Things I've picked up for free but didn't need, I can generally resell quite easily. Cases in point: an industrial label printer, SS7 motherboards (sold these for $50 each, got em for $1 each) and a plethora of other random things.
Things I've paid money for, generally didn't sell quite as well.
Then there was the esoteric, when I tried to sell a matched pair of StorageTek 3060 Fibre Channel array cabinets. You know, the kind that sell for $25,000+, weigh the better part of a ton each, and are 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide? Yeah, those. Well, I picked two of them up working-surplus for the low, low price of (gasp) $100 for both units, with all documentation, all manuals, all cables, etc. Tried selling them, no takers even with a $0+Shipping opening bid...Eventually ended up scrapping them and selling the 122 hard drives contained therein for about $2 each back to IBM Storage Technologies via eBay.
I enjoy selling on eBay, and have slightly-better-than-broken-even in the long run, but I'd need to be doing a lot more volume to really make any money at it.
This is why I purchased the leather case for my phone. It slips over it and provides what looks like an insignificant amount of padding, but in informal "drop tests" my friend's similar phone with no padding bounces, rattles, and spins on contact with the ground. Mine will sort of thud, rock up a bit, and drop.
The tiny extra bit of padding is all it needs to sustain 0 damage on falls from normal heights, it my experience.
I'd be willing to pay a few dollars a month, say, $10 or so, to be able to watch NTSC-quality video on a window in my computer, over the Internet.
Hell, it can be compressed to hell if need be...I'd pay the same $10 for a 512 kbit video DivX feed or something. 1 channel at a time, maybe 40 channels to pick from.
We need to start delivering more content over existing connections, not necessarely over existing physical media.
I'd kill for a trackpoint nipple dealy on a desktop keyboard. I especially like them on laptops because I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard to use the "mouse" like on my Dell, where the touchpad is the only input device.
Precisely why I've been drawn to roleplaying games ever since I could remember. Movies just weren't intellectually stimulating enough for me (although good fun when I wanted to shut my mind off) but I was pulled to the you-are-the-story feeling of an RPG.
Specifically, non-combat-driven RPGs (Final Fantasy-style) where the combat isn't button-mashing and stafing, but carefully plotted turn-based volleys. The best battle system was FFX's round-based system, which had no active portion at all: you could walk away from an active battle and come back 10 minutes later, or 10 hours later, and not be dead, because there'd have been no progress.
I enjoy the feeling that I'm the story, although good games are getting more difficult to find now a days.
Maybe not necessary, but certainly not inappropriate, as someone who has never played Halo or Halo 2, it's nice to have a few words about the game when it's referenced the first time.
Just like you're supposed to write acronyms in full the first time you use them, and thereafter refer to it by initials only, it doesn't hurt anyone to elaborate on literary or cultural references to which the reader may even possibly be unfamiliar.
End result: Whatever you're talking about just became more accessible to the Unwashed Masses than before, with no negative effect on those in-the-know already.
Inverters can be had for about $30 (after MIR) although, for today's power-hungry laptops, my $30 inverter is strong enough to charge the battery while the laptop is shut off, but overdraws when the thing is actually turned on.
Inverter will either plug direct into the plane's +12vDC socket, or use an adapter (about $10) to get a standard +12vDC car-style socket from the plane's socket.
The price of DVD movies, while high, is about in line with the perceived "entertainment value" out of them.
Assuming I'm billing myself out at my absolute rock-bottom rate of $25 per hour which I reserve, basically, for 802(c)3 non-profits which are operating with negative net income, a movie is half an hour's work for me. I'll get about 4 times that much time back out of it on the other end.
I would pay about $5 per movie to download an ISO image, legally, of the feature film DVDs. No extras, etc. just the feature film in unmodified version (even if that meant watching trailers and such beforehand, as long as I could still skip them.) Or they could offer, say, DVD47 quality ISOs, not a full DVD9, thus you go to the store and pay for a better copy, or something.
The problem, like you mentioned, is that Hollywood isn't able to make the jump to direct-distribution. I bet if they eliminated the middleman, and 100% of that $5 went to the top-tier distributor, they'd make a bit more money overall, as a result of significantly lower overhead.
