Don't forget their end of latefees-- which ended up the king of late fees. Apparently, if you kept the DVD, no late fees occurred, because they just charged your credit card for the purchase of the movie.
Which only occurred after you didn't return it for a week! Did you think they were just going to let you keep the movie forever?
That's sort of what they were implying, yes. I mean, what did they expect from people by proclaiming the "end of late fees!" The entire concept and marketing of it was an abortion.
Actually he did mention it in the 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. At the time, most thought he was lying and/or didn't understand why he wouldn't wear dark makeup (i.e., not "white" makeup) to cover it up.
Yeah it's been stated that the movie's editing makes certain things seem different than how they went down. Stuff like how Billy Mitchell's videotaped score being rejected the following day and Walter Day apologizing to Weibe. And when Weibe's videotaped score was rejected, the record reverted to the other record he set in 2003, not to Mitchell. And Weibe has stated that the scene in the restaurant where Mitchell avoids him leaves out the part that came later where Mitchell came over and apologized for being rude and introduced his wife.
Weibe is the everyman character we all identify with and Mitchell has an abrasive personality that make for an excellent film. But both men agree that the movie doesn't portray them correctly. Still, it's a great film. What I wonder is - will there ever be a DK score that's literally impossible to beat?
If I remember right from the last Slashdot discussion we had on this:
1. Some organizations (mostly religious ones) don't want porn to exist at all. They pray (literally) for the day when it is legislated out of existence. a.xxx domain would legitimize it further than it already is.
2. Many porn sites already have a large vested interest in their.com domains. They don't want to have to move to.xxx domains.
3. The porn industry doesn't want some quick/easy way to block them. Sure, you as a parent would like to just block www.*.xxx and be done with it but what if your ISP decides to do the same? Then you can't look at this no matter what. To say nothing of the false sense of security (i.e., just blocking www.*.xxx doesn't really block all porn)
4. How would it be enforced? Anyone can have a.xxx domain? Does it have to be a porn site? Would porn sites have to move to.xxx domains instead of.com domains?
5. Who decides what is porn? An example was given of a stunt to raise awareness for breast cancer or something wherein a thousand women got naked and laid down to pose in a large shape. The photo was carried on a lot of news sites, including Yahoo. Would it be considered porn? It's not video footage of people having sex but it is a photo of a thousand naked women. If it is considered porn, would Yahoo have to host it on www.yahoo.xxx instead of www.yahoo.com? And wouldn't Yahoo get into a shitstorm by even registering www.yahoo.xxx in the first place?
Basically when both the porn industry and the religious movements are agreeing on something, you know it's messed up. Yeah, on its surface it's not a bad idea, it's just one not thought through very well.
In the latimes interview, James Cameron even stated that
I'm not arguing the factual merits of your claims, but I'd like to remind you that what showbiz people say in interviews can be pure utter bullshit designed to enhance shareholder value. They'll tell you they're very faithful to the source material, they'll tell you their tech is revolutionary, they'll say ANYTHING to get you to fork over some money. Anything. Grains of salt are mandatory.
You're right to be skeptical but apparently the transfer takes up over 46GB of the 47GB of usable space on the dual-layer BR disc. They really did use the entire disc. They even cut out all non-English audio tracks and any trailers (the DVD has some alternate language tracks and one trailer for something).
Which makes me wonder - are they going to put audio commentary on the November release? If so, are they going to split the movie across two discs? Or lower the bit budget? If it's the latter, could this release have better video quality than the one in November?
Got any data or source to back that up, or did you just pull that out of your ass?
I think he was saying that there are six major browsers out there and three of them run WebKit (Safari, Chrome and... Konqueror maybe?) and three of them don't (IE, Firefox, Opera).
This is the fundamental problem I have with the likes of GameStop. They probably gave the previous owner $20 for this game and then turn around and sell it for $55. The pricing on most of their used games is quite outrageous.
I take it you never went to college. This is what the used textbook market is founded on.
And it kills me how people get indignant over this. GameStop wants to make a profit. They buy the game for $20 and sell for $55 and they make $35 profit. Are you saying they should pay more? Why? They've already proven they don't have to.
By throwing around the S-word you're taking the blame off the people it truly belongs to: the parents.
In many places in the USA, insofar as legal definitions are concerned any taking of one's own life, intentional or no, accidental or no, is listed as "suicide".
Same way the generally accepted definition of sodomy is anal sex but in many places the definition includes any "unnatural" sex act such as oral sex ("unnatural" in this context meaning anything not related to reproduction). And yes it is illegal in some places but rarely if ever enforced.
