These things are starting to stretch the definition of "laptop."
In another year or so we'll probably see models with four fold-down legs like a card table, because they'll be so big and heavy people will injure themselves if they try to just perch one on their lap.
Here's a sneak peak at the 2003 VAIO "portable" line: Item 1,Item 2
"Thanks for your money, gentlemen! Here's you go, one plate each. Yes, we know that the plates are the size of a saucer even though our commercials say they're the size of a manhole cover. Now please, overlook that and go help yourself to anything. Oh, except, the sundae bar you heard is in places like this is off-limits to you. And you can't have the fried chicken wings, and you can forget about those bacon bits that you see in the salad bar, those are off limits to you, too. And if you gentlemen want to discuss business over your meal, you have to pay us more money."
"Excuse me, sir, what do you mean, 'Then what did I come here and pay good money for?' You can always sit at your table, sip a glass of water, have a slice of bread, and look at all the nice ads that are on the placemats. We worked very hard to sell that ad space so you customers wouldn't have to look a plain, blank placemats!"
"Oh, and please don't stay too long. Even though we say we never close, we sort of frown on people who keep the tables tied up for too long."
Ahh, yes, the Pentium, named by some dillhole marketdroids who didn't even think that the logical successor to "Pentium" would be "Sexium," a name sure to set off the bible-thumper crowd. And too bad, too, think of the lost marketing opportunity: "The Sexium: It makes surfing for pr0n on the Internet more fun!" If I close my eyes, I can see the "Sex Inside!" case emblems that were almost printed up.
So now we've got Pentium II; Pentium: The Revenge; Pentium IV: The Pentium's Identical Cousin; Pentium XIV with Sprinkles... it's like how the Hitchhiker's Trilogy stretched to five books, only it was funny when Adams did it... with Intel, it's just stupid.
This must be a new definition of "unlimited" that I'm not familiar with. We're talking about cable ISPs here, whose terms of service forbid things like servers, VPNs, NAT... cripes, technically you're in violation of Comcast's AUP ("You may not use the Service for commercial purposes.") if you check your work e-mail via Outlook Web Access from your "residential" connection.
That's pretty damned limited service, in my book. Whee, all this bandwidth and I'm only allowed to send and receive e-mail and look at ad-filled web pages owned by my ISP! This is NOT what they depict in their commercials, BTW, and they need to be smacked down by the FTC for it, IMHO.
I ditched Comcast and their limited services as soon as it was practicable, and now have DSL from an ISP whose TOS is pretty much, "No illegal stuff, and no pr0n web sites, please." I advise everyone who is able to, to cast off the chains of their cable ISP and get one where you give them your money and they give you their bandwidthwithout smothering you in stupid limitations. Only by voting with your wallet can you make these greedy companies see the light... and even then, it's a long shot.
The site was, of course,/.'ed so I couldn't see, but if he has an Athlon in that rig and uses it to heat the coffee, his cups better have a warning printed on them!:-)
Hardware gets noticeably faster with each three-year generation, always a benefit.
If your users only use Office, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, like probably 90+% of the office drones in the world, a PII/400 spends most of its time waiting for the user to do something. We are at the point where, for the most common tasks, an office PC and the software that it ran on that was fine three years ago is still fast enough today.
The only benefit of faster hardware to the average office worker is a faster reboot after a BSOD. It's not like they'll work so much faster with a 2Ghz P4 that they'll be able to start taking Fridays off.
Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place?
Because Apple is in the business of selling Apple computers and accessories for Apple computers, and giving people compelling reasons to buy them, like ease of use and seamless integration.
Because the iPod is expensive, and 99% of Windows users only care about cost, not quality. Anyone who paid scarcely more than $399 for their whole damn computer will not open their wallet and dump out that much for an MP3 player, even if it is the best one out there. Not to mention that Windows users would probably have the added expense of buying a FireWire card to use the iPod, since almost no PCs come with true FireWire built-in (VAIOs with i.Link don't count, either, since they don't have the larger connector that allows for power to flow across the bus and charge the iPod). Even if Apple made the iPod for Windows, the number of Windows users who would buy it would be miniscule compared to the number of Windows users btiching about the high price. Add in the costs of supporting a Windows product, and you quickly find out that supporting the Windows market is 'not economically viable'.
