...when the same exact thing happened to Apple with the Powerbook 5300 (though very few if any computers had actually gotten into the hands of consumers in that instance), and the media and Apple/Mac-bashers were exaggerating the severity of it?
Personally, I think Dell and its big-mouthed, "I think Apple should close down and return the shareholders' money" CEO are long overdue for a taste of overblown, bad publicity. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Ah, yes, Dell, so very proud of wresting the education sales crown from Apple, I just can't wait until the first schoolkid gets burned by one of their laptops and the hordes of lawyers descend.
Also gotta love that they are continuing their stringent QC from a year or two ago when they shipped CD-ROM modules for their Latitudes that did not fit any Dell laptop that was in production at the time. That was a real fun time for me where I worked. What I don't understand is, when Dell is just a me-too cloner bolting parts together and not innovating a thing, how can they not even be able to do that right and still stay in business?
Oooh, NetMind? They suck! Many moons ago, I signed up for their service that automatically notifies people on a mailing list of changes to a web site I run. Sometimes it would take two days for changes to be noticed and notifications to be sent out. Sometimes the notifications never went through at all. I ended up making a mailing list of my own and sending out update notifications manually.
The site in question is www.tiffanymodel.com. The change notification mailing list is gone now, because my original host went out of business and sold my account to another, sucky, host. But that's an unrelated rant.
"Why the fuck are kids such god damn pussies today that they can't take a little pushing around?"
It's because society now coddles its children far too much, and Darwinism is no longer in effect. Far fewer kids, if any, die from falling off monkeybars or other playground implements nowadays because they have eight inches of rubber padding on the ground under them. We can't buy lawn darts anymore. Kids aren't allowed to ride a bike or skateboard without a helmet. The warnings about itty bitty pieces of peanut in a granola bar are larger than the surgeon general's warning on a pack of smokes, because these wussies are allergic. You have to go 15mph in a school zone, lest some stupid kid run out in front of your car and get killed.
These children that were previously destined to die very young are now allowed to age to the point where they can get the bright idea of taking their daddy's Glock to school to settle the score with that bully that's been picking on them.
And then, after Junior busts a couple caps in study hall and the bodies are carted out, oh, it's time to bring in three busloads of grief counselors for the sniveling brats. People die, shitheads! It happens every day! Get over it! I found both of my parents dead, did I need a grief counselor either time? No! These little bitch-asses are growing up soft, and I hope I die before they are old enough to be running this country.
At least, they will if they bought a Zip drive between January 1, 1995 and March 19, 2001. I found the class action proposed settlement notice in my snail mail today. I honestly don't recall registering my Zip drive when I bought it in 1995 (I never register my hardware), so perhaps the vendors were asked to pull sales records so the affected could be notified?
Here's what you get if you can prove your drive is hosed (i.e. fill out and sign "under oath" the form that was sent with the notice):
$17.50 towards a Zip 250 Drive
$12.50 towards a Zip 100 Drive
$40.00 towards a Zip 250 and 6 pack of disks
$27.50 towards a Zip 100 and 6 pack of disks
$17.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 250 disks
$12.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 100 disks
$12.50 towards a Pocket Zip drive
$35.00 towards a Pocket Zip and 10 pack of disks
$22.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 4 pack of disks
If you don't fill out the 'proof' section of the form, you get one of these:
...is quite possible one of the most annoying people ever to plague comp.sys.mac.advocacy. Considering how frequently he makes Mac- and Apple-bashing posts in there, I'm surprised he has anything like this at all on his personal site.
How about more cameras *and* more guns? That way, when you smoke some junkie who was about to do you and yours harm for your pocket change, it'll be on tape and there won't be a shred of doubt that it was necessary, so no more civil suits when the scumbag's family tries to crawl out of the woodwork and sue you.
AND you'll still be alive to collect when FOX airs it on "When Filthy Fucking Criminals Get What They Deserve."
I use @Home in PA, and I have a static IP. My friend uses @Home in NJ, and he has a dynamic IP. I can still VNC into his machine without asking him the IP-address-of-the-day (or however long their leases last), because @Home (at least in PA and NJ) assigns a name to the client machines.
That name, coupled with the domain (ie "[hostname].[localnode].[state].home.com", allows me to find a machine whether its address is static or dynamic. In Windows you can find this info with "ipconfig/all" at a command prompt.
