? I find it difficult to think of any significant software for which there is not an equivalent if not better OSS / FS option
Oh goody. Give me a software solution that will properly route every single piece of 1st through 3rd class mail in the US from every mailbox, post office box, and other drop off to every other one. Please do not forget GIS map and shortest-route information, including cost based analysis of routes. It will also need to interface with a few hundred external systems which will have both inputs and outputs to this system in the form of additional packages to be routed.
Oh, you mean there isn't an OSS solution for the US Postal Service? Ok. I guess they should just rewrite the entire system from the ground up using OSS. No problem. You don't need any mail delivered for the next decade or so, right?
Next thing you'll do is claim that there's no OSS replacement for air traffic control either. Bloody hell.
When you get out in the real world, you'll realize that the majority of software isn't generic "business productivity" solutions, but highly targeted, industry specific solutions that can't be solved without an in-depth knowledge and design of that industry.
He did not [...] say he had a hidden agenda. [...] He said that perhaps O'Reilly has a hidden agenda.
Which is it please? Your use of pronouns makes that, well, abundantly foggy.
Agreed. However, mandating open formats will in effect mandate OSS, since there will no longer be any excuse for paying for software to do something free software will do just as well.
Yes, because, as we all know, Photoshop's sales have gone into the crapper and The Gimp is now the most commonly used image editor amongst professionals.
What? You mean that's not true? Wow...
As another poster pointed out, HTML is 100% open, and yet commercial packages such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage are far more popular than OSS tools.
Text files are about as open as it gets. Yet Ultraedit does quite well for itself, despite the preponderance of free text editors (personally, I use vim - but it's not an editor I'd recommend to everyone).
Merely the ability to create a file in a particular format does not mean that everyone can do it equally well. There's those little issues like user interface, ease of use, and simplicity to deal with. Funny... usually the same areas where commercial software stomps all over open source. Because while the bazaar may be dirt cheap, it also has a tendancy to smell too.
Believe it or not, I like and support OSS. But wow am I tired of some of the blithering idiots that have their heads stuck up their asses in both the OS and commercial software camps.
Mach is an accepted measurement of speed, and when used as such it does indeed have a specific value. Reference Mach is measured at 15 deg. Celsius at sea level, yielding ~340 m/s or 1224 km/h (someone feel free to doublecheck the math, conversion and multiplication errors abound when you post).
So while, yes, the speed of sound does indeed change with altitude (due to temperature changes, which is related to pressure changes), the reference Mach value does not. So Mach 7.6 was 9306 km/h or 5784 mph.
Re:What all 3D games are really missing
on
New DOOM III Shots
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· Score: 2
Most realistic physics causes the game to cease being fun. And that's what the entire point is after all.
Most of what you mention is trivial to do. It's not a new graphics effect, it's just a minor calculation. And various designers have played around with more realistic physics models, only to discover that they made the game suck (this was mostly done around the Q2/Q3 timeframe, which well postdates Half-Life).
A couple of specific points -- if you're going for real world physics, then your horizontal momentum is going to make nearly no difference to that rocket. It would put the aim off by a couple centimeters at most. Of course, we're playing with comic physics, where the players move nearly as fast as the projectiles, so it's another matter entirely at that point.
As far as "real" space flight physics -- there was one game that implemented this. I don't recall the title anymore, because I played it once and said "wow, this sucks" -- because it did. It had a true vectoring physics model (sans gravity) where you had to counterthrust to cancel your momemntum. It was impossible to do dogfights, to fly anywhere, or get anything done. Could I have retrained myself? Sure. But it was too much of a pain in the ass, and just wasn't fun.
Re:Finally, ABI stabilization. Now about optimizat
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 2
I'm not going to dispute the good points that others have made regarding specific optimizations, but...
I've had many bugs that disappear with "-g" turned on.
No, no, no. You didn't just turn off optimization there, you turned on debug mode as well. Debug mode is well known to do things that regular compiles don't -- including initializing variables to zero and the like. Most coders have run into situations where compiling with debug on works and without it doesn't, and they are amongst the more difficult bugs to stomp out. But they (generally) have nothing to do with optimization. I've seen bugs from compilers before, even in things as benign as loop unrolling.
Do not mix apples and oranges. No optimization != debug mode.
Readable code does not document business logic, and the business logic that leads to the code isn't always documented anywhere useful, or (better yet) it changes and the original logic can't be found anymore.