For every one Windows user who bitches about the iPod not being Windows-friendly, there are hundreds of Mac users who, over the years, have wanted a Windows-only gadget or two and had their pleas for Mac support ignored by the maker. Welcome to our world.
The mid-to-late 90's Macs were hits and misses, case-wise.
The first two generations of Power Macs were not great. The pizza-box 6100 was fairly easily upgraded, though I still have a nice scar on my wrist from simply *carrying* one-- it slipped a little bit and the RF shielding sticking out from the bottom of the CD-ROM bezel sliced me clean and deep. The 7100 was kind of a pain because you had to take out the power supply to add RAM. The 8100, 8500 and 9500 were miserable, you literally had to take the whole damn thing apart to do anything to it.
Things got much better with the 3rd generation, the first with PCI slots. The 7200, 7300, 7500, 7600 were sweet in terms of internal access, the drives and power supply flipped up and to the side to allow access to the motherboard. Similarly, the 8600 and 9600 adopted a tilt-out chassis and were vast improvements over the 8500 and 9500 they replaced. In terms of upgradability, the 73/75/7600, 8600, and 9600 are the best used machines you can buy, IMHO. I have two of them with G3 upgrades, USB and IDE cards in 'em, and they make great servers.
Apple is gonna be really hard-pressed to top their current tower case, but I cannot wait to see their attempt at MWNY.
What's the difference between a salesman calling you on the phone to sell you something and spam?
If a salesman calls you on the phone, he or his company is paying for the call. Likewise, it doesn't cost you anything to open your door if someone knocks on it.
What about cell phones where the call recipent is paying for the call, you ask? Well, there is an FCC prohibition of phone solicitation using auto-dialers or prerecorded messages to be sent to mobile phone users.
When someone sends you spam, you're paying for the bandwidth used to receive it, period. Considering HTML-formatted spam often has a lot of image files that must be pulled down from a remote server, this can add up quickly-- my Hotmail account (which I do not use and have NEVER given the address of to ANYONE, though I do peek in it occasionally to see how much crap collects in it) gets buried in spam.
The recipient-pays-for-the-bandwidth issue will be a bigger deal in the future as more people move to broadband. The way things are going, the greedy cable companies and phone companies will eventually meter their broadband offerings, to squeeze more money out of their customers while at the same time encouraging them to use the service less. Then they can keep overselling their existing network capacity like they've been doing, without having to do much to increase it.
Interesting, but maybe not, because they present you with the TOS before you sign.
You can't make false claims in your commercials and then just revoke them in a disclaimer, EULA, or TOS, or whatever. The software industry, especially Microsoft, has gotten away with this for way too long and will eventually be smacked down. But companies that make tangible products that exist in the physical world can't really break this rule as easily. No amount of disclaimers would mean Coke commercials could claim drinking one can of their products will cure AIDS and whiten your teeth. Ford can't claim their cars get a million miles per gallon, and are capable of flying to the moon.
These cable companies are totally full of shit... their commercials bray far and wide, "Download music and movies and all sorts of cool stuff!" "Play internet games with a bunch of friends!"
Meanwhile, they keep crossing stuff off the list of things you're allowed to do with your connection. As far as some cable ISPs are concerned, you're violating their AUP if you so much as check your office e-mail with Outlook Web Access via a "residential" cable internet connection.
In one commerical that's recently gotten a fair amount of play where I live, Vanessa Williams is auditioning for a part in New York while sitting in L.A., via videoconferencing over her Comcast cable internet service. Isn't that considered "working at home"? Well I sure hope she's paying for Comcast's "business" class cable internet service! But... wait! The ad is clearly for "residential" service! What's going on?
As far as I'm concerned, the cable companies are advertising one service, but actually selling people an entirely different one. And that is why I dumped Comcast in January and got DSL through SpeakEasy. And now I've got static IPs, my own domain, and run my own mail and web servers, and everybody's happy. SpeakEasy knows how to do what Comcast refuses to do-- just take my money, give me a fat pipe in return, and fuck off otherwise unless I need something and call them.