Yes but you are deliberately ignoring the point - that one Linux-only or Mac-only user is an acceptable loss. The odds are good that those five people they could have reached out to have Windows and are already playing it. And if they're not, then they have more Windows friends playing it. Linux and Mac combined are less than 10% of the population and in many instances, their users don't play games game (Photoshop jockeys) or also own a Windows machine, or have a Windows partition to boot into. Hell thanks to stuff like Wine and Parallels, the geeks will do your work for you in making it run on those alternative platforms. To say nothing of the fact that these platforms typically don't have sales for squat.
Large minorities don't pull people with them. You think Facebook didn't have competition? You think Twitter didn't have competition? WoW had tons of competition.
WoW won because it was really popular and good. Not because it had non-Windows clients.
I read some posting somewhere from someone talking about working for AOL in the tech support department in the early days, like right before and right as they exploded due to Internet access. So not only did they have social scaling issues from having to deal with so many people so suddenly, but they also were pretty much the first ones to have this issue in the digital age.
One of his anecdotes centered around how one of their jobs was to boot users who had set up profane usernames. So GoFuckYourself@aol.com got the boot (especially since this was around the time they got a lot of quick/fake users trying to mooch access for a few days before you figured out their CC# was fake).
They had a user who had a username like VelvetPussy@aol.com. OK, so this person got the boot. This person called in to complain. Turns out it was an 89-year-old grandmother who liked cats and knitting.
The 486DX has a built-in co-pro, but the 486SX lines "didn't". Well they did, but it was disabled.
Boards would have 486SX (soldered on usually, but not always) and a co-pro sockets which was actually just a normal 486 socket. When you bought a 487 math co-pro unit it was actually a full 486DX - it didn't just take on the extra job like the 387 and 287 chips did, it actually took over from the 486SX chip completely. Overdrive sockets and chips were the same thing: just a standard socket and 486DX with a different label - plug it in and the motherboard turns the other processor off.
I had this exact computer he's referring to and I remember all this. I had always heard conflicting stories - either they just went through and intentionally disabled the coprocessor so they could sell this for less money to a different market, or these were 486DX chips where the math coprocessor was broken (similar to how these days AMD will sell a "tri core" processor which is a quad core processor where one of the four cores is defective)
Either way it was asinine and brilliant - they sold less expensive processors to those who wanted them and then if they wanted an upgrade they sold them a second processor.
One of the sites mentioned in the story is Shacknews, a Dallas-based site frequented by hardcore gamers and whose initial primary subject matter was the FPS games from the era when Duke Nukem 3D was initially popular. George Broussard posts there under the handle GeorgeB3DR.
Someone posted a link to the WIRED story yesterday and one of the responses was from Jason Bergman who worked for Shacknews at one point as a writer and later moved on to Take Two and now works for Bethesda. In the discussion he posted:
That article is missing a LOT of facts. Until the lawsuit is settled, you won't know the full story.
Which naturally got the "Well how could you even know?" response, to which he responded:
I was the producer at take two on dnf. So yes. Yes I know the real story. This article has a few things that are blatantly false, and others that are assumptions from people who weren't there.
Granted this is from someone who used to work at Take Two, which is the company somewhat demonized in the article, so there may be some bias in play there, but it sounds like some of the stuff in this article may just be flat wrong.
That said, this article is probably the best it can be under the circumstances, given that no one can really talk too much about it because of the lawsuit.
Microsoft events involving free software are very well attended. Over the years I've acquired Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows 7 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard, SQL Server 2005/2008 Standard and Windows Server 2008 all for just showing up.
Of course it helped that the conferences themselves were also free.
On the one hand if Joe Average User can't get to YouTube.com anymore then yes they'll either upgrade to IE7/8, or maybe use that crazy Firefox browser.
However, we still run across many many clients who still mandate IE6 in their workplace. No upgrading to IE7/8, no other browsers than IE6, etc.
So they'll upgrade finally now too, right?
Nope - those are also the same companies that probably block access to YouTube for bandwidth/time wasting reasons.
"I work in an industry where the way we make money is to rigidly and tightly control the flow of information. You didn't get to see the movie unless you paid for it. You didn't get to listen to the music unless you paid for it. Sure, people could dub VHS tapes or buy a bootleg or record things on cassettes, and we fought these things, but they were the exceptions. Now, thanks to the Internet and the free flow of information we don't make as much money as we used to because now it's easy to share information. Rather than adapt or maybe realize that our earnings are going to go down, I'm just going to wish the Internet didn't happen so I can go back to the glory days. Or maybe I'll send off for that time machine I see advertised in that magazine."