Bashing the Newton was quite the fad when the first model came out, back in '93. Apple finally got it right with the Newton 2000 back in '96-- it was blazing fast and the recognition was good, and it could replace a laptop if all you needed on the road was a little word processing capability and e-mail in addition to the normal PDA tasks. But the damage had been done by the original MessagePad, and the first Palms were beginning to take over.
I now use a Palm V, but I still have my MP2k, and in a few ways it still kicks the Palm's ass. If the Newton hadn't been killed by Jobs, it would probably be doing speech recognition by now. The text-to-speech was already working well 3 or 4 years ago. I think the main reason it's taken the WinCE so long to really catch on is because Microsoft didn't have a truly successful Apple PDA to copy.
This is why I feel absolutely zero guilt for using Napster. Napster is actually helping the RIAA by stirring up demand, and those bastards actually have the nerve to lie about their profits because the truth would cause them to lose face in their litigation.
Sitting in racks in my bedroom are about 400 CDs, most of which were purchased because I liked one or two songs on the disc. (CD singles always seemed a complete waste of space and money to me). More often than not, the remaining songs on those CDs sucked rocks.
Thanks to Napster, I haven't bought a new CD in well over a year, and I am slowly amassing the collection of good music for which I have already paid, but did not receive on those 400 CDs. Oh, and a few songs that I have been trying to find on CD for literally YEARS, but have been unable to. The RIAA can kiss my ass.
Cloning humans will bring humanity together like never before, because then 'genuine' humans will be able (and, I'm sure, more than happy) to treat clones as their inferiors.
I'm sure a lot of people will no longer have a problem with the black family across the street, when that soulless bastard that just moved in next door was grown in a test tube in some friggin' lab!
Of course, a lot of those same guys will see nothing wrong with owning their own copy of Jenna Jameson, but that's good old-fashioned American hypocrisy for you.:-)
Nope the first Bill & Ted flick came out in 1988 or '89, but definitely not in 1990. IMDB lists it as 1989. And both of them were entertaining, though Bill Sadler stole the second one in his role as the Reaper.
Saving Silverman, which I saw this afternoon, I also found very enjoyable. I went in expecting a juvenile flick with lots of lowbrow humor, and I was not disappointed. I laughed, I rolled my eyes, I walked out feeling like I got my money's worth.
~Philly
What are the regional posters?
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
I read that nine different posters advertising Thirteen Days were made for different regions of the USA, and I'm interested to hear what all of them are. They are all variations of the same iconoclastic concept: A local/regional landmark, with missiles in the air and a particularly photogenic mushroom cloud from an old H-bomb test in the background. The poster sure does its job well with me. They are all over bus shelters in my area, and while stopped at certain traffic lights on my way to work, I can't help but sit there and stare at them and shudder a little.
Anyway, here in the Philadelphia, PA area, the landmark depicted is Independence Hall. I know that the landmark in the New England regional posters is a lighthouse. What are the other seven?
Resurrection Day (slightly O/T)
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
Anybody who's a missile crisis buff might want to pick up Resurrection Day. It's an excellent alternate history novel that takes place in 1972 in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into war. A little slow at points, but an overall good and thought-provoking read that gave me some new insights into the goings on during the Crisis in this world. The next time I caught a Discovery Channel special on the subject, those fresh insights sent quite a chill down my spine.
I wasn't born until 1973, but I've read almost everything I could get my hands on about those days and spoken at length to relatives who remember all too well the sheer terror of October 1962.
I'm looking forward to seeing Thirteen Days for a fresh, albeit dramatic-license riddled (from what I've read) perspective.
I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Ethernet is Ethernet is Ethernet. They shouldn't be doing anything to proprietarize it.
If they've really got it together, it will have out-of-box support for PPPoE for all those DSL users. Of course, if you're using a soft router, you don't have to worry about PPPoE support... all you'll have to do is set it to DHCP, or manually assign it a static address appropriate for your home LAN.
AMEX isn't so great, either. I spent the better part of a year trying to get them to remove over US$12,000 in bogus balance transfers to my "Blue" account.
These transfers were not authorized by me, were from accounts that didn't belong to me, and went through before I had received the card in the mail, or indeed even knew the account number.
AMEX, when I finally rattled enough cages to get them to look into the matter, removed the charges as 'Fraud'. They refused to explain to me how this fraud occurred, without being subpoenaed. But you figure it out. It was either an inside job, or there was some hacking involved somewhere.