The cable companies will eventually go too far and find themselves on the wrong end of a false-advertising lawsuit. If these companies that are banding together to complain to the FCC were smart, they'd also give a holler to the people in the FTC.
It strikes me as pretty funny that Microsoft (king of the PC monopoly) wants to force the cable companies to open up their networks
Nothing funny about it-- courtesy of a one billion dollar investment in 1997, Microsoft owns a chunk of Comcast, who is poised to become the largest cable company in the country.
If the stupid usage restrictions are lifted on broadband, more people will get it, and Microsoft will make money. If more people get broadband, those people will be more likely to buy shiny new Microsoft OS-laden hardware to take advantage of the fat pipe, and Microsoft will make still more money.
And if they pull off this.Net shit, the restriction-free fat pipe will be needed for people to use pay-per-use apps, and Microsoft will get paid again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.
All the AMEX payment coupon said at the time was, "Please do not send cash." That's a far cry from "Cash will not be accepted." It was more of a pleasant request. Well, I denied that request.
Furthermore, if they sent back my pennies, I would have then paid with a check written on a pair of underwear that were worn daily for one week, specifically for the purpose of getting them funky. And yes, it is possible to write a check on pretty much anything, before you dispute that, too.
It is generally not wise to *really* piss me off, and AMEX did it in spades... first by screwing up my account in a way that could have damaged my credit, then by providing very poor customer service, and then by threatening legal action over my website without the apparent thought, "Gee, how did we anger this person so much that he went to the trouble to make this whole website to complain about us? Maybe we should talk to him and try to rectify the situation." No, they just did the typical, uncaring-huge-company routine and pointed the lawyers at me. My understanding that "these things happen" was gone by about the second month of trying to get them to straighten everything out.
We need to put a few dozen CEOs and CFOs in jail to restore confidence in the economy. Top management needs to be so afraid of going to jail that they don't dare cook the books.
Yeah, and not some minimum-security country club, either. Send them to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison, write "child molester" or "rapist" on their foreheads with a Sharpie on their first day, and toss them right into general population.
Our justice system needs to start making examples of the right people. CEOs who sink companies, ruin careers, and destroy hundreds or thousands of employees' financial well-being in the process are the right people. Some kid who sold a shroom to an undercover cop at a Phish concert is not the right person.
I had some serious problems with American Express a couple years ago. In late 1999, I applied online for one of their then-new Blue cards, and my first bill included over $12K in balance transfers from accounts that weren't mine.
AMEX dutifully blew off about seven months of phone calls and letters (complete with photocopies of the entire paper trail) from me, trying to get this rectified. I have never in my life encountered more rude, hostile, and unhelpful CSRs. They were actively attempting to thwart me at every turn, and when they finally forced me to do my own legwork and look into the accounts the balances had come from, I found they had lied to me quite often as well.
For all that lethargy, though, AMEX was mighty quick to release the 'trademark infringement' hounds when a web site at amexblew.com was created to relate my experience to others (The story that was there will become a part of my personal site in the very near future, if it was online right now I'd link to it).
I was preparing to sue them in anticipation of my credit being screwed when I finally managed to get this resolved in July of 2000 in the most bizarre way possible... an AMEX employee read my posts on another anti-AMEX web site, contacted me, and took care of almost everything. AMEX still insisted I pay a little under $40 that I absolutely did not owe, so I did. In pennies. Mailed to their CEO, with my pulverized card and a nasty, nasty letter.
To this day, I still don't know how those balance transfers managed to find their way into my brand-new account at the moment of its creation. You would think that if it had been just a really stupid data-entry mistake on their part, they'd own up to it and apologize for it-- but AMEX representatives said they would only disclose what happened if they were subpoenaed, which leads me to believe there were some internal monkeyshines going on.
Do yourself a favor and cancel your AMEX cards now, if you like having good credit.
~Philly
Re:Coloured Just Like Canadian Money...