So write readable code. And comment. They're inseperable necessities.
Unless, of course, you do want to maintain the code forever. Personally, I'd rather go off and write new, nifty stuff than maintain old, cruddy stuff forever (and yes, all the old code is cruddy by definition -- if you can't think of improvements to something then you didn't learn anything).
Re:Finally, ABI stabilization. Now about optimizat
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Compile with optimization on -- visual glitches.
Compile with optimization off -- no visual glitches.
There were no ad banners, no pop-ups. It was wonderful. You just found the information you needed and you were happy
As long as, of course, the knowledge you needed was in the 1% domain that the Internet covered at the time - mainly computers and electronics.
Look, I was there in the "good ole days" and it wasn't so good. Nobody was online because it wasn't popular yet and there wasn't any clear way to gain advantage from it. Sure, you and I knew how kick ass it was -- finding a company with a website and useful information was always a good reason to do business with them again. But try and find info outside of the realm of computers, electronics, or sex? Trudge to the library.
The antiadblocker guy is a twerp and a moron, but to some extent he's right. Note that most company sites don't have ads -- they run the site as a marketing or support expense largely. Virtually all large private sites have ads. Why? Because it costs money to run the site. It has nothing to do with commercialization -- it has to do with being able to share information on a global basis without running your pocketbook dry.
If you don't believe that, then maybe you should talk to Taco about paying for the bandwidth used by Slashdot on a monthly basis. I'm sure he'd be happy for you to foot the bill.
For the record - I have no issue blocking pop-up/under ads, or freaking annoying ads that flash and try to distract you. I personally don't block banner ads because they largely don't annoy me. If they bug you, block 'em. But don't be so stupid as to think that banner ads are the root of all evil and that advertising is either ineffective or unnecessary.
I didn't play HL much -- I bought it, noted that they had numerous bugs in their network code and felt the inventory system sucked wind, and returned it directly to Sierra.
If they can make money off of Quake3, why on earth would they GPL it?
They won't. id is not stupid.
But, based off past procedures, you can expect the Q3 source to be GPL'd within 1-2 years of the Doom3 release. They did it with Wolfenstein, they did it with Doom (sans sound code), and they did it with both Q1 and Q2.
But, like I said, they're not stupid. It's released well after its licensing value is near zero and under GPL. Want to make a commercial game using the old Q2 engine? Sure -- pay id Software $10k (a heavily reduced price) and you can have the exact same code as what's under GPL -- except that you're not bound by the GPL.
It's one of the few ways to make the GPL work for companies to make money. Of course, even then, you'll get rabid idiots decrying the fact that it's not GPL from the start, and that you can actually get a non-GPL license in exchange for cash.
Fortunately most people are sane and simply thank id Software for contributing to the public knowledge base in such a manner.
But, just to implement all the Q3 tech, including BSP+PVS, Q3 Shaders and a loader for the Model files and Map files would take two good 3D engine programmers about a week
Including the extensible modules? And the network code? And the sound code? And everything else?
And have it be virtually bug free?
Yes, as you said, it's old now. But you also said that it's mature, and that's one thing that can't be replicated in a week. Or a month. Probably not even a year.
Hell, you want to talk about an old codebase? Look at Half-Life. It's still based on Q2, and it's still one of the most popular online games.
Dropping $250k for a stable core is nothing if you're serious about things. Sure, you'll have to extend it to bring it up to current standards, but RtCW did just that and did quite well in the market. So has SoF and SoF2, amongst others.
Yes, the Q3 core is old, and shows it. But I think you drastically underestimate how long it would take to redevelop it from scratch. There's quite a number of open source (under various licenses) game cores out there, and they've taken considerably longer than a month to make and aren't approaching Q3's capabilities yet. Yes, I suppose you could argue that they're not made by "good 3D engine programmers", but that doesn't help the situation for a fledgling company now does it?
useless Windows driver disks I get with every piece of hardware I buy [...] discover they're broken and I have to get updated drivers from the web anyway
Yes, quit shipping those driver disks. After all, I'm just going to download new drivers... er... and how, exactly, is that going to work for network cards, motherboards, or other critical pieces of the computer?
