Let me preface this by saying I'm not a console gamer. I had PONG and an atari 2600 when they came out. Since, I have found the console gaming experience lacking. Ok, Halo and Halo2 are badass, but hardly worth the cost of the Xbox and assorted other accessories... Maybe I outgrew them...
I have been reading and hearing about the 360 for a while. The hardware seems impressive. I can see a lot of potential for impressive physics, good graphics, and complex models. By and large, it seems the magic spell that Microsoft's PR department is casting is working. Gamers are abuzz with speculation and news of the 360.
There will be no shortage.
I worked at Best Buy when the PS2 was released, and I remember the same rumors of ps2 shortages. People were standing in line the night before. Families split up and stood in lines at different retailers around town. There was genuine concern that demand would not be met. My store had 80 to give out for opening day. Management told the prods (sales reps, product specialists.. whatever) that they were not to sell a ps2 without at *least* an extra controller, and a PRP (Product Replacement Plan). Best Buy is incredibly numbers oriented. Its not enough to sell a box, you have to sell a box "with cheese" i.e. with the higher profit items cables, controllers, PRP. Why else would a Prod recommend a "Monster Cable" surge supressor to ward off dead pixels? BTW Monster Cable costs about 25% of retail price. But I digress.....
My point is that the shortage was artificial... Every store got an allotment of PS2s (80), and the next truck had more (for us, 130). People were so relieved that they got a PS2 opening day, that they coughed up the dough for all of the extra crap that they were told they *needed*.
My father is a programmer. One of those whitebeards that learned programming using stacks of punchcards. There was always technology at home, usually in pieces, laying about to be studied and tinkered with. His company (a telecom) used unix quite extensively. CLI was the way to get anything done. When he heard about Linux, he brought it home and tried it out. I think it was kernel.99. If you wanted a driver you had to write it. There wasnt much it could do out-of-the-box. Hell, there wasn't even a box! But that was the greatness of it. You had to get under the hood. You had to understand the mechanisms behind the curtain. My father taught me his craft. It was a bonding activity. Some people build canoes in the garage. We built a server.
I was hooked...then I discovered girls. I took a break for a while. When I came back to linux, I was in college. My roomate and I needed to share a dial-up connection. Being poor, we cobbled a underpowered machine from the scraps at school. Red-Hat 5 was new, and some disks were laying around the lab so we used it. I finally made the switch in 1998. Not because I hate windows, but because I love linux. I take pride in the fact that the community built it. We supported ourselves, and fashioned an OS that has the largest software company in the world threatened.
The absolute best part about linux is the code distilling process. It is Darwinism for computers. Rather than a company developing to meet a business plan/schedule, you have a community tweaking and patching and improving the code everyday. cood code gets passed to the next version, the badly structured sloppiness gets dumped.... most of the time:-)/RANT
This is a off topic, but I thought that I'd share. When I was a PC tech, I had a customer come in because his hard drive went bad. It turns out that this customer ran a dry-cleaning business. This machine was the one that he used to do his books etc. When I opened the case, I could not see *any* components at all. It was a solid wall of lint. Thank God that this was around the time that 286's ruled, so there were no fans inside the case, just heatsinks. I was suprized that the power supply didnt catch fire.
I walked it over to the auto-repair shop that shared the parking lot, and used their compressed air to blow it out... outside of course:-)
"Now that we've gotten management onboard with linux, how do we get support that is acceptable/valueable to both the end-user and IT management?"
I have experienced first-hand the pain of turning over my linux box to the Windows only admins. It is very difficult to have your rights taken away, and have to walk the "admin" though a task that would have only taken seconds.
Was test it before pushing it company wide. My Company has offices all over the state. Before any new software is deployed, we test it on a small segment(5-10 users) of the userbase at the main office. That way we can discover/ workaround any issues, before we have a thousand computers to fix.
Your situation teaches us that no software comany, no matter how big, should be trusted until its been tested in-house.
I shouldnt be surprised by this, but the images are stitched from different sat. passes. My home town of Dallas is compiled from at least two perspectives. Quite disorienting when two skyscrapers lean across each other. and shawdows point at different angles.
You would do well to heed this advice. I built a machine for a family friend that happens to be a pro baseball player. I thought "what the hell," I can get all of the latest and greatest, ang he can foot the bill. A few thousand in hardware costs, no cost on my labor, and I was getting calls in the middle of the night (1 and 2 am) to fix every little thing. I always refer ppl who want me build or fix stuff to a repair shop here in town that I trust.