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 2
That was the first thing I thought when I heard this, remembering the weekend I spent in Toronto chuckling every time I opened my wallet to pay for something. I don't want money that looks like it came from a Monopoly set. And at that particular time, Canadian money was worth about as much as Monopoly money-- I think I turned US$300 into damn near CDN$500.
If people are unable to differentiate denominations, screw 'em-- learn how or be gypped out of your cash. Why must we continually dumb down everything about our society? I was raised to live in a world where intelligence was rewarded and ignorance was its own punishment. Now everyone bends over backwards to cater to the lazy and stupid, and I feel like I wasted the first two decades of my life growing my intellect. I could've just been watching NASCAR and pro wrestling on TV, eating pork rinds and drinking beer all that time like everyone else, and just had the government fix everything for me when it became evident I was too dumb to function in society,
The way things are going, I guess they'll take care of the problem of illiteracy by just outlawing books and writing.
I built my first PC about a year and a half ago, and upgraded it often enough that with the purchase of a cheap case and mobo, I could build a second PC from the spare parts.
...further efforts by the same school to trick children into getting their education include a recent announcement that the films they show in their Sex Education classes will be produced exclusively by Vivid Video. Additionally, Asia Carrera has been hired by the school to teach a few computer classes.
Check the Waterworld goofs page on the IMDB (no link, I'm in a lazy mood, sorry)... there is nowhere near enough polar ice to cover the entire Earth in water to the depth portrayed, even it every last bit of it melted. And if even the existing polar ice were to melt, the salt water in the oceans would be so diluted you could drink it with no problem.
Incidentally, the city they used as the underwater ruins is recognizable as Denver, so they sort of imply that the Earth is covered significantly higher than one mile above present-day sea level.
Uninspiring and anal retentive, derisive arrogance without just cause.
I found the site to be entertaining in its derision. And I feel his pain, as a fairly intelligent geek whose intelligence is regularly insulted by the mass media which is dumbed-down for the great unwashed masses.
As Homer lamented before he had Moe hammer the crayon back into his brain to make him a dope again, "I'm a Spalding Gray in a Rick Dees world!"
Sadly, movies are not made for the intelligent minority, they are made for the people who need a "Caution! HOT!" warning on their coffee cups. The Matrix was probably the closest we'll ever get to a thinking man's movie, and I heard somewhere that even that was dumbed down a tad (IIRC, the enslaved humans were originally supposed to be part of a tremendously huge RAID via their unused brain capacity, instead of as an energy source).
I just remember watching that scene and saying "huh. No idea why they dropped that scene, it really helped bridge that hole a bit."
You should try watching the broadcast-TV cut of 'Waterworld' sometime... there were so many added-in, hole-patching scenes that weren't in the theatrical release, I could hardly believe it. They made it a vastly better movie.
One additional nice touch is a scene or two when Dennis Hopper and his brethren react to pictures of grass and trees almost as if they were looking at high-quality pornography.
Oh, and just to keep this post a little on topic, Waterworld had some rip-roaring physics goofs (a primitive bathysphere that travels down to the ocean floor and doesn't implode, anyone?) of its own.
On the Mac? You have to... connect to a network (extra hardware/etc $$$)
Yeah, the short length of Cat-5 cable needed to connect two machines together really breaks the bank these days. And with the Mac, you only need one cable, because Macs can adapt their network connection so you don't need a crossover cable to directly connect two of them together without a hub.
Then again, a FireWire cable is a tad more expensive, but you get four times the speed, and plug-and-play ease of use. And it only takes a moment to reboot one of the machines into target disk mode.
Slashdot Mirror
These things are starting to stretch the definition of "laptop."
In another year or so we'll probably see models with four fold-down legs like a card table, because they'll be so big and heavy people will injure themselves if they try to just perch one on their lap.
Here's a sneak peak at the 2003 VAIO "portable" line: Item 1, Item 2
~Philly
Tea (get one of those sets with all sorts of flavors)
Krabappel: "What kind of little boy has a tea set?"
Skinner: "I think we both know the answer to that. A LUCKY boy!"