Honestly, I recommend you buy better hardware, from companies that don't have so many driver problems. I generally don't bother downloading new drivers unless I'm having an issue with the old ones -- or the new ones are substantially faster. And, funny, the drivers that come with the hardware generally work too. But, again, I'm willing to pay a couple bucks more for stuff that works right out of the box. My time is worth far more than fiddling with crap for hours to make it work.
Ok, by the same measure then, Sony/Verant has had an income of roughly $130 (EQ + Kunark + Velious + Luclin, all bought new at release) * 400,000 = $52M.
Of course, that's wrong too. Far more than 400k people have bought the game, because Sony/Verant has about a 30% cancellation rate. And they didn't reap all of that money in one year, nor did people pay full price for everything.
More importantly, they see nearly none of that money at all -- maybe a third of it. The rest goes to the end store and the middle men. Ditto for Blizzard.
What Sony does see, however, is $9.89 (now $13ish) per month from every active account. Until they cancel. And when Planes of Power is released (end of the year? Hell if I care anymore) they'll sell another expansion to 80% of their customer base at $30 a pop. Sure, half the price and a third of the user base. So what. It's icing on the cake at this point -- the development is already paid for, the servers and maintainence are already paid for, every penny that comes in is pure profit at this point.
Would you rather pay $150-$200 for a game and not have monthly charges, or pay $40 for a game and $12.95 a month to play it?
Go ahead and do the former. You'll go out of business because too few people will be willing to pony up that much money upfront.
People (and companies) are funny like that -- they'll pay ongoing fees instead of a large upfront fee. Partially because ongoing fees are easier to budget for, partially because there's not such a sense of commitment with a smaller upfront fee.
On the flip side, there's no way in hell that I'd want you to pay a large upfront fee instead of monthly. Monthly gives me an ongoing revenue base, which is great since I probably have ongoing expenses (like staffing, rent, etc). The large upfront fee gives me spikes in revenue - which is hard for me to budget for and isn't viewed kindly by investors.
I played EQ for nearly 3 years, had 2 accounts for a year, and bought the expansions up to and including Luclin. So I guess I spent something in the neighborhood of $700 on the game alone in that time. So yeah, it would've been cheaper for an upfront version. But if I had to pay $200 to just start then I never would've played, and that's a huge stream of revenue gone. (And while I will never again play anything like EQ again, I can't really be too pissed -- without it I never would've met my wife, who also played).
On the flip side, I bought lifetime memberships for both my TiVo's, at $200 each. One has already paid for itself, the other will do so within a few months.
Good Eats is sponsored by Viking Range company... whether that's because Mr. Brown likes their products, or because they're the sponsor is a good question, but it may not be one he can answer without incurring the wrath of the sponsor.
Not all that funny if you're on the receiving end of the bill... a lot of hosting sites bill based off of bandwidth usage, with flat level caps and then money per bit afterwards.
So imagine going from a $50/month hosting fee to $15k.
And it happens, and companies go out of business dealing with it -- if you make $30k/year from this side job and only half of that is profit, you just got your profit for an entire year eaten by a/.-ing. Why bother? Call the company bankrupt (you DID incorporate, right?) and move on.
I despise Comcast... they were the original cable provider in my area. The ones that hooked up my cable without a ground line. Lightning strike somewhere vaguely nearby destroyed a VCR and damaged my receiver -- the VCR was cheaper to replace than fix and the receiver cost me a couple hundred to fix. Another surge took out my TiVo.
Of course, they refused to pay my costs, claimed there was no fault (and quietly went and attached the ground wire), and eventually went bye-bye. I still have cable, but only because there are 60' trees blocking my SW view. Eventually I'll figure out which tree is the culprit and have it removed. Then I'll kick the cable company out once and for all.
Dunno... I'd have to ask my friends and coworkers who have had dental work recently to find out. My insurance is through a dental HMO though, so it must be cheap... otherwise it wouldn't be covered (I'm often thankful that novacaine is covered...)
The stuff my dentist uses is yellow-orange, rather thick, and put on a large cotton swab and put in your mouth. They go away for about 3 minutes, come back, and give a pain free injection.
Only a small percentage remember the days when there wasn't a single corporate interest on the web
I do.
It was pure, unfettered information.
With huge, gaping blanks because the entities that had the information weren't online -- whether those entities were corporations with their own information or Joe Blow user who wasn't online because there wasn't anything of interest to him there.