Had to be at least 10 years ago for someone to use an email account used for work-related stuff to send such a message.
You must be joking.
The average person only has one email address, their work email address. They don't have Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo or anything else, they have one email address and that's their work email address. And when they switch jobs, they switch email addresses and everyone has to update their lists.
And when they're not at work, email does not exist. You send them something at 5:01 PM on a Friday and you're not getting a response from them until Monday morning.
And they only know how to use one button, "Reply All". They don't know what the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All" is, all they know is that they once used "Reply" and the person they intended the message for didn't get it, so they just use "Reply All" because that works every time.
So no, I don't doubt for one minute that this story is newer than ten years old because I work with people dumb enough to do this every day. Here at Slashdot we nailed this whole "email" thing back in the 90's. The average person hasn't and they also don't care. Some of them even view email as a nuisance they were better off without.
This is interesting seeing as how for over a decade in PC Magazine (maybe in their last issue too, I don't have it handy) some company called Cybernet has been marketing "zero footprint" PC's in the classified ads in the back of the magazine.
Similar to the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed and most of the things Billy Mays pimps on television, it's one of those things I've seen advertised to death but I've never known anyone who has owned one, nor have I seen one in use, ever.
So given that this is not a new idea at all I'm curious to see how Asus will fare with this thing...
You don't have to wait six months between activations, it's just that if you wait six months then you can activate over the Internet again, without having to make phone calls.
You won't agree with me on this but it does seem reasonable to me that Microsoft would see your pattern of constant reinstalls and figure you were up to something, like putting one license on dozens of machines or pirating it or something. People who do a lot of VM work know to install a clean image, then clone that and NewSID it to avoid the activation tussle (i.e., you want ten different copies of this one VM to test ten different things).
If however you think OS's should be free and not privy to install restrictions that's your right, too.
The line that MS crossed was deciding that legitimate keys could only be used "so many times" some where in an algorithm.
I've done an install of XP with a single retail key in various forms (new machines, VM's, etc.) dozens of times over the last seven years. Never had a problem. If you wait six months between activations then you don't even have to call anyone.
This legitimate key of yours - was it an OEM key? Those get tied to your motherboard. New motherboard = new machine = new copy of XP. That's why the OEM copies are so cheap, and why people should really avoid them. Meanwhile I've had at least four motherboards over the life of my retail copy of XP, to say nothing of the times I've activated it in a VM.
Does anyone know if I can still pick these up for free at Radio Shack?
No, Radio Shack told all its stores to get rid of them years ago. Not just throw them away but literally destroy them, preferrably with a hammer. Seriously. My Google-Fu fails me but I'm certian I remember reading this info a few years back.
Women listen to Oprah. Women do what she tells them to. It's sort of frightening actually.
For years I was telling my wife how neat TiVo was. All the stuff it could do (and this was before TiVo had competition, before MythTV, etc.) and how we should get one. She ignored me. I don't think she was even listening. I think she heard "blah blah blah I want to spend money on gadgets" and tuned me out.
Then one day Oprah had a show where she went on and on about how cool TiVo is. Suddenly my wife wanted one. And mine being a typical marriage, that's when we bought one.
Sure her ratings are slipping but Oprah endorsing something is significant because how all the women who watch her show will buy one and do as she says.
Slashdot Mirror
So... an iPad basically? Maybe with the keyboard attachment?
That's sort of what they were implying, yes. I mean, what did they expect from people by proclaiming the "end of late fees!" The entire concept and marketing of it was an abortion.
Actually he did mention it in the 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. At the time, most thought he was lying and/or didn't understand why he wouldn't wear dark makeup (i.e., not "white" makeup) to cover it up.
Yeah it's been stated that the movie's editing makes certain things seem different than how they went down. Stuff like how Billy Mitchell's videotaped score being rejected the following day and Walter Day apologizing to Weibe. And when Weibe's videotaped score was rejected, the record reverted to the other record he set in 2003, not to Mitchell. And Weibe has stated that the scene in the restaurant where Mitchell avoids him leaves out the part that came later where Mitchell came over and apologized for being rude and introduced his wife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_kong#Disputed_facts
Weibe is the everyman character we all identify with and Mitchell has an abrasive personality that make for an excellent film. But both men agree that the movie doesn't portray them correctly. Still, it's a great film. What I wonder is - will there ever be a DK score that's literally impossible to beat?
Well seeing as how this is just a comic book, couldn't they have just put it on an iPhone/iPad-formatted website behind a paywall?
If I remember right from the last Slashdot discussion we had on this:
1. Some organizations (mostly religious ones) don't want porn to exist at all. They pray (literally) for the day when it is legislated out of existence. a .xxx domain would legitimize it further than it already is.