If cable ISPs were all-you-can-eat restaurants:
"Thanks for your money, gentlemen! Here's you go, one plate each. Yes, we know that the plates are the size of a saucer even though our commercials say they're the size of a manhole cover. Now please, overlook that and go help yourself to anything. Oh, except, the sundae bar you heard is in places like this is off-limits to you. And you can't have the fried chicken wings, and you can forget about those bacon bits that you see in the salad bar, those are off limits to you, too. And if you gentlemen want to discuss business over your meal, you have to pay us more money."
"Excuse me, sir, what do you mean, 'Then what did I come here and pay good money for?' You can always sit at your table, sip a glass of water, have a slice of bread, and look at all the nice ads that are on the placemats. We worked very hard to sell that ad space so you customers wouldn't have to look a plain, blank placemats!"
"Oh, and please don't stay too long. Even though we say we never close, we sort of frown on people who keep the tables tied up for too long."
~Philly
Ahh, yes, the Pentium, named by some dillhole marketdroids who didn't even think that the logical successor to "Pentium" would be "Sexium," a name sure to set off the bible-thumper crowd. And too bad, too, think of the lost marketing opportunity: "The Sexium: It makes surfing for pr0n on the Internet more fun!" If I close my eyes, I can see the "Sex Inside!" case emblems that were almost printed up.
So now we've got Pentium II; Pentium: The Revenge; Pentium IV: The Pentium's Identical Cousin; Pentium XIV with Sprinkles... it's like how the Hitchhiker's Trilogy stretched to five books, only it was funny when Adams did it... with Intel, it's just stupid.
~Philly
the 'unlimited' service you currently get
This must be a new definition of "unlimited" that I'm not familiar with. We're talking about cable ISPs here, whose terms of service forbid things like servers, VPNs, NAT... cripes, technically you're in violation of Comcast's AUP ("You may not use the Service for commercial purposes.") if you check your work e-mail via Outlook Web Access from your "residential" connection.
That's pretty damned limited service, in my book. Whee, all this bandwidth and I'm only allowed to send and receive e-mail and look at ad-filled web pages owned by my ISP! This is NOT what they depict in their commercials, BTW, and they need to be smacked down by the FTC for it, IMHO.
I ditched Comcast and their limited services as soon as it was practicable, and now have DSL from an ISP whose TOS is pretty much, "No illegal stuff, and no pr0n web sites, please." I advise everyone who is able to, to cast off the chains of their cable ISP and get one where you give them your money and they give you their bandwidthwithout smothering you in stupid limitations. Only by voting with your wallet can you make these greedy companies see the light... and even then, it's a long shot.
~Philly
Yeah, there are never any problems with AmEx.
~Philly
The site was, of course, /.'ed so I couldn't see, but if he has an Athlon in that rig and uses it to heat the coffee, his cups better have a warning printed on them! :-)
~Philly
Hardware gets noticeably faster with each three-year generation, always a benefit.
If your users only use Office, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, like probably 90+% of the office drones in the world, a PII/400 spends most of its time waiting for the user to do something. We are at the point where, for the most common tasks, an office PC and the software that it ran on that was fine three years ago is still fast enough today.
The only benefit of faster hardware to the average office worker is a faster reboot after a BSOD. It's not like they'll work so much faster with a 2Ghz P4 that they'll be able to start taking Fridays off.
~Philly
I don't know which is fastest, but here's an interesting tidbit which stuck with me from the 'Self Love' episode of VH-1's 'Pop-Up Video':
The longest word you can type with one hand [using the proper fingers on the keys of a QWERTY layout] is "stewardesses"
I don't know where they came up with that, but it was good for a chuckle.
~Philly
Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place?
Because Apple is in the business of selling Apple computers and accessories for Apple computers, and giving people compelling reasons to buy them, like ease of use and seamless integration.