They pissed me off so badly, I did up an entire website about their piss-poor customer service, and I got threatened by their lawyers over the domain name. The site has been down since the problem was finally fixed, but I just threw it back up into my webspace for anyone who's interested in reading it (there are a few things that need to be changed before I make it a permanent part of my forthcoming personal site).
It sure must be nice to have a jillion bucks to throw around to hire other people to wire up your home, but IMHO it's much more satisfying to roll up your sleeves and do the tinkering yourself.
My house mutes the stereo and announces who's calling when the phone rings, tells me who sent the e-mail that just arrived, tells me when my friends pop online if I'm not signed on, controls every commonly-used light I have, controls the A/V setup in my bedroom, and does lots of other things. And I set it all up myself, and had a blast doing it.
"Why, when I was young, we had to automate our own homes! And by gum, we liked it!"
People who are too damned lazy to hit 3 more buttons should be shot. It took a little getting used to when they switched to it in my area (Philadelphia) back in January, but it did not take long at all before it became second nature. I hate whiners!
They don't offer questionnaires with dangling-carrot prizes because Net-savvy people see right through that as a data-gathering trick, and may fill populate such forms with BS as a goof.
It's much easier for the companies to just log your activities on the QT.
Why should @Home put in server-level spam blocks? Their fscking mailservers are down so much (at least the one(s) that handle my mail here in the Philadelphia area are), that I barely get ANY mail!
Reminds me of an actual funny line on SNL a few years back, during Weekend Update with Norm McD.
The news item was about an equally blindingly-obvious assertion that had been borne out by exhaustive research. "...if you're interested in the complete article, it's in this month's issue of the medical journal, 'Duh!'."
Slashdot Mirror
...is someone to invent the flux capacitor, and then we can go back and prevent Gates from being born!
~Philly
...when the same exact thing happened to Apple with the Powerbook 5300 (though very few if any computers had actually gotten into the hands of consumers in that instance), and the media and Apple/Mac-bashers were exaggerating the severity of it?
Personally, I think Dell and its big-mouthed, "I think Apple should close down and return the shareholders' money" CEO are long overdue for a taste of overblown, bad publicity. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Ah, yes, Dell, so very proud of wresting the education sales crown from Apple, I just can't wait until the first schoolkid gets burned by one of their laptops and the hordes of lawyers descend.
Also gotta love that they are continuing their stringent QC from a year or two ago when they shipped CD-ROM modules for their Latitudes that did not fit any Dell laptop that was in production at the time. That was a real fun time for me where I worked. What I don't understand is, when Dell is just a me-too cloner bolting parts together and not innovating a thing, how can they not even be able to do that right and still stay in business?
~Philly
Oooh, NetMind? They suck! Many moons ago, I signed up for their service that automatically notifies people on a mailing list of changes to a web site I run. Sometimes it would take two days for changes to be noticed and notifications to be sent out. Sometimes the notifications never went through at all. I ended up making a mailing list of my own and sending out update notifications manually.
The site in question is www.tiffanymodel.com. The change notification mailing list is gone now, because my original host went out of business and sold my account to another, sucky, host. But that's an unrelated rant.
~Philly
"Why the fuck are kids such god damn pussies today that they can't take a little pushing around?"
It's because society now coddles its children far too much, and Darwinism is no longer in effect. Far fewer kids, if any, die from falling off monkeybars or other playground implements nowadays because they have eight inches of rubber padding on the ground under them. We can't buy lawn darts anymore. Kids aren't allowed to ride a bike or skateboard without a helmet. The warnings about itty bitty pieces of peanut in a granola bar are larger than the surgeon general's warning on a pack of smokes, because these wussies are allergic. You have to go 15mph in a school zone, lest some stupid kid run out in front of your car and get killed.
These children that were previously destined to die very young are now allowed to age to the point where they can get the bright idea of taking their daddy's Glock to school to settle the score with that bully that's been picking on them.
And then, after Junior busts a couple caps in study hall and the bodies are carted out, oh, it's time to bring in three busloads of grief counselors for the sniveling brats. People die, shitheads! It happens every day! Get over it! I found both of my parents dead, did I need a grief counselor either time? No! These little bitch-asses are growing up soft, and I hope I die before they are old enough to be running this country.