2. Many porn sites already have a large vested interest in their .com domains. They don't want to have to move to .xxx domains.
3. The porn industry doesn't want some quick/easy way to block them. Sure, you as a parent would like to just block www.*.xxx and be done with it but what if your ISP decides to do the same? Then you can't look at this no matter what. To say nothing of the false sense of security (i.e., just blocking www.*.xxx doesn't really block all porn)
4. How would it be enforced? Anyone can have a .xxx domain? Does it have to be a porn site? Would porn sites have to move to .xxx domains instead of .com domains?
5. Who decides what is porn? An example was given of a stunt to raise awareness for breast cancer or something wherein a thousand women got naked and laid down to pose in a large shape. The photo was carried on a lot of news sites, including Yahoo. Would it be considered porn? It's not video footage of people having sex but it is a photo of a thousand naked women. If it is considered porn, would Yahoo have to host it on www.yahoo.xxx instead of www.yahoo.com? And wouldn't Yahoo get into a shitstorm by even registering www.yahoo.xxx in the first place?
Basically when both the porn industry and the religious movements are agreeing on something, you know it's messed up. Yeah, on its surface it's not a bad idea, it's just one not thought through very well.
You're right to be skeptical but apparently the transfer takes up over 46GB of the 47GB of usable space on the dual-layer BR disc. They really did use the entire disc. They even cut out all non-English audio tracks and any trailers (the DVD has some alternate language tracks and one trailer for something).
Which makes me wonder - are they going to put audio commentary on the November release? If so, are they going to split the movie across two discs? Or lower the bit budget? If it's the latter, could this release have better video quality than the one in November?
I think he was saying that there are six major browsers out there and three of them run WebKit (Safari, Chrome and... Konqueror maybe?) and three of them don't (IE, Firefox, Opera).
I take it you never went to college. This is what the used textbook market is founded on.
And it kills me how people get indignant over this. GameStop wants to make a profit. They buy the game for $20 and sell for $55 and they make $35 profit. Are you saying they should pay more? Why? They've already proven they don't have to.
In many places in the USA, insofar as legal definitions are concerned any taking of one's own life, intentional or no, accidental or no, is listed as "suicide".
Same way the generally accepted definition of sodomy is anal sex but in many places the definition includes any "unnatural" sex act such as oral sex ("unnatural" in this context meaning anything not related to reproduction). And yes it is illegal in some places but rarely if ever enforced.
Yes but you are deliberately ignoring the point - that one Linux-only or Mac-only user is an acceptable loss. The odds are good that those five people they could have reached out to have Windows and are already playing it. And if they're not, then they have more Windows friends playing it. Linux and Mac combined are less than 10% of the population and in many instances, their users don't play games game (Photoshop jockeys) or also own a Windows machine, or have a Windows partition to boot into. Hell thanks to stuff like Wine and Parallels, the geeks will do your work for you in making it run on those alternative platforms. To say nothing of the fact that these platforms typically don't have sales for squat.
Large minorities don't pull people with them. You think Facebook didn't have competition? You think Twitter didn't have competition? WoW had tons of competition.
WoW won because it was really popular and good. Not because it had non-Windows clients.
I read some posting somewhere from someone talking about working for AOL in the tech support department in the early days, like right before and right as they exploded due to Internet access. So not only did they have social scaling issues from having to deal with so many people so suddenly, but they also were pretty much the first ones to have this issue in the digital age.
One of his anecdotes centered around how one of their jobs was to boot users who had set up profane usernames. So GoFuckYourself@aol.com got the boot (especially since this was around the time they got a lot of quick/fake users trying to mooch access for a few days before you figured out their CC# was fake).
They had a user who had a username like VelvetPussy@aol.com. OK, so this person got the boot. This person called in to complain. Turns out it was an 89-year-old grandmother who liked cats and knitting.
I had this exact computer he's referring to and I remember all this. I had always heard conflicting stories - either they just went through and intentionally disabled the coprocessor so they could sell this for less money to a different market, or these were 486DX chips where the math coprocessor was broken (similar to how these days AMD will sell a "tri core" processor which is a quad core processor where one of the four cores is defective)
Either way it was asinine and brilliant - they sold less expensive processors to those who wanted them and then if they wanted an upgrade they sold them a second processor.
Someone posted a link to the WIRED story yesterday and one of the responses was from Jason Bergman who worked for Shacknews at one point as a writer and later moved on to Take Two and now works for Bethesda. In the discussion he posted:
Which naturally got the "Well how could you even know?" response, to which he responded:
Granted this is from someone who used to work at Take Two, which is the company somewhat demonized in the article, so there may be some bias in play there, but it sounds like some of the stuff in this article may just be flat wrong.