Because the iPod is expensive, and 99% of Windows users only care about cost, not quality. Anyone who paid scarcely more than $399 for their whole damn computer will not open their wallet and dump out that much for an MP3 player, even if it is the best one out there. Not to mention that Windows users would probably have the added expense of buying a FireWire card to use the iPod, since almost no PCs come with true FireWire built-in (VAIOs with i.Link don't count, either, since they don't have the larger connector that allows for power to flow across the bus and charge the iPod). Even if Apple made the iPod for Windows, the number of Windows users who would buy it would be miniscule compared to the number of Windows users btiching about the high price. Add in the costs of supporting a Windows product, and you quickly find out that supporting the Windows market is 'not economically viable'.
For every one Windows user who bitches about the iPod not being Windows-friendly, there are hundreds of Mac users who, over the years, have wanted a Windows-only gadget or two and had their pleas for Mac support ignored by the maker. Welcome to our world.
~Philly
The mid-to-late 90's Macs were hits and misses, case-wise.
The first two generations of Power Macs were not great. The pizza-box 6100 was fairly easily upgraded, though I still have a nice scar on my wrist from simply *carrying* one-- it slipped a little bit and the RF shielding sticking out from the bottom of the CD-ROM bezel sliced me clean and deep. The 7100 was kind of a pain because you had to take out the power supply to add RAM. The 8100, 8500 and 9500 were miserable, you literally had to take the whole damn thing apart to do anything to it.
Things got much better with the 3rd generation, the first with PCI slots. The 7200, 7300, 7500, 7600 were sweet in terms of internal access, the drives and power supply flipped up and to the side to allow access to the motherboard. Similarly, the 8600 and 9600 adopted a tilt-out chassis and were vast improvements over the 8500 and 9500 they replaced. In terms of upgradability, the 73/75/7600, 8600, and 9600 are the best used machines you can buy, IMHO. I have two of them with G3 upgrades, USB and IDE cards in 'em, and they make great servers.
Apple is gonna be really hard-pressed to top their current tower case, but I cannot wait to see their attempt at MWNY.
~Philly
What's the difference between a salesman calling you on the phone to sell you something and spam?
If a salesman calls you on the phone, he or his company is paying for the call. Likewise, it doesn't cost you anything to open your door if someone knocks on it.
What about cell phones where the call recipent is paying for the call, you ask? Well, there is an FCC prohibition of phone solicitation using auto-dialers or prerecorded messages to be sent to mobile phone users.
When someone sends you spam, you're paying for the bandwidth used to receive it, period. Considering HTML-formatted spam often has a lot of image files that must be pulled down from a remote server, this can add up quickly-- my Hotmail account (which I do not use and have NEVER given the address of to ANYONE, though I do peek in it occasionally to see how much crap collects in it) gets buried in spam.
The recipient-pays-for-the-bandwidth issue will be a bigger deal in the future as more people move to broadband. The way things are going, the greedy cable companies and phone companies will eventually meter their broadband offerings, to squeeze more money out of their customers while at the same time encouraging them to use the service less. Then they can keep overselling their existing network capacity like they've been doing, without having to do much to increase it.
~Philly
Interesting, but maybe not, because they present you with the TOS before you sign.
You can't make false claims in your commercials and then just revoke them in a disclaimer, EULA, or TOS, or whatever. The software industry, especially Microsoft, has gotten away with this for way too long and will eventually be smacked down. But companies that make tangible products that exist in the physical world can't really break this rule as easily. No amount of disclaimers would mean Coke commercials could claim drinking one can of their products will cure AIDS and whiten your teeth. Ford can't claim their cars get a million miles per gallon, and are capable of flying to the moon.
These cable companies are totally full of shit... their commercials bray far and wide, "Download music and movies and all sorts of cool stuff!" "Play internet games with a bunch of friends!"
Meanwhile, they keep crossing stuff off the list of things you're allowed to do with your connection. As far as some cable ISPs are concerned, you're violating their AUP if you so much as check your office e-mail with Outlook Web Access via a "residential" cable internet connection.
In one commerical that's recently gotten a fair amount of play where I live, Vanessa Williams is auditioning for a part in New York while sitting in L.A., via videoconferencing over her Comcast cable internet service. Isn't that considered "working at home"? Well I sure hope she's paying for Comcast's "business" class cable internet service! But... wait! The ad is clearly for "residential" service! What's going on?
