I've had the same partition dedicated to linux on my computer for a while now and it's starting to get tight at 3GB. I tried upgrading from 8.0 to 9 from over the campus mirror but I was getting errors about disk space. This is strange because the install basically just 'rpm -U's all the packages that are the same on the system and I had 500 MB free. It seems that instead of calculating the needed space as (new package - old package) at the beginning of each rpm it was just doing a df or something and quitting the install process when there wasn't enough space.
Has anyone else tried an upgrade with limited hd space? (I searched google but the dist is too new) Is it just that Redhat 9 is significantly larger than 8?
All in all, I wasn't impressed with the network install. While 8.0 had a GUI over ftp, 9 is text-based for some reason, a real step backwards. I guess it's time to switch to a more minimalist distribution like gentoo or slack to keep my hd in order.
My younger brother knows almost nothing about computers. He was really interested in using linux after I told him the fonts stopped sucking. He really liked all the KDE games and free stuff that were on my machine back when I was living at home.
So he decided to install linux a couple months ago and partitioned his drive with an old partition magic that was lying around. He then started trying to find a distribution.
I said mandrake was pretty good the last time I used it (8.something). So he goes to their ftp site and there are a ton of CD images to choose from but what they do is poorly documented. There were release candidates and stable versions and old versions and versions for different architectures and whatever. He didn't want to do an ftp install so I told him to forget it and go with redhat 8.0.
RedHat's ftp site was even worse. The website was almost completely useless because they just wanted to sell redhat stuff. [Something that's strange is that most newbies think they go and buy linux in a box at the store and then they take it home and install it but then they end up with something that's several versions old.] My brother didn't want to buy something that was free so he tried downloading linux again. There was the same problem with a bunch of architectures and images and he eventually just started downloading something. He called me and told me the filename and it sounded like a snapshot. I told him I wouldn't be able to help him with that so he on his way to get a different set of images until he noticed that the 8.0 distribution was 5 CDs. I told him that you 'only' need 3 CDs, the other two were just source code.
At that point he gave up. A major problem with linux is that it's retardedly inaccessable if you don't know about CD images and architectures and release candidates. Even ftp was a new challenge for my brother. This problem could easily be solved if distributions would have a 'click here to download' link right on the front page that took them to an ftp site. This business with mirrors is silly, don't we have perl and php and whatever else to do that sort of thing for us? A windows or bootable cd installer for over the internet and some really good walkthrus would also help.
I remember what its like to be a newb installing Debian 2.0 for the first time (ya I know that was a bad decision). I didn't know that by server, the X-server name meant it showed video on your screen. And so I was stuck in the console for a few days figuring that out. After using linux for a long time, I think we become accustomed to the silly terminology that makes windows users cry. Getting used to bash is hard, especially when the text editors are crazy complicated compared to DOS edit. A chart in the initial documentation that starts with "This is what you need to install linux" and then has "This is the linux equivalent to program X" would be helpful.
I still have hope for linux though, last week I was doing a comp sci project on my machine and my partner saw me load up gFTP. "Did you register that?" he asked. And I replied mightily "Almost everything in linux is free!" and he was impressed. Free software that doesn't crash or run lots of stuff in the background for no reason or just suck in general still has a huge potential market, the people making just have to get their act together. It doesn't have to be really simple or look like a Fisher Price playset, we just need some decent documentation, explanation and support.
My university is in the MSDNAA (I suppose) but when I went down to get WinXP they said I could only borrow it for a night and install (by that I think they implied copy) the program then bring it back. That's a hassle, now I have to stock up (by which I mean install) on all the microsoft stuff I want during finals because I was too lazy to do it then.
For other people at MSDNAA schools: does it work this way for you or do you actually get media to keep?
Uh, and how long did - or will - it take Microsoft to release a descent operating system?
I 'm pretty sure you only needed DOS 5.0 to run Descent but 6.0 had a lot of neat utils like memmaker that helped. DOS could do more than just play Descent but not much and not well, so it really was just a Descent operating system. DOS Quake was good too though.
It's also strange that none of the replies to your excellent post interpretted it correctly.
When you look at the way the US gov is acting it seems like they know something. They're like disarm... disarm NOW... DISARM RIGHT NOW... you have 48 hours to step down. It's more than possible that the government has information that they can't share without risking the lives of their informants.
Did you know that Iraq bought a lot of playstation 2's ? It seems like they've been actively developing missile technology for a while now and maybe they had finally succeeded, making the Americans antsy.
I find it hard to believe that if it was because of oil, the US gov would be so impatient. Especially when Iraq's disarmament efforts so far had been half-assed enough to warrant action eventually.