~Philly
Here's what you get if you can prove your drive is hosed (i.e. fill out and sign "under oath" the form that was sent with the notice):
$17.50 towards a Zip 250 Drive
$12.50 towards a Zip 100 Drive
$40.00 towards a Zip 250 and 6 pack of disks
$27.50 towards a Zip 100 and 6 pack of disks
$17.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 250 disks
$12.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 100 disks
$12.50 towards a Pocket Zip drive
$35.00 towards a Pocket Zip and 10 pack of disks
$22.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 4 pack of disks
If you don't fill out the 'proof' section of the form, you get one of these:
$10.00 towards a Zip 250 Drive
$5.00 towards a Zip 100 Drive
$25.00 towards a Zip 250 and 6 pack of disks
$12.50 towards a Zip 100 and 6 pack of disks
$10.00 towards a 6 pack of Zip 250 disks
$5.00 towards a 6 pack of Zip 100 disks
$5.00 towards a Pocket Zip drive
$17.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 10 pack of disks
$10.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 4 pack of disks
~Philly
...is quite possible one of the most annoying people ever to plague comp.sys.mac.advocacy. Considering how frequently he makes Mac- and Apple-bashing posts in there, I'm surprised he has anything like this at all on his personal site.
~Philly
How about more cameras *and* more guns? That way, when you smoke some junkie who was about to do you and yours harm for your pocket change, it'll be on tape and there won't be a shred of doubt that it was necessary, so no more civil suits when the scumbag's family tries to crawl out of the woodwork and sue you.
AND you'll still be alive to collect when FOX airs it on "When Filthy Fucking Criminals Get What They Deserve."
~Philly
I use @Home in PA, and I have a static IP. My friend uses @Home in NJ, and he has a dynamic IP. I can still VNC into his machine without asking him the IP-address-of-the-day (or however long their leases last), because @Home (at least in PA and NJ) assigns a name to the client machines.
/all" at a command prompt.
That name, coupled with the domain (ie "[hostname].[localnode].[state].home.com", allows me to find a machine whether its address is static or dynamic. In Windows you can find this info with "ipconfig
~Philly
Too late... How about this toaster, that burns the day's weather forecast onto your morning toast?
~Philly
Check out the iRack, by Marathon Computer. It allows you to rack mount an iMac in 1U of space, sans monitor of course.
Only problem is, it costs $400 and does not include the guts of the iMac-- you provide those.
~Philly
Rumor has it Woody Harrelson is bankrolling a company that licensed the technology from Altshul to do just that. ;-)
Bashing the Newton was quite the fad when the first model came out, back in '93. Apple finally got it right with the Newton 2000 back in '96-- it was blazing fast and the recognition was good, and it could replace a laptop if all you needed on the road was a little word processing capability and e-mail in addition to the normal PDA tasks. But the damage had been done by the original MessagePad, and the first Palms were beginning to take over.
I now use a Palm V, but I still have my MP2k, and in a few ways it still kicks the Palm's ass. If the Newton hadn't been killed by Jobs, it would probably be doing speech recognition by now. The text-to-speech was already working well 3 or 4 years ago. I think the main reason it's taken the WinCE so long to really catch on is because Microsoft didn't have a truly successful Apple PDA to copy.
~Philly
This is why I feel absolutely zero guilt for using Napster. Napster is actually helping the RIAA by stirring up demand, and those bastards actually have the nerve to lie about their profits because the truth would cause them to lose face in their litigation.
Sitting in racks in my bedroom are about 400 CDs, most of which were purchased because I liked one or two songs on the disc. (CD singles always seemed a complete waste of space and money to me). More often than not, the remaining songs on those CDs sucked rocks.
Thanks to Napster, I haven't bought a new CD in well over a year, and I am slowly amassing the collection of good music for which I have already paid, but did not receive on those 400 CDs. Oh, and a few songs that I have been trying to find on CD for literally YEARS, but have been unable to. The RIAA can kiss my ass.
~Philly
Where the hell does 'strategy' come into play in the crap-ass, mindless, Quake-engine-based cookie-cutter FPS-of-the-month?
"If it moves, blow the shit out of it" is not really a strategy on par with the kind of strategy you need to employ in, say, Civilization.
~Philly
Cloning humans will bring humanity together like never before, because then 'genuine' humans will be able (and, I'm sure, more than happy) to treat clones as their inferiors.
:-)
I'm sure a lot of people will no longer have a problem with the black family across the street, when that soulless bastard that just moved in next door was grown in a test tube in some friggin' lab!