As far as I'm concerned, the cable companies are advertising one service, but actually selling people an entirely different one. And that is why I dumped Comcast in January and got DSL through SpeakEasy. And now I've got static IPs, my own domain, and run my own mail and web servers, and everybody's happy. SpeakEasy knows how to do what Comcast refuses to do-- just take my money, give me a fat pipe in return, and fuck off otherwise unless I need something and call them.
The cable companies will eventually go too far and find themselves on the wrong end of a false-advertising lawsuit. If these companies that are banding together to complain to the FCC were smart, they'd also give a holler to the people in the FTC.
~Philly
It strikes me as pretty funny that Microsoft (king of the PC monopoly) wants to force the cable companies to open up their networks
.Net shit, the restriction-free fat pipe will be needed for people to use pay-per-use apps, and Microsoft will get paid again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.
Nothing funny about it-- courtesy of a one billion dollar investment in 1997, Microsoft owns a chunk of Comcast, who is poised to become the largest cable company in the country.
If the stupid usage restrictions are lifted on broadband, more people will get it, and Microsoft will make money. If more people get broadband, those people will be more likely to buy shiny new Microsoft OS-laden hardware to take advantage of the fat pipe, and Microsoft will make still more money.
And if they pull off this
~Philly
I got shitty treatment from the word go. It was only after I became King of the Assholes that I got any results.
All the AMEX payment coupon said at the time was, "Please do not send cash." That's a far cry from "Cash will not be accepted." It was more of a pleasant request. Well, I denied that request.
Furthermore, if they sent back my pennies, I would have then paid with a check written on a pair of underwear that were worn daily for one week, specifically for the purpose of getting them funky. And yes, it is possible to write a check on pretty much anything, before you dispute that, too.
It is generally not wise to *really* piss me off, and AMEX did it in spades... first by screwing up my account in a way that could have damaged my credit, then by providing very poor customer service, and then by threatening legal action over my website without the apparent thought, "Gee, how did we anger this person so much that he went to the trouble to make this whole website to complain about us? Maybe we should talk to him and try to rectify the situation." No, they just did the typical, uncaring-huge-company routine and pointed the lawyers at me. My understanding that "these things happen" was gone by about the second month of trying to get them to straighten everything out.
~Philly
We need to put a few dozen CEOs and CFOs in jail to restore confidence in the economy. Top management needs to be so afraid of going to jail that they don't dare cook the books.
Yeah, and not some minimum-security country club, either. Send them to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison, write "child molester" or "rapist" on their foreheads with a Sharpie on their first day, and toss them right into general population.
Our justice system needs to start making examples of the right people. CEOs who sink companies, ruin careers, and destroy hundreds or thousands of employees' financial well-being in the process are the right people. Some kid who sold a shroom to an undercover cop at a Phish concert is not the right person.
~Philly
I had some serious problems with American Express a couple years ago. In late 1999, I applied online for one of their then-new Blue cards, and my first bill included over $12K in balance transfers from accounts that weren't mine.
AMEX dutifully blew off about seven months of phone calls and letters (complete with photocopies of the entire paper trail) from me, trying to get this rectified. I have never in my life encountered more rude, hostile, and unhelpful CSRs. They were actively attempting to thwart me at every turn, and when they finally forced me to do my own legwork and look into the accounts the balances had come from, I found they had lied to me quite often as well.
For all that lethargy, though, AMEX was mighty quick to release the 'trademark infringement' hounds when a web site at amexblew.com was created to relate my experience to others (The story that was there will become a part of my personal site in the very near future, if it was online right now I'd link to it).
I was preparing to sue them in anticipation of my credit being screwed when I finally managed to get this resolved in July of 2000 in the most bizarre way possible... an AMEX employee read my posts on another anti-AMEX web site, contacted me, and took care of almost everything. AMEX still insisted I pay a little under $40 that I absolutely did not owe, so I did. In pennies. Mailed to their CEO, with my pulverized card and a nasty, nasty letter.