I like saying sextuple-U for the shock value of saying SEX.
Also, ten years from now, we'll all have flying cars in our browsers.
But really, we'll just have really annoying video playing all over and the same stupid flash/java games but in 3D. There hasn't really been much innovation since I started using netscape 1.0 that hasn't been really obnoxious (flash, animated gifs(?) [I don't remember if ns1 had these but ie3 did not], audio of different kinds, pop-up windows and other javascript lameness). Although I did find frames more acceptable than most people.
Maybe I'm only remembering the bad stuff, if someone can think of neat things that webpages have now please reply. I just find that most of the sites I visit are about as effective in elinks unless I want to see a picture.
The article mentions proper spelling and grammar in e-mails. I have another problem, the use of ellipses...people...seem to think...that... randomly placing ellipses...all over...their message...will somehow... absolve them...of punctuation... when all it really does...is annoy. Did they... pick it up...from Japanese...RPG games?
What does that symbol even mean anymore? Like if one period means pause three periods must be really dramatic!
Really, it's like "Man I don't know if a comma goes here, this elipse will fool everyone! I'm brilliant!" I'm not a grammar nazi or anything, I just hate reading IM/e-mails from people that do this. Even the damn article has some ellipses in it.
So if you're one of those people who does this, please stop. For...the love... of god.
Interact also makes a card that holds 16 gamecube assloads (or 1 PS2 assload (8 megabytes)). It's pretty cool because with one memory card you can hold info for all your games since they're all designed with one assload of storage in mind. Unfortunately, Nintendo put a 128 file cap on the filesystem so you can never fill the card. I have one and had a similar one for the dreamcast and they have both never lost any data.
Beware of 3rd party memory cards though, sometimes they suck and lose your data, buy them at a local store so you can get a replacement/refund if necessary. Actually, I have a dreamcast VMU that loses its data every 2 weeks or so, so 1st party stuff can suck too.
Anyways, memory cards are a scam, you can buy your weight in floppy disks for about $20 now.
Back when I was running CorelLinux 1.1, I was getting tired of it and tried an apt-get potato. Bad idea. It messed up everything. I ended up installing windows, installing BeOS 5 Personal and then deleting windows.
In macroeconomics this is called chunky capital. If you need to improve the performance of your plant and equipment (in this case machine power) you can't improve it incrementally as you go, you have to buy a lot more performance than you really need at that point so there will be room to grow. The problem with fiber optics and (seemingly) video cards is that they're super chunky capital, the next generation is so much better than the previous that once you upgrade there's no need to do so again for a while, hurting the industry that produces the product and doesn't plan ahead properly.
For examply, many internet links are 'fast enough' so that unless some new bandwidth sucking application comes along, there will be no reason to upgrade, leading to a point of saturation (currently, people for whom dial-up is adequate don't need broadband). If some new faster connection came along, a lot of people wouldn't care unless the company was much better at competing with services and price. So even though your cable company might be faster, most people would be interested the slower adsl provider if their service/price/other factors were better.
Back to video cards, it doesn't matter how fast ATI cards are, if they're not affordable or have lame drivers and support most people won't care. (note: I'm not saying this is the case). Right now, the last generation is fast enough so the only way they can sell this card is to attract a niche market.
I remember how the Savage2000 was really fast in quake3 but the drivers were in beta at the card's release so noone bothered buying it.
note: I've only ever taken one economics course so feel free to shoot me down.
It's funny to think of the Amish or some other technology avoiding society in this situation. They probably landed in North America and were like "Ya we don't need to adapt that much, it's not like staying behind in buggy technology would hurt us much" and then the industrial revolution came along and they were like "Fuck!".
My dad uses msn messenger (or whatever its called that comes with XP) to hold meetings with people from the company he works for (he's a financial advisor). The only problem is that no one involved is apt enough for everyone to get their machines to work when they want to do something fancy like teleconferencing. In his case he couldn't get the router to open the ports he needed, but there have been problems from the other side of the line as well. The technology is all there but the expertise is lacking.
So if your thinking of implementing something like that with a bunch of non-computer savvy middle aged people without some amount tech support, forget it.
If you live in Ontario try going to a local high school, they just trashed a lot of old IBM's for some newer pentium stuff two years ago. All of the keyboards on the old machines were IBM model-M's with keys that you could shift around. I figured they were mostly so IBM engineers could write swears and insults on eachothers keyboards between extended arguments over eachother's sexual orientation but that seems to be just a high school thing. Anyways the typing labs were goddamn loud when I was in grade 9, imagine 35 IBM keyboards all going at full capacity in a room with no soft surfaces what-so-ever to absorb the sound.