Not that I think that the research is not valuable, but c'mon. Spend the cash looking for the fountain of youth.
IMHO, there is no given set of stimuli that will cause a person's logic and reason to fail and become a spending machine... that takes years of brainwashing, consumer competition, and a free-market economy.:-P
how do you roll a 0 or 00 with dice?
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 1
Roulette(sp?) is the biggest gamble with the highest payout (35-1 if you guess correctly)
Personally, I dont care what the Doctors/ staff make off of me. If it is a fair and reasonable price, it is worth the service. Big insurance sits in the middle of all financial transactions, takes what they want, and pay what they want.
for what its is worth Mozilla has an option to encrypt the passwords that you have stored with the browser. When I go to a site that requires info, a box pops up asking for my encryption password.
Lets step away from "facts","spin" and "special intrests" and listen to one Texan's opinion.
I live in Texas. In this state, we've voted in a concealed hangun law. It is leagal for a non-felony criminal to carry a handgun provided he/she obtains the proper permits and passes the training classes.
I like that I have the choice to carry. I choose to not carry.
I think that most issues in America should be decided by individual states. This includes abortion, gun control, and the death penalty. We could avoid spin, and special interests if we had the states decide themselves.
Todd Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong
I dont think that most/.ers think it is too expensive. They think it's ludicrous for any single person to spend that much money on nothing. I could get more useful info off of the Linux Kernal Map over at thinkgeek for $30, than a map of my DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a console gamer. I had PONG and an atari 2600 when they came out. Since, I have found the console gaming experience lacking. Ok, Halo and Halo2 are badass, but hardly worth the cost of the Xbox and assorted other accessories... Maybe I outgrew them...
I have been reading and hearing about the 360 for a while. The hardware seems impressive. I can see a lot of potential for impressive physics, good graphics, and complex models. By and large, it seems the magic spell that Microsoft's PR department is casting is working. Gamers are abuzz with speculation and news of the 360.
There will be no shortage.
I worked at Best Buy when the PS2 was released, and I remember the same rumors of ps2 shortages. People were standing in line the night before. Families split up and stood in lines at different retailers around town. There was genuine concern that demand would not be met. My store had 80 to give out for opening day. Management told the prods (sales reps, product specialists.. whatever) that they were not to sell a ps2 without at *least* an extra controller, and a PRP (Product Replacement Plan). Best Buy is incredibly numbers oriented. Its not enough to sell a box, you have to sell a box "with cheese" i.e. with the higher profit items cables, controllers, PRP. Why else would a Prod recommend a "Monster Cable" surge supressor to ward off dead pixels? BTW Monster Cable costs about 25% of retail price. But I digress.....
My point is that the shortage was artificial... Every store got an allotment of PS2s (80), and the next truck had more (for us, 130). People were so relieved that they got a PS2 opening day, that they coughed up the dough for all of the extra crap that they were told they *needed*.
Maybe I am wrong. Time will tell.
My father is a programmer. One of those whitebeards that learned programming using stacks of punchcards. There was always technology at home, usually in pieces, laying about to be studied and tinkered with. His company (a telecom) used unix quite extensively. CLI was the way to get anything done. When he heard about Linux, he brought it home and tried it out. I think it was kernel .99. If you wanted a driver you had to write it. There wasnt much it could do out-of-the-box. Hell, there wasn't even a box! But that was the greatness of it. You had to get under the hood. You had to understand the mechanisms behind the curtain. My father taught me his craft. It was a bonding activity. Some people build canoes in the garage. We built a server.
:-) /RANT
I was hooked...then I discovered girls. I took a break for a while.
When I came back to linux, I was in college. My roomate and I needed to share a dial-up connection. Being poor, we cobbled a underpowered machine from the scraps at school. Red-Hat 5 was new, and some disks were laying around the lab so we used it. I finally made the switch in 1998. Not because I hate windows, but because I love linux. I take pride in the fact that the community built it. We supported ourselves, and fashioned an OS that has the largest software company in the world threatened.
