you'd spent any time driving in greater Boston at all, you'd know that Roundabouts are a terrible idea. I used to pass through about a half-dozen of them on my daily 40-mile commute and it was easily the worst part of the trip.
Wow! That's incredibly flattering, thank you. You've seriously made my day.
I've gone ahead and used this slashdot post as the basis for a weblog entry, so if you'd like an edited and expanded version of the same text, it's available on my site as well.
The RIAA loves the new Napster, or at least, part of it. For those who aren't quite familiar with how the service works, users pay a monthly fee to subscribe to Napster. Then, based on the preferences of the copyright holder, users can either stream or download tracks for a one-time fee. Once the fee is paid, the user can listen to the song as many times as they want, but only downloaded songs can be loaded onto mp3 players, etc. for use away from the computer.
The rub, of course, is that if a subscriber stop paying Napster a monthly subscription fee, she loses access to the music streams she's already paid for. It's brilliant, because in the end, the consumer gets nothing for their dollar but instant gratification. No file, no archived recording, just the experience of having heard Outkast encouraging them to "shake it like a Polaroid picture" to file away in their memory.
The RIAA adores this. It makes them happy like dogs rolling in some particularly nasty filth. They look out and see the incredible use statistics counting the users of p2p and iTunes, and they start multiplying subscription fees on top of those numbers. It's the best deal possible for them, because they manage to make money by selling us no real assets.
But iTunes style stores, where users are given individual copies of songs to keep and own, and use in perpetuity for a one-time fee? The RIAA hates this. It makes them sad, like a pet owner discovering that his dog has rolled in some particularly nasty filth. Instead of a recurring revenue stream that's locked into continuing to pay for the RIAA's existing products for life, each consumer instead is a fair deal. They get songs for a low one-time fee, they're able to get their music a la carte without having to buy dozens of filler tracks, and they're still offered the instant gratification that is the only real selling point the streaming model has to offer. The RIAA, in turn, is forced to continue producing new product at a high enough quality that they can continue to sell it to customers.
Once you understand this, it's easy to see what the RIAA is doing: They're trying to shut down iTunes.
By raising the cost of songs to $1.25, they're breaking the magic $1 price point. Anything under a buck, well hell, that's just a candy bar. Why not buy it? But $1.25, that's a 20oz. bottle of soda, a purchase that must be considered a little more carefully. They've broken the psychological barrier to impulse purchases that $.99 magically hovers below.
By raising the price of full albums on iTunes to be equivalent to the cost of a physical CD bought in the store, the RIAA looks on the surface like they're creating a financial incentive to go and buy the album at a music store. But we all know that's not how this will work out.
What will happen is that iTunes' sales will drop, but they won't be met with a commeasurate increase in sales at music stores. The RIAA knows that people accustomed to the iTunes Music Store will return to illegal acquisition of music via filesharing before they'll go to the store and buy it.
In fact, they're counting on it, because once the iTunes music store is dead, they can say, "See? We tried, we put our best foot forward, but it just didn't work. These pirates aren't interested in paying." Then the lawyers can go to town, until there is no technological nor legal recourse available to escape their stranglehold on recorded music.
It's not only evil, it's fucking brilliant.
PS2 dev kits were in developers' hands for years before system launch, while all that false hype was going on.
Didn't change the fact that the system was vapor. Hell, XBox 2 dev kits are out, and that sucker's still vapor.
Yup, I do like my Dreamcast, I enjoy many games on it, including btw. a version of Rez that is superior in every way to the PS2 incarnation of the same game.
However, unlike you, I'm neither a system partisan nor a troll. I'm more than willing to talk about the relative merits of different game platforms in contrast to one another, because hey, guess what? I've already bought all of them. I'm not bound to one as being the One True Way toward gaming, because I have no personal stake based in either honor nor finance to justify my purchase.
Sony's PR department has a history of doing this sort of thing.
Dreamcast is about to ship? Announce the PS2. Show clips of amazing rendered video being run through an Emotion Engine chip, and claim it's being generated in realtime by a Playstation 2. Claim a near release date. Get everyone so excited about the PS2 that they're willing to wait. Push the release date back once it gets too near.