Yes, lets go back to pre-corporate Internet. After all, the Old Days Were Better.
What a load of extremist conservative claptrap.
Want to learn how to program? Pay gobs of money
Funny. I learned Perl almost entirely online. I learned much of C++ the same way. Want someone to hold your hand? Then yeah, you'll need to pay money for that person's time. Get off your ass and it's free. Sweat equity, just like it's always been.
It isn't surface novacaine. It's new -- as in, within the past year new. And it works for me at least. I've had 3 fillings, a root canal, and a crown in the past 3 months (sigh) and never felt the needle stick.
I never once had anything like that with my previous dentist, or any of the other dentists I've had.
Nitrous doesn't affect everyone. Others it affects very well.
I've had nitrous before - did nothing to me. The previous patient getting some dental work done, however, was apparantly trying to get the entire office to sing along with her.
Just how long ago was this? If recently, I suggest you change dentists.
They have a topical anesthetic now that it swabbed on to your gums prior to the novacaine shot. Takes a minute or two and then they can administer the shot to an area that's already numbed. Very nice. If your dentist isn't doing this yet, either tell them to or change dentists.
Not passing judgement on the Bush administration regarding Enron, but...
asked them for advice in setting policy.
And so... ? This is standard operating procedure. Making policy without consulting the businesses is both political suicide and foolish -- you think you know more about the industry than the industry itself? Not likely. You're a professional politician -- sure, you'll be briefed by industry experts, but that doesn't mean you don't go talk to the big fish too. Take a look at who any of the past 10 presidents consulted with and you'll see corporate execs all the time.
Gore pushed the last telecom tax through, allegedly to pay for Internet access to all public schools nationwide.
The other taxes have a much longer standing, but the OP wasn't totally off his rocker.
Basically most of it does go to taxes - generally somewhere between 33-50%. And, shockingly, telecomm companies aren't cheap to run. There's a hell of a lot of manpower in them, just for maintainence. If you've never been to a major CO then you may want to call your RBOC and ask to see the biggest CO they have near you. I've been to the one in downtown Atlanta (as a field trip for a networking class in college!) and it was an eye-opener. Most of the telecomm traffic for the SE runs through that little 4 story building.
Slashdot Mirror
? I find it difficult to think of any significant software for which there is not an equivalent if not better OSS / FS option
Oh goody. Give me a software solution that will properly route every single piece of 1st through 3rd class mail in the US from every mailbox, post office box, and other drop off to every other one. Please do not forget GIS map and shortest-route information, including cost based analysis of routes. It will also need to interface with a few hundred external systems which will have both inputs and outputs to this system in the form of additional packages to be routed.
Oh, you mean there isn't an OSS solution for the US Postal Service? Ok. I guess they should just rewrite the entire system from the ground up using OSS. No problem. You don't need any mail delivered for the next decade or so, right?
Next thing you'll do is claim that there's no OSS replacement for air traffic control either. Bloody hell.
When you get out in the real world, you'll realize that the majority of software isn't generic "business productivity" solutions, but highly targeted, industry specific solutions that can't be solved without an in-depth knowledge and design of that industry.
He did not [...] say he had a hidden agenda. [...] He said that perhaps O'Reilly has a hidden agenda.
Which is it please? Your use of pronouns makes that, well, abundantly foggy.
Agreed. However, mandating open formats will in effect mandate OSS, since there will no longer be any excuse for paying for software to do something free software will do just as well.
Yes, because, as we all know, Photoshop's sales have gone into the crapper and The Gimp is now the most commonly used image editor amongst professionals.
What? You mean that's not true? Wow...
As another poster pointed out, HTML is 100% open, and yet commercial packages such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage are far more popular than OSS tools.
Text files are about as open as it gets. Yet Ultraedit does quite well for itself, despite the preponderance of free text editors (personally, I use vim - but it's not an editor I'd recommend to everyone).
Merely the ability to create a file in a particular format does not mean that everyone can do it equally well. There's those little issues like user interface, ease of use, and simplicity to deal with. Funny... usually the same areas where commercial software stomps all over open source. Because while the bazaar may be dirt cheap, it also has a tendancy to smell too.
Believe it or not, I like and support OSS. But wow am I tired of some of the blithering idiots that have their heads stuck up their asses in both the OS and commercial software camps.