I really want a cryptosystem where I can enter, say, two different plaintexts (of similar length, I imagine) and then there are two keys: the private key, and the decoy key.
If required to give up "your private key" then give up the decoy key. The decoy plaintexts decrypts, and you're done. The real plaintext is still hidden away.
You could not install the flash plugin, but unfortunately, a lot of the web sites I visit (while they have an HTML version) require you to click "HTML" from within a Flash site to get there.
Of course this is slashdot, where the incorrect citation of a (very good) book will get tons of replies, but a well-thought-out comment about something might get 2.
On a fully legitimate system, the first time I installed SP2, Explorer crashed when I tried to set the firewall options.
Subsequent installs of SP2, now, Explorer.exe will not start. Ever. Task Mrg>New Task>Explorer.exe doesn't even start the app, my guess is it segfaults right away. So I'm on SP1a.
piece of shit if you ask me, I *want* to use it, and I don't have the time to reformat and reinstall the applications I have.
Assuming you *have* G-Spot, it has always been a simple matter for me to fire it up whenever WMP doesn't want to play something, then type whatever that string is into Google and get the codec.
Total time is about 2 minutes.
Now, I do generally know by sight the most comoon non-prepackaged codecs (DivX, FFD) and most of the other, odder ones I can either find, or are actually already installed by default.
Slashdot Mirror
I laughed out loud when your sentence construed that radio shack and MCDonalds are clothing stores.
This is one of the more insightful posts I've ever seen.
If I had mod points, you'd get all of them.
If you ripped all the pages out of every book in the Library of Congress, how many would you have to place end-to-end to reach an orbit of Jupiter?
I've had a mixed experience with eBay.
Things I've picked up for free but didn't need, I can generally resell quite easily. Cases in point: an industrial label printer, SS7 motherboards (sold these for $50 each, got em for $1 each) and a plethora of other random things.
Things I've paid money for, generally didn't sell quite as well.
Then there was the esoteric, when I tried to sell a matched pair of StorageTek 3060 Fibre Channel array cabinets. You know, the kind that sell for $25,000+, weigh the better part of a ton each, and are 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide? Yeah, those. Well, I picked two of them up working-surplus for the low, low price of (gasp) $100 for both units, with all documentation, all manuals, all cables, etc. Tried selling them, no takers even with a $0+Shipping opening bid...Eventually ended up scrapping them and selling the 122 hard drives contained therein for about $2 each back to IBM Storage Technologies via eBay.
I enjoy selling on eBay, and have slightly-better-than-broken-even in the long run, but I'd need to be doing a lot more volume to really make any money at it.
Office of the Commisioner of Baseball (wtf?)
They're rebroadcasting Major League Baseball without express written consent, only implied oral consent!
This is why I purchased the leather case for my phone. It slips over it and provides what looks like an insignificant amount of padding, but in informal "drop tests" my friend's similar phone with no padding bounces, rattles, and spins on contact with the ground. Mine will sort of thud, rock up a bit, and drop.
The tiny extra bit of padding is all it needs to sustain 0 damage on falls from normal heights, it my experience.
You, sir, have murdered the Queen's English.
To the gallows!
I own 3, in my CPU collection.
;)
So, yes, I have seen them. Produced as late as 1987 for embedded systems.
No, I'm not selling
Why in god's name did they pick nanoseconds-after-the-epoch as their method of measuring time?
I'd be willing to pay a few dollars a month, say, $10 or so, to be able to watch NTSC-quality video on a window in my computer, over the Internet.
Hell, it can be compressed to hell if need be...I'd pay the same $10 for a 512 kbit video DivX feed or something. 1 channel at a time, maybe 40 channels to pick from.
We need to start delivering more content over existing connections, not necessarely over existing physical media.
and I'm willing to bet, at 300km away from his grandmother, he's not an American either.
My best friend takes Adderall for a legitimate case of ADD - it works wonders for its purposes.
I'd kill for a trackpoint nipple dealy on a desktop keyboard. I especially like them on laptops because I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard to use the "mouse" like on my Dell, where the touchpad is the only input device.
Oh, *wow*, someone else who played that on AOL Pay-by-Hour.
I'd still play it today, except I don't (1) make enough to justify the monthly and (2) I don't play any games at all, for the most part.