See if your local school board will sell/donate/give away/tolerate the theft of some of these keyboards. I don't think they'd mind a trade or something since as far as I know these computers are being used for teaching the insides of a PC.
I was just thinking of this a couple days ago and now this article pops up on slashdot. I think it would be incredibly efficient to be able to click a mouse button or select an option on a pop-up menu that would display a tree with the last branch at the position of your cursor. I often find myself clicking back to a site so I could find one that branched off it (especially if I took a wrong turn). I use tabs but find it's a sloppy remedy since I have to register wether or not this site is worth opening in a new window.
I even thought about making a modification to ELinks (awesome text browser BTW) but then figured I was too lazy to see it through to completion.
Also, speaking of input systems, I'm addicted to mouse gestures. Sometimes I'll be in some file manager and I'll right click + drag right to go back before realizing that it doesn't work there. This kind of interface confusion is most befuddling in windows because middle clicking in IE brings up a handy scroll tool that lets you scroll really fast while middle clicking in the file explorer does not. I thought they were supposed to be the same program!
Anyways, I'm on a tangent of a tangent so I'll click submit.
I feel the opposite way. I was in the states a couple weeks ago and aside from the shiny patch, I couldn't believe how much the money looked like play money. It looks like you could print out a 20, mark it with a pink high-lighter and a cashier who has just spent the entire day handling money would never notice it. Most of the anti-copy measures on the bills seem like they need a magnifying glass or very close inspection to find. That's all neat if you're thinking about international conspiracies with briefcases full of money like in some movie, but most counterfit bills are passed over in small amounts at local stores. (It has to end up somewhere, right?)
That being said, the new Canadian money isn't that great either, while it does have neat shiny patches, brail, little tiny print all over, lots of colour, and other things, they look like coupons. The new 5 even has children playing hockey on it.. ugh. I'd rather have that Canadian Tire guy with the silly hat. And we still have the queen on our money even though we have nothing at all to do with England anymore. Why couldn't the Bank of Canada put some Canadian scientists or writers on there? They deserve a lot more recognition.
I think it's all a plot to encourage spending by making the tangible currency unbearable, what with the gay bills and gigantic coins.
If you go to the link on the parent, Bruce McIndoe, Marty Pfinsgraff and Greg Meyer all look exactly alike. The most probable conclusion is that they're all part of some secret government cloning program.
The salon article makes fun of the probability that future civilizations will want to dig up the burial site more if we put a monument there. The major difference, however, between our burial and historical ones is that ours really is cursed. If we put huge diagrams of the symptoms of radiation sickness (figures vomitting, losing hair, becoming frail, etc., eventually leading to death) all over the place then when somebody actually has this happen to them after spending some time on the site, they'll get out of there pretty fast and probably tell their friends to stay away.
Also, we need only worry about civilizations more primitive than our own, as any other civ will know about radiation and why we marked the site. This means that the rosetta stone idea, while making for a neat time capsule, will be wasted since we never bothered to research archeological sites in that much depth until recently (a couple centuries or so ago). The entire idea of trying to convey in plain text that it is not the site but something under the site which eminates dangerous energy rays seems far too abstract, we should instead concentrate of conveying the idea to people that the land itself is sick.
The problem with my approach is that the land isn't that sick, the government article mentions that any radiation detected could be confused with background radiation. We should make it more radioactive on purpose to prevent permanent settlement, which is a major possibility if people of the future start thinking the site is sacred. Not marking the place at all is also not a very good option, as there is a good probability imho that somebody over the next 10,000 years will stay there for a while.
Does anyone find it odd that an article talking about video game crashes says nothing about all those expensive 32bit systems that flooded the market around 94-96 (my dating may be off) with prices that were outrageous at the time. There's no mention of the Panasonic Real 3DO, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega 32X/CD or the Phillips/Magnavox CD-I only the Playstation and Saturn. Perhaps more research was needed.
I find the Atari Jaguar's history most interesting right now: a system whos 2 32bit processors made it very powerful and also impossible to program a decent looking game on. Then there were also the 3DO and CD-I, complete multimedia experiences with kerioke additions and all. Sounds like the Playstation 2 albeit to a more extreme level. I find it ironic that Sony eventually beat out the Jaguar and it's competitors with the Playstation only to repeat Atari and company with the Playstation 2, however the market and developers seem more friendly this time around.
Sega also looks to be repeating the past, the Dreamcast looks to have a fairly established user base (including myself, it's neat) but at the cost of less powerful hardware. They've done the same with the Saturn, Sega CD, 32X and Genesis. There is also a matter of capital, the only Dreamcast commercials I ever see are in that one slot during the simpsons and the company hasn't made a profit in 4 years, making for some pretty lamo marketing, especially when it looks to be the only console for under US$150 in this generation, judging by component prices.