Mach is an accepted measurement of speed, and when used as such it does indeed have a specific value. Reference Mach is measured at 15 deg. Celsius at sea level, yielding ~340 m/s or 1224 km/h (someone feel free to doublecheck the math, conversion and multiplication errors abound when you post).
So while, yes, the speed of sound does indeed change with altitude (due to temperature changes, which is related to pressure changes), the reference Mach value does not. So Mach 7.6 was 9306 km/h or 5784 mph.
Most realistic physics causes the game to cease being fun. And that's what the entire point is after all.
Most of what you mention is trivial to do. It's not a new graphics effect, it's just a minor calculation. And various designers have played around with more realistic physics models, only to discover that they made the game suck (this was mostly done around the Q2/Q3 timeframe, which well postdates Half-Life).
A couple of specific points -- if you're going for real world physics, then your horizontal momentum is going to make nearly no difference to that rocket. It would put the aim off by a couple centimeters at most. Of course, we're playing with comic physics, where the players move nearly as fast as the projectiles, so it's another matter entirely at that point.
As far as "real" space flight physics -- there was one game that implemented this. I don't recall the title anymore, because I played it once and said "wow, this sucks" -- because it did. It had a true vectoring physics model (sans gravity) where you had to counterthrust to cancel your momemntum. It was impossible to do dogfights, to fly anywhere, or get anything done. Could I have retrained myself? Sure. But it was too much of a pain in the ass, and just wasn't fun.
I'm not going to dispute the good points that others have made regarding specific optimizations, but...
I've had many bugs that disappear with "-g" turned on.
No, no, no. You didn't just turn off optimization there, you turned on debug mode as well. Debug mode is well known to do things that regular compiles don't -- including initializing variables to zero and the like. Most coders have run into situations where compiling with debug on works and without it doesn't, and they are amongst the more difficult bugs to stomp out. But they (generally) have nothing to do with optimization. I've seen bugs from compilers before, even in things as benign as loop unrolling.
Do not mix apples and oranges. No optimization != debug mode.
Readable code does not document business logic, and the business logic that leads to the code isn't always documented anywhere useful, or (better yet) it changes and the original logic can't be found anymore.
So write readable code. And comment. They're inseperable necessities.
Unless, of course, you do want to maintain the code forever. Personally, I'd rather go off and write new, nifty stuff than maintain old, cruddy stuff forever (and yes, all the old code is cruddy by definition -- if you can't think of improvements to something then you didn't learn anything).
Compile with optimization on -- visual glitches.
Compile with optimization off -- no visual glitches.
Ever heard of Occam's Razor?
There were no ad banners, no pop-ups. It was wonderful. You just found the information you needed and you were happy
As long as, of course, the knowledge you needed was in the 1% domain that the Internet covered at the time - mainly computers and electronics.
Look, I was there in the "good ole days" and it wasn't so good. Nobody was online because it wasn't popular yet and there wasn't any clear way to gain advantage from it. Sure, you and I knew how kick ass it was -- finding a company with a website and useful information was always a good reason to do business with them again. But try and find info outside of the realm of computers, electronics, or sex? Trudge to the library.
The antiadblocker guy is a twerp and a moron, but to some extent he's right. Note that most company sites don't have ads -- they run the site as a marketing or support expense largely. Virtually all large private sites have ads. Why? Because it costs money to run the site. It has nothing to do with commercialization -- it has to do with being able to share information on a global basis without running your pocketbook dry.
If you don't believe that, then maybe you should talk to Taco about paying for the bandwidth used by Slashdot on a monthly basis. I'm sure he'd be happy for you to foot the bill.
For the record - I have no issue blocking pop-up/under ads, or freaking annoying ads that flash and try to distract you. I personally don't block banner ads because they largely don't annoy me. If they bug you, block 'em. But don't be so stupid as to think that banner ads are the root of all evil and that advertising is either ineffective or unnecessary.
Right you are... I remembered incorrectly.
I didn't play HL much -- I bought it, noted that they had numerous bugs in their network code and felt the inventory system sucked wind, and returned it directly to Sierra.
If they can make money off of Quake3, why on earth would they GPL it?
They won't. id is not stupid.
But, based off past procedures, you can expect the Q3 source to be GPL'd within 1-2 years of the Doom3 release. They did it with Wolfenstein, they did it with Doom (sans sound code), and they did it with both Q1 and Q2.