Of course, a lot of those same guys will see nothing wrong with owning their own copy of Jenna Jameson, but that's good old-fashioned American hypocrisy for you.
~Philly
Nope the first Bill & Ted flick came out in 1988 or '89, but definitely not in 1990. IMDB lists it as 1989. And both of them were entertaining, though Bill Sadler stole the second one in his role as the Reaper.
Saving Silverman, which I saw this afternoon, I also found very enjoyable. I went in expecting a juvenile flick with lots of lowbrow humor, and I was not disappointed. I laughed, I rolled my eyes, I walked out feeling like I got my money's worth.
~Philly
I read that nine different posters advertising Thirteen Days were made for different regions of the USA, and I'm interested to hear what all of them are. They are all variations of the same iconoclastic concept: A local/regional landmark, with missiles in the air and a particularly photogenic mushroom cloud from an old H-bomb test in the background. The poster sure does its job well with me. They are all over bus shelters in my area, and while stopped at certain traffic lights on my way to work, I can't help but sit there and stare at them and shudder a little.
Anyway, here in the Philadelphia, PA area, the landmark depicted is Independence Hall. I know that the landmark in the New England regional posters is a lighthouse. What are the other seven?
Anybody who's a missile crisis buff might want to pick up Resurrection Day. It's an excellent alternate history novel that takes place in 1972 in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into war. A little slow at points, but an overall good and thought-provoking read that gave me some new insights into the goings on during the Crisis in this world. The next time I caught a Discovery Channel special on the subject, those fresh insights sent quite a chill down my spine.
I wasn't born until 1973, but I've read almost everything I could get my hands on about those days and spoken at length to relatives who remember all too well the sheer terror of October 1962.
I'm looking forward to seeing Thirteen Days for a fresh, albeit dramatic-license riddled (from what I've read) perspective.
~Philly
I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Ethernet is Ethernet is Ethernet. They shouldn't be doing anything to proprietarize it.
If they've really got it together, it will have out-of-box support for PPPoE for all those DSL users. Of course, if you're using a soft router, you don't have to worry about PPPoE support... all you'll have to do is set it to DHCP, or manually assign it a static address appropriate for your home LAN.
~Philly
AMEX isn't so great, either. I spent the better part of a year trying to get them to remove over US$12,000 in bogus balance transfers to my "Blue" account.
These transfers were not authorized by me, were from accounts that didn't belong to me, and went through before I had received the card in the mail, or indeed even knew the account number.
AMEX, when I finally rattled enough cages to get them to look into the matter, removed the charges as 'Fraud'. They refused to explain to me how this fraud occurred, without being subpoenaed. But you figure it out. It was either an inside job, or there was some hacking involved somewhere.
They pissed me off so badly, I did up an entire website about their piss-poor customer service, and I got threatened by their lawyers over the domain name. The site has been down since the problem was finally fixed, but I just threw it back up into my webspace for anyone who's interested in reading it (there are a few things that need to be changed before I make it a permanent part of my forthcoming personal site).
~Philly
It sure must be nice to have a jillion bucks to throw around to hire other people to wire up your home, but IMHO it's much more satisfying to roll up your sleeves and do the tinkering yourself.
My house mutes the stereo and announces who's calling when the phone rings, tells me who sent the e-mail that just arrived, tells me when my friends pop online if I'm not signed on, controls every commonly-used light I have, controls the A/V setup in my bedroom, and does lots of other things. And I set it all up myself, and had a blast doing it.
"Why, when I was young, we had to automate our own homes! And by gum, we liked it!"
People who are too damned lazy to hit 3 more buttons should be shot. It took a little getting used to when they switched to it in my area (Philadelphia) back in January, but it did not take long at all before it became second nature. I hate whiners!
~Philly
They don't offer questionnaires with dangling-carrot prizes because Net-savvy people see right through that as a data-gathering trick, and may fill populate such forms with BS as a goof.
It's much easier for the companies to just log your activities on the QT.
~Philly
Why should @Home put in server-level spam blocks? Their fscking mailservers are down so much (at least the one(s) that handle my mail here in the Philadelphia area are), that I barely get ANY mail!
~Philly
Reminds me of an actual funny line on SNL a few years back, during Weekend Update with Norm McD.
The news item was about an equally blindingly-obvious assertion that had been borne out by exhaustive research. "...if you're interested in the complete article, it's in this month's issue of the medical journal, 'Duh!'."
~Philly