To this day, I still don't know how those balance transfers managed to find their way into my brand-new account at the moment of its creation. You would think that if it had been just a really stupid data-entry mistake on their part, they'd own up to it and apologize for it-- but AMEX representatives said they would only disclose what happened if they were subpoenaed, which leads me to believe there were some internal monkeyshines going on.
Do yourself a favor and cancel your AMEX cards now, if you like having good credit.
~Philly
That was the first thing I thought when I heard this, remembering the weekend I spent in Toronto chuckling every time I opened my wallet to pay for something. I don't want money that looks like it came from a Monopoly set. And at that particular time, Canadian money was worth about as much as Monopoly money-- I think I turned US$300 into damn near CDN$500.
If people are unable to differentiate denominations, screw 'em-- learn how or be gypped out of your cash. Why must we continually dumb down everything about our society? I was raised to live in a world where intelligence was rewarded and ignorance was its own punishment. Now everyone bends over backwards to cater to the lazy and stupid, and I feel like I wasted the first two decades of my life growing my intellect. I could've just been watching NASCAR and pro wrestling on TV, eating pork rinds and drinking beer all that time like everyone else, and just had the government fix everything for me when it became evident I was too dumb to function in society,
The way things are going, I guess they'll take care of the problem of illiteracy by just outlawing books and writing.
~Philly
But I rely on Directron, NewEgg, and CyberGuys for all of my PC parts needs.
I built my first PC about a year and a half ago, and upgraded it often enough that with the purchase of a cheap case and mobo, I could build a second PC from the spare parts.
~Philly
...further efforts by the same school to trick children into getting their education include a recent announcement that the films they show in their Sex Education classes will be produced exclusively by Vivid Video. Additionally, Asia Carrera has been hired by the school to teach a few computer classes.
~Philly
Check the Waterworld goofs page on the IMDB (no link, I'm in a lazy mood, sorry)... there is nowhere near enough polar ice to cover the entire Earth in water to the depth portrayed, even it every last bit of it melted. And if even the existing polar ice were to melt, the salt water in the oceans would be so diluted you could drink it with no problem.
Incidentally, the city they used as the underwater ruins is recognizable as Denver, so they sort of imply that the Earth is covered significantly higher than one mile above present-day sea level.
~Philly
Uninspiring and anal retentive, derisive arrogance without just cause.
I found the site to be entertaining in its derision. And I feel his pain, as a fairly intelligent geek whose intelligence is regularly insulted by the mass media which is dumbed-down for the great unwashed masses.
As Homer lamented before he had Moe hammer the crayon back into his brain to make him a dope again, "I'm a Spalding Gray in a Rick Dees world!"
Sadly, movies are not made for the intelligent minority, they are made for the people who need a "Caution! HOT!" warning on their coffee cups. The Matrix was probably the closest we'll ever get to a thinking man's movie, and I heard somewhere that even that was dumbed down a tad (IIRC, the enslaved humans were originally supposed to be part of a tremendously huge RAID via their unused brain capacity, instead of as an energy source).
~Philly
I just remember watching that scene and saying "huh. No idea why they dropped that scene, it really helped bridge that hole a bit."
You should try watching the broadcast-TV cut of 'Waterworld' sometime... there were so many added-in, hole-patching scenes that weren't in the theatrical release, I could hardly believe it. They made it a vastly better movie.
One additional nice touch is a scene or two when Dennis Hopper and his brethren react to pictures of grass and trees almost as if they were looking at high-quality pornography.
Oh, and just to keep this post a little on topic, Waterworld had some rip-roaring physics goofs (a primitive bathysphere that travels down to the ocean floor and doesn't implode, anyone?) of its own.
~Philly
On the Mac? You have to ... connect to a network (extra hardware/etc $$$)
Yeah, the short length of Cat-5 cable needed to connect two machines together really breaks the bank these days. And with the Mac, you only need one cable, because Macs can adapt their network connection so you don't need a crossover cable to directly connect two of them together without a hub.
Then again, a FireWire cable is a tad more expensive, but you get four times the speed, and plug-and-play ease of use. And it only takes a moment to reboot one of the machines into target disk mode.
~Philly