It was a ton of fun, though.
Precisely why I've been drawn to roleplaying games ever since I could remember. Movies just weren't intellectually stimulating enough for me (although good fun when I wanted to shut my mind off) but I was pulled to the you-are-the-story feeling of an RPG.
Specifically, non-combat-driven RPGs (Final Fantasy-style) where the combat isn't button-mashing and stafing, but carefully plotted turn-based volleys. The best battle system was FFX's round-based system, which had no active portion at all: you could walk away from an active battle and come back 10 minutes later, or 10 hours later, and not be dead, because there'd have been no progress.
I enjoy the feeling that I'm the story, although good games are getting more difficult to find now a days.
Maybe not necessary, but certainly not inappropriate, as someone who has never played Halo or Halo 2, it's nice to have a few words about the game when it's referenced the first time.
Just like you're supposed to write acronyms in full the first time you use them, and thereafter refer to it by initials only, it doesn't hurt anyone to elaborate on literary or cultural references to which the reader may even possibly be unfamiliar.
End result: Whatever you're talking about just became more accessible to the Unwashed Masses than before, with no negative effect on those in-the-know already.
Inverters can be had for about $30 (after MIR) although, for today's power-hungry laptops, my $30 inverter is strong enough to charge the battery while the laptop is shut off, but overdraws when the thing is actually turned on.
Inverter will either plug direct into the plane's +12vDC socket, or use an adapter (about $10) to get a standard +12vDC car-style socket from the plane's socket.
The price of DVD movies, while high, is about in line with the perceived "entertainment value" out of them.
Assuming I'm billing myself out at my absolute rock-bottom rate of $25 per hour which I reserve, basically, for 802(c)3 non-profits which are operating with negative net income, a movie is half an hour's work for me. I'll get about 4 times that much time back out of it on the other end.
I would pay about $5 per movie to download an ISO image, legally, of the feature film DVDs. No extras, etc. just the feature film in unmodified version (even if that meant watching trailers and such beforehand, as long as I could still skip them.) Or they could offer, say, DVD47 quality ISOs, not a full DVD9, thus you go to the store and pay for a better copy, or something.
The problem, like you mentioned, is that Hollywood isn't able to make the jump to direct-distribution. I bet if they eliminated the middleman, and 100% of that $5 went to the top-tier distributor, they'd make a bit more money overall, as a result of significantly lower overhead.
I really want a cryptosystem where I can enter, say, two different plaintexts (of similar length, I imagine) and then there are two keys: the private key, and the decoy key.
If required to give up "your private key" then give up the decoy key. The decoy plaintexts decrypts, and you're done. The real plaintext is still hidden away.
Does anything like this exist?
Why not make cards with upgradable memory?
It wouldn't be that difficult to mount, say, a single or pair of DDR sockets towards the top of the card.
Have it ship with, say, 1 stick of 256MB or whatever.
Want an upgrade? Go buy a few more sticks and swap em out.
You could not install the flash plugin, but unfortunately, a lot of the web sites I visit (while they have an HTML version) require you to click "HTML" from within a Flash site to get there.
Of course this is slashdot, where the incorrect citation of a (very good) book will get tons of replies, but a well-thought-out comment about something might get 2.
StringTokenizer is useless...
String[] tokens = wholeString.split("regex");
will do the same thing, a lot more efficiently.
number of tokens? tokens.length.
Plus, it's a single line to tokenize the string that way, rather than dealing with new StringTokenizer(), getnexttoken, etc.
I can't install SP2.
On a fully legitimate system, the first time I installed SP2, Explorer crashed when I tried to set the firewall options.
Subsequent installs of SP2, now, Explorer.exe will not start. Ever. Task Mrg>New Task>Explorer.exe doesn't even start the app, my guess is it segfaults right away. So I'm on SP1a.
piece of shit if you ask me, I *want* to use it, and I don't have the time to reformat and reinstall the applications I have.
Assuming you *have* G-Spot, it has always been a simple matter for me to fire it up whenever WMP doesn't want to play something, then type whatever that string is into Google and get the codec.
Total time is about 2 minutes.
Now, I do generally know by sight the most comoon non-prepackaged codecs (DivX, FFD) and most of the other, odder ones I can either find, or are actually already installed by default.