The absolute best part about linux is the code distilling process. It is Darwinism for computers. Rather than a company developing to meet a business plan/schedule, you have a community tweaking and patching and improving the code everyday. cood code gets passed to the next version, the badly structured sloppiness gets dumped.... most of the time
This is a off topic, but I thought that I'd share. When I was a PC tech, I had a customer come in because his hard drive went bad. It turns out that this customer ran a dry-cleaning business. This machine was the one that he used to do his books etc. When I opened the case, I could not see *any* components at all. It was a solid wall of lint. Thank God that this was around the time that 286's ruled, so there were no fans inside the case, just heatsinks. I was suprized that the power supply didnt catch fire.
:-)
I walked it over to the auto-repair shop that shared the parking lot, and used their compressed air to blow it out... outside of course
Why not? Unprofessinal yes... but in my experience the NOC is under appriciated.
maybe I'm too forgiving, but I dont play a game when its rated at 60% or lower.
79% just doesnt sound bad...
"Now that we've gotten management onboard with linux, how do we get support that is acceptable/valueable to both the end-user and IT management?"
I have experienced first-hand the pain of turning over my linux box to the Windows only admins. It is very difficult to have your rights taken away, and have to walk the "admin" though a task that would have only taken seconds.
Was test it before pushing it company wide. My Company has offices all over the state. Before any new software is deployed, we test it on a small segment(5-10 users) of the userbase at the main office. That way we can discover/ workaround any issues, before we have a thousand computers to fix.
Your situation teaches us that no software comany, no matter how big, should be trusted until its been tested in-house.
That doesnt mean I'll watch the new one.
I shouldnt be surprised by this, but the images are stitched from different sat. passes. My home town of Dallas is compiled from at least two perspectives. Quite disorienting when two skyscrapers lean across each other. and shawdows point at different angles.
You would do well to heed this advice. I built a machine for a family friend that happens to be a pro baseball player. I thought "what the hell," I can get all of the latest and greatest, ang he can foot the bill. A few thousand in hardware costs, no cost on my labor, and I was getting calls in the middle of the night (1 and 2 am) to fix every little thing.
I always refer ppl who want me build or fix stuff to a repair shop here in town that I trust.
Good point.
How is it that we manage to overlook the simplest solution? Passive parenting is a trend I do not agree with.
Not that I think that the research is not valuable, but c'mon. Spend the cash looking for the fountain of youth. :-P
IMHO, there is no given set of stimuli that will cause a person's logic and reason to fail and become a spending machine... that takes years of brainwashing, consumer competition, and a free-market economy.
Roulette(sp?) is the biggest gamble with the highest payout (35-1 if you guess correctly)
It works great. Aside from a few dead-spots, I have no complaints, other than the bulk.
all those "little things" are called overhead.
Personally, I dont care what the Doctors/ staff make off of me. If it is a fair and reasonable price, it is worth the service. Big insurance sits in the middle of all financial transactions, takes what they want, and pay what they want.
or Iron Chef IT
for what its is worth Mozilla has an option to encrypt the passwords that you have stored with the browser. When I go to a site that requires info, a box pops up asking for my encryption password.
A key to get the key, as it were.
If you knew how to type
Lets step away from "facts","spin" and "special intrests" and listen to one Texan's opinion.
I live in Texas. In this state, we've voted in a concealed hangun law. It is leagal for a non-felony criminal to carry a handgun provided he/she obtains the proper permits and passes the training classes.
I like that I have the choice to carry. I choose to not carry.
I think that most issues in America should be decided by individual states. This includes abortion, gun control, and the death penalty.
We could avoid spin, and special interests if we had the states decide themselves.
Todd
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong
What Kind of applications (other than file swapping) would this be good for?
...by the plot of a little seen movie AntiTrust....not that i saw it or anything...really.
They'll have to finish the dig by candle-light...oh yeah it's a tunnel Absence of the Sun shouldn't affect it. SHOULDN'T...
What could you do with 50Lbs. of Silly Putty?
Check out the link:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/putty/
This one simple act covers physics(gravity Acceleration, fluid dynamics and whatnot) and is so simple but so fun.
Too bad its sponsored by a windows software publishing house.
FUN!
Another step in the right direction. Just as long as the KDE group doesn't stray from open standards like other software companies.
I dont think that most /.ers think it is too expensive. They think it's ludicrous for any single person to spend that much money on nothing. I could get more useful info off of the Linux Kernal Map over at thinkgeek for $30, than a map of my DNA.