But, like I said, they're not stupid. It's released well after its licensing value is near zero and under GPL. Want to make a commercial game using the old Q2 engine? Sure -- pay id Software $10k (a heavily reduced price) and you can have the exact same code as what's under GPL -- except that you're not bound by the GPL.
It's one of the few ways to make the GPL work for companies to make money. Of course, even then, you'll get rabid idiots decrying the fact that it's not GPL from the start, and that you can actually get a non-GPL license in exchange for cash.
Fortunately most people are sane and simply thank id Software for contributing to the public knowledge base in such a manner.
But, just to implement all the Q3 tech, including BSP+PVS, Q3 Shaders and a loader for the Model files and Map files would take two good 3D engine programmers about a week
Including the extensible modules? And the network code? And the sound code? And everything else?
And have it be virtually bug free?
Yes, as you said, it's old now. But you also said that it's mature, and that's one thing that can't be replicated in a week. Or a month. Probably not even a year.
Hell, you want to talk about an old codebase? Look at Half-Life. It's still based on Q2, and it's still one of the most popular online games.
Dropping $250k for a stable core is nothing if you're serious about things. Sure, you'll have to extend it to bring it up to current standards, but RtCW did just that and did quite well in the market. So has SoF and SoF2, amongst others.
Yes, the Q3 core is old, and shows it. But I think you drastically underestimate how long it would take to redevelop it from scratch. There's quite a number of open source (under various licenses) game cores out there, and they've taken considerably longer than a month to make and aren't approaching Q3's capabilities yet. Yes, I suppose you could argue that they're not made by "good 3D engine programmers", but that doesn't help the situation for a fledgling company now does it?
useless Windows driver disks I get with every piece of hardware I buy [...] discover they're broken and I have to get updated drivers from the web anyway
Yes, quit shipping those driver disks. After all, I'm just going to download new drivers... er... and how, exactly, is that going to work for network cards, motherboards, or other critical pieces of the computer?
Honestly, I recommend you buy better hardware, from companies that don't have so many driver problems. I generally don't bother downloading new drivers unless I'm having an issue with the old ones -- or the new ones are substantially faster. And, funny, the drivers that come with the hardware generally work too. But, again, I'm willing to pay a couple bucks more for stuff that works right out of the box. My time is worth far more than fiddling with crap for hours to make it work.
Wow, what amazingly bad math.
Ok, by the same measure then, Sony/Verant has had an income of roughly $130 (EQ + Kunark + Velious + Luclin, all bought new at release) * 400,000 = $52M.
Of course, that's wrong too. Far more than 400k people have bought the game, because Sony/Verant has about a 30% cancellation rate. And they didn't reap all of that money in one year, nor did people pay full price for everything.
More importantly, they see nearly none of that money at all -- maybe a third of it. The rest goes to the end store and the middle men. Ditto for Blizzard.
What Sony does see, however, is $9.89 (now $13ish) per month from every active account. Until they cancel. And when Planes of Power is released (end of the year? Hell if I care anymore) they'll sell another expansion to 80% of their customer base at $30 a pop. Sure, half the price and a third of the user base. So what. It's icing on the cake at this point -- the development is already paid for, the servers and maintainence are already paid for, every penny that comes in is pure profit at this point.
Would you rather pay $150-$200 for a game and not have monthly charges, or pay $40 for a game and $12.95 a month to play it?
Go ahead and do the former. You'll go out of business because too few people will be willing to pony up that much money upfront.
People (and companies) are funny like that -- they'll pay ongoing fees instead of a large upfront fee. Partially because ongoing fees are easier to budget for, partially because there's not such a sense of commitment with a smaller upfront fee.
On the flip side, there's no way in hell that I'd want you to pay a large upfront fee instead of monthly. Monthly gives me an ongoing revenue base, which is great since I probably have ongoing expenses (like staffing, rent, etc). The large upfront fee gives me spikes in revenue - which is hard for me to budget for and isn't viewed kindly by investors.
I played EQ for nearly 3 years, had 2 accounts for a year, and bought the expansions up to and including Luclin. So I guess I spent something in the neighborhood of $700 on the game alone in that time. So yeah, it would've been cheaper for an upfront version. But if I had to pay $200 to just start then I never would've played, and that's a huge stream of revenue gone. (And while I will never again play anything like EQ again, I can't really be too pissed -- without it I never would've met my wife, who also played).