But then again maybe it would have been a bigger mistake for these companies to have looked at the past. The Gamecube will have a proprietary DVD drive but it won't play movies, which is a huge selling point for the Playstation 2 and helps justify the rediculous price tag. Nintendo says it's because people want a game machine, not a multimedia machine. Hey, didn't the CD-I have a couple of Zelda games? They also said cartridges would be far better than CD's a while ago because there would be no load times and look where that got them. The N64 would have been a great CD based system.
Instead of comparing these systems to some old 1984 consoles with a completely different market and completely different games maybe the writer should have focused on more recent events, especially with the changing demographics. 16 year olds who were born in 1984 have a lot more cash to lay down on a system then their parents did, or even their siblings of 6 years ago. The writer also takes for granted that every console generation has a lot of competitors that get weeded out. A crash seems very unlikely with this economy.
PS I realize the CD-I wasn't really meant to be a gaming machine but it made for good comparing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the same partition dedicated to linux on my computer for a while now and it's starting to get tight at 3GB. I tried upgrading from 8.0 to 9 from over the campus mirror but I was getting errors about disk space. This is strange because the install basically just 'rpm -U's all the packages that are the same on the system and I had 500 MB free. It seems that instead of calculating the needed space as (new package - old package) at the beginning of each rpm it was just doing a df or something and quitting the install process when there wasn't enough space.
Has anyone else tried an upgrade with limited hd space? (I searched google but the dist is too new) Is it just that Redhat 9 is significantly larger than 8?
All in all, I wasn't impressed with the network install. While 8.0 had a GUI over ftp, 9 is text-based for some reason, a real step backwards. I guess it's time to switch to a more minimalist distribution like gentoo or slack to keep my hd in order.
My younger brother knows almost nothing about computers. He was really interested in using linux after I told him the fonts stopped sucking. He really liked all the KDE games and free stuff that were on my machine back when I was living at home.
So he decided to install linux a couple months ago and partitioned his drive with an old partition magic that was lying around. He then started trying to find a distribution.
I said mandrake was pretty good the last time I used it (8.something). So he goes to their ftp site and there are a ton of CD images to choose from but what they do is poorly documented. There were release candidates and stable versions and old versions and versions for different architectures and whatever. He didn't want to do an ftp install so I told him to forget it and go with redhat 8.0.
RedHat's ftp site was even worse. The website was almost completely useless because they just wanted to sell redhat stuff. [Something that's strange is that most newbies think they go and buy linux in a box at the store and then they take it home and install it but then they end up with something that's several versions old.] My brother didn't want to buy something that was free so he tried downloading linux again. There was the same problem with a bunch of architectures and images and he eventually just started downloading something. He called me and told me the filename and it sounded like a snapshot. I told him I wouldn't be able to help him with that so he on his way to get a different set of images until he noticed that the 8.0 distribution was 5 CDs. I told him that you 'only' need 3 CDs, the other two were just source code.
At that point he gave up. A major problem with linux is that it's retardedly inaccessable if you don't know about CD images and architectures and release candidates. Even ftp was a new challenge for my brother. This problem could easily be solved if distributions would have a 'click here to download' link right on the front page that took them to an ftp site. This business with mirrors is silly, don't we have perl and php and whatever else to do that sort of thing for us? A windows or bootable cd installer for over the internet and some really good walkthrus would also help.
I remember what its like to be a newb installing Debian 2.0 for the first time (ya I know that was a bad decision). I didn't know that by server, the X-server name meant it showed video on your screen. And so I was stuck in the console for a few days figuring that out. After using linux for a long time, I think we become accustomed to the silly terminology that makes windows users cry. Getting used to bash is hard, especially when the text editors are crazy complicated compared to DOS edit. A chart in the initial documentation that starts with "This is what you need to install linux" and then has "This is the linux equivalent to program X" would be helpful.
I still have hope for linux though, last week I was doing a comp sci project on my machine and my partner saw me load up gFTP. "Did you register that?" he asked. And I replied mightily "Almost everything in linux is free!" and he was impressed. Free software that doesn't crash or run lots of stuff in the background for no reason or just suck in general still has a huge potential market, the people making just have to get their act together. It doesn't have to be really simple or look like a Fisher Price playset, we just need some decent documentation, explanation and support.
My university is in the MSDNAA (I suppose) but when I went down to get WinXP they said I could only borrow it for a night and install (by that I think they implied copy) the program then bring it back. That's a hassle, now I have to stock up (by which I mean install) on all the microsoft stuff I want during finals because I was too lazy to do it then.