That said, this article is probably the best it can be under the circumstances, given that no one can really talk too much about it because of the lawsuit.
Microsoft events involving free software are very well attended. Over the years I've acquired Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows 7 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard, SQL Server 2005/2008 Standard and Windows Server 2008 all for just showing up.
Of course it helped that the conferences themselves were also free.
Well let's give them a little credit in not requiring everyone to only use MS products and develop for MS platforms.
PHB's have no influence whatsoever on the IT department.
On the one hand if Joe Average User can't get to YouTube.com anymore then yes they'll either upgrade to IE7/8, or maybe use that crazy Firefox browser.
However, we still run across many many clients who still mandate IE6 in their workplace. No upgrading to IE7/8, no other browsers than IE6, etc.
So they'll upgrade finally now too, right?
Nope - those are also the same companies that probably block access to YouTube for bandwidth/time wasting reasons.
"I work in an industry where the way we make money is to rigidly and tightly control the flow of information. You didn't get to see the movie unless you paid for it. You didn't get to listen to the music unless you paid for it. Sure, people could dub VHS tapes or buy a bootleg or record things on cassettes, and we fought these things, but they were the exceptions. Now, thanks to the Internet and the free flow of information we don't make as much money as we used to because now it's easy to share information. Rather than adapt or maybe realize that our earnings are going to go down, I'm just going to wish the Internet didn't happen so I can go back to the glory days. Or maybe I'll send off for that time machine I see advertised in that magazine."
You must be joking.
The average person only has one email address, their work email address. They don't have Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo or anything else, they have one email address and that's their work email address. And when they switch jobs, they switch email addresses and everyone has to update their lists.
And when they're not at work, email does not exist. You send them something at 5:01 PM on a Friday and you're not getting a response from them until Monday morning.
And they only know how to use one button, "Reply All". They don't know what the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All" is, all they know is that they once used "Reply" and the person they intended the message for didn't get it, so they just use "Reply All" because that works every time.
So no, I don't doubt for one minute that this story is newer than ten years old because I work with people dumb enough to do this every day. Here at Slashdot we nailed this whole "email" thing back in the 90's. The average person hasn't and they also don't care. Some of them even view email as a nuisance they were better off without.
This is interesting seeing as how for over a decade in PC Magazine (maybe in their last issue too, I don't have it handy) some company called Cybernet has been marketing "zero footprint" PC's in the classified ads in the back of the magazine.
Similar to the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed and most of the things Billy Mays pimps on television, it's one of those things I've seen advertised to death but I've never known anyone who has owned one, nor have I seen one in use, ever.
So given that this is not a new idea at all I'm curious to see how Asus will fare with this thing...
You don't have to wait six months between activations, it's just that if you wait six months then you can activate over the Internet again, without having to make phone calls.
You won't agree with me on this but it does seem reasonable to me that Microsoft would see your pattern of constant reinstalls and figure you were up to something, like putting one license on dozens of machines or pirating it or something. People who do a lot of VM work know to install a clean image, then clone that and NewSID it to avoid the activation tussle (i.e., you want ten different copies of this one VM to test ten different things).
If however you think OS's should be free and not privy to install restrictions that's your right, too.
I've done an install of XP with a single retail key in various forms (new machines, VM's, etc.) dozens of times over the last seven years. Never had a problem. If you wait six months between activations then you don't even have to call anyone.
This legitimate key of yours - was it an OEM key? Those get tied to your motherboard. New motherboard = new machine = new copy of XP. That's why the OEM copies are so cheap, and why people should really avoid them. Meanwhile I've had at least four motherboards over the life of my retail copy of XP, to say nothing of the times I've activated it in a VM.
No, Radio Shack told all its stores to get rid of them years ago. Not just throw them away but literally destroy them, preferrably with a hammer. Seriously. My Google-Fu fails me but I'm certian I remember reading this info a few years back.
Women listen to Oprah. Women do what she tells them to. It's sort of frightening actually.
For years I was telling my wife how neat TiVo was. All the stuff it could do (and this was before TiVo had competition, before MythTV, etc.) and how we should get one. She ignored me. I don't think she was even listening. I think she heard "blah blah blah I want to spend money on gadgets" and tuned me out.
Then one day Oprah had a show where she went on and on about how cool TiVo is. Suddenly my wife wanted one. And mine being a typical marriage, that's when we bought one.
Sure her ratings are slipping but Oprah endorsing something is significant because how all the women who watch her show will buy one and do as she says.