On the flip side, I bought lifetime memberships for both my TiVo's, at $200 each. One has already paid for itself, the other will do so within a few months.
Sigh... so many people asking questions that are on his website or on the show website.
If you want to see his list of "essential gear" look here.
Good Eats is sponsored by Viking Range company... whether that's because Mr. Brown likes their products, or because they're the sponsor is a good question, but it may not be one he can answer without incurring the wrath of the sponsor.
Not all that funny if you're on the receiving end of the bill... a lot of hosting sites bill based off of bandwidth usage, with flat level caps and then money per bit afterwards.
/.-ing. Why bother? Call the company bankrupt (you DID incorporate, right?) and move on.
So imagine going from a $50/month hosting fee to $15k.
And it happens, and companies go out of business dealing with it -- if you make $30k/year from this side job and only half of that is profit, you just got your profit for an entire year eaten by a
I despise Comcast... they were the original cable provider in my area. The ones that hooked up my cable without a ground line. Lightning strike somewhere vaguely nearby destroyed a VCR and damaged my receiver -- the VCR was cheaper to replace than fix and the receiver cost me a couple hundred to fix. Another surge took out my TiVo.
Of course, they refused to pay my costs, claimed there was no fault (and quietly went and attached the ground wire), and eventually went bye-bye. I still have cable, but only because there are 60' trees blocking my SW view. Eventually I'll figure out which tree is the culprit and have it removed. Then I'll kick the cable company out once and for all.
Dunno... I'd have to ask my friends and coworkers who have had dental work recently to find out. My insurance is through a dental HMO though, so it must be cheap... otherwise it wouldn't be covered (I'm often thankful that novacaine is covered...)
The stuff my dentist uses is yellow-orange, rather thick, and put on a large cotton swab and put in your mouth. They go away for about 3 minutes, come back, and give a pain free injection.
Only a small percentage remember the days when there wasn't a single corporate interest on the web
I do.
It was pure, unfettered information.
With huge, gaping blanks because the entities that had the information weren't online -- whether those entities were corporations with their own information or Joe Blow user who wasn't online because there wasn't anything of interest to him there.
Yes, lets go back to pre-corporate Internet. After all, the Old Days Were Better.
What a load of extremist conservative claptrap.
Want to learn how to program? Pay gobs of money
Funny. I learned Perl almost entirely online. I learned much of C++ the same way. Want someone to hold your hand? Then yeah, you'll need to pay money for that person's time. Get off your ass and it's free. Sweat equity, just like it's always been.
It isn't surface novacaine. It's new -- as in, within the past year new. And it works for me at least. I've had 3 fillings, a root canal, and a crown in the past 3 months (sigh) and never felt the needle stick.
I never once had anything like that with my previous dentist, or any of the other dentists I've had.
Nitrous doesn't affect everyone. Others it affects very well.
I've had nitrous before - did nothing to me. The previous patient getting some dental work done, however, was apparantly trying to get the entire office to sing along with her.
Just how long ago was this? If recently, I suggest you change dentists.
They have a topical anesthetic now that it swabbed on to your gums prior to the novacaine shot. Takes a minute or two and then they can administer the shot to an area that's already numbed. Very nice. If your dentist isn't doing this yet, either tell them to or change dentists.
Not passing judgement on the Bush administration regarding Enron, but...
asked them for advice in setting policy.
And so... ? This is standard operating procedure. Making policy without consulting the businesses is both political suicide and foolish -- you think you know more about the industry than the industry itself? Not likely. You're a professional politician -- sure, you'll be briefed by industry experts, but that doesn't mean you don't go talk to the big fish too. Take a look at who any of the past 10 presidents consulted with and you'll see corporate execs all the time.
Gore pushed the last telecom tax through, allegedly to pay for Internet access to all public schools nationwide.
The other taxes have a much longer standing, but the OP wasn't totally off his rocker.
Basically most of it does go to taxes - generally somewhere between 33-50%. And, shockingly, telecomm companies aren't cheap to run. There's a hell of a lot of manpower in them, just for maintainence. If you've never been to a major CO then you may want to call your RBOC and ask to see the biggest CO they have near you. I've been to the one in downtown Atlanta (as a field trip for a networking class in college!) and it was an eye-opener. Most of the telecomm traffic for the SE runs through that little 4 story building.