PS2 Ships. Aside from SSX, launch games are a crushing disappointment, as not one of them beyond this title demonstrates clear technical superiority to the aging Dreamcast, despite the huge gap in their release dates.
X-Box ships. X-Box Live! ships. Christmas buying season approaches. Sony announces the PS3. Talk about the fantastic power of grid processing and cell chips. Imply that the backward compatability of the PS2 will also be in the PS3.
Nintendo ships GBA SP. Sony announces PSP in concept, claims a near release date. Push back as release date approaches.
Nintendo is about to announce portable dual-screen system. Sony re-hypes PSP, releases a few more tidbits of detail, the tech press predictably goes rabid.
Gamers decide to wait for the PSP.
As gamers, how long are we going to put up with this shit from Sony? Haven't we learned from our mistakes by now?
PSP is vapor, and shitty vapor at that, until proven otherwise.
Sorry for the sales pitch, but it's not often I'm given an appropriate forum in which to evangelize about this:
Mary Hunt's site Cheapskate Monthly is a lot of what's wrong with the internet, & self-help She wants you to buy a subscription, buy her books, spend money you might not have, in order to learn how to save money. It reeks of spam, get-rich-quick schemes, do-nothing credit repair programs, and all that other worthless crap.
She's a shitty writer, she biblethumps, she spends chapters selling the reader on concepts she hasn't yet introduced.
Here's the thing though: Her advice? It works.
To be blunt, money used to flow through my fingers like water, and I had no idea where it went. I might be able to point to a few DVDs, and my computer was usually up to date, but on the whole? No idea where it went. Nothing in savings, Bills were paid late, rent was a scrounge, etc. etc. I was screwed if my job disappeared, and I'm in IT in the SF Bay, so it's not like that's a remote possibility.
Using the techniques in one of Hunt's books as a starting point, I managed to turn it around within a year. In the last year I paid down five grand in credit card debt, put that much again into savings, caught up on, eliminated, or cut all of my bills.
I still have an up-to-date computer and a big stack o' DVDs, too. I feel confident that if the transmission drops out of my car tomorrow, I won't be back in the poor house. It's a great feeling.
If debt is ruining your life, then this is the book for you.
Gerrymandering is par for the course here. See the recent Texas re-districting hoopla for an example.
If you're not familiar with state politics in the USA (and who could blame you for not caring), the Republican-controlled state congress of Texas re-drew the districts such that wherever there had been a Democratic stronghold, it was split up and absorbed as a small percentage of a neighboring Republican stronghold. To use an analogy, they re-divided the districts so that opposition stronghold districts were like the center of a pizza pie. Suddenly they're a dozen small blocks of democrat votes inside large republican districts, instead of a united democrat bloc, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.
Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.
With that in mind, it's no wonder everyone's quick to point fingers at Diebold, or to suspect that these machines are used to rig elections. It's what our politicians do best.
they never show the poor truck driver, driving for 20 hours straight just to earn a living, fighting exhaustion but alert enough to avoid swerving his big white truck into oncoming traffic
That one was called Night Driver.
Jet Set Radio? You mean the games about street gangs on rollerblades, each one based on a ridiculous* theme like sharks, love droids, and 3-year-out-of-date raver culture stereotypes, sticking it to the man via rail grinds, graffiti and pirate radio?
The one that ends (depending on the game in the series) in either a skyscraper rooftop battle on a giant spinning record against an evil dj booth, or a battle with a three story disco mind-control robot?
Is Kevin Parker seriously trying to say that game has an overtly political message? This just goes to show; some people have a vivid imagination, but little common sense.
*holy fucking shit, Slashdot posters, what's with all the high mod posts with the mis-spelling of this word as 'rediculous' lately? Buy a damn dictionary.
First I've heard. What players are these?
But ... but ... but ... Microsoft did this years ago (minus .net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
I believe this turned into Outlook Web Access, which is an integrated component of Exchange servers. It's also pretty damn slick.
You think 1-button is more expedient? Try this:
Hook up a 3-button wheel-mouse to your mac. Bind expose's "display all open windows" feature to middle mouse. Then click middle mouse, move your cursor over the the app you want, and let go.
It's a gajillion times more elegant than any keyboard-based solution.