For other people at MSDNAA schools: does it work this way for you or do you actually get media to keep?
I 'm pretty sure you only needed DOS 5.0 to run Descent but 6.0 had a lot of neat utils like memmaker that helped. DOS could do more than just play Descent but not much and not well, so it really was just a Descent operating system. DOS Quake was good too though.
It's also strange that none of the replies to your excellent post interpretted it correctly.
When you look at the way the US gov is acting it seems like they know something. They're like disarm... disarm NOW... DISARM RIGHT NOW... you have 48 hours to step down. It's more than possible that the government has information that they can't share without risking the lives of their informants.
Did you know that Iraq bought a lot of playstation 2's ? It seems like they've been actively developing missile technology for a while now and maybe they had finally succeeded, making the Americans antsy.
I find it hard to believe that if it was because of oil, the US gov would be so impatient. Especially when Iraq's disarmament efforts so far had been half-assed enough to warrant action eventually.
I like saying sextuple-U for the shock value of saying SEX .
Also, ten years from now, we'll all have flying cars in our browsers.
But really, we'll just have really annoying video playing all over and the same stupid flash/java games but in 3D. There hasn't really been much innovation since I started using netscape 1.0 that hasn't been really obnoxious (flash, animated gifs(?) [I don't remember if ns1 had these but ie3 did not], audio of different kinds, pop-up windows and other javascript lameness). Although I did find frames more acceptable than most people.
Maybe I'm only remembering the bad stuff, if someone can think of neat things that webpages have now please reply. I just find that most of the sites I visit are about as effective in elinks unless I want to see a picture.
So what kind of benefits does an evil henchman get? I hope they cover funeral expenses & danger pay, you guys seem awfully expendable.
You needed 80 jiggawatts of power to properly fuel the flux capacitator!
The article mentions proper spelling and grammar in e-mails. I have another problem, the use of ellipses...people...seem to think...that... randomly placing ellipses...all over...their message...will somehow... absolve them...of punctuation... when all it really does...is annoy. Did they... pick it up...from Japanese...RPG games?
What does that symbol even mean anymore? Like if one period means pause three periods must be really dramatic!
Really, it's like "Man I don't know if a comma goes here, this elipse will fool everyone! I'm brilliant!" I'm not a grammar nazi or anything, I just hate reading IM/e-mails from people that do this. Even the damn article has some ellipses in it.
So if you're one of those people who does this, please stop. For...the love... of god.
Interact also makes a card that holds 16 gamecube assloads (or 1 PS2 assload (8 megabytes)). It's pretty cool because with one memory card you can hold info for all your games since they're all designed with one assload of storage in mind. Unfortunately, Nintendo put a 128 file cap on the filesystem so you can never fill the card. I have one and had a similar one for the dreamcast and they have both never lost any data.
Beware of 3rd party memory cards though, sometimes they suck and lose your data, buy them at a local store so you can get a replacement/refund if necessary. Actually, I have a dreamcast VMU that loses its data every 2 weeks or so, so 1st party stuff can suck too.
Anyways, memory cards are a scam, you can buy your weight in floppy disks for about $20 now.
Back when I was running CorelLinux 1.1, I was getting tired of it and tried an apt-get potato. Bad idea. It messed up everything. I ended up installing windows, installing BeOS 5 Personal and then deleting windows.
In macroeconomics this is called chunky capital. If you need to improve the performance of your plant and equipment (in this case machine power) you can't improve it incrementally as you go, you have to buy a lot more performance than you really need at that point so there will be room to grow. The problem with fiber optics and (seemingly) video cards is that they're super chunky capital, the next generation is so much better than the previous that once you upgrade there's no need to do so again for a while, hurting the industry that produces the product and doesn't plan ahead properly.
For examply, many internet links are 'fast enough' so that unless some new bandwidth sucking application comes along, there will be no reason to upgrade, leading to a point of saturation (currently, people for whom dial-up is adequate don't need broadband). If some new faster connection came along, a lot of people wouldn't care unless the company was much better at competing with services and price. So even though your cable company might be faster, most people would be interested the slower adsl provider if their service/price/other factors were better.
Back to video cards, it doesn't matter how fast ATI cards are, if they're not affordable or have lame drivers and support most people won't care. (note: I'm not saying this is the case). Right now, the last generation is fast enough so the only way they can sell this card is to attract a niche market.
I remember how the Savage2000 was really fast in quake3 but the drivers were in beta at the card's release so noone bothered buying it.
note: I've only ever taken one economics course so feel free to shoot me down.
It's funny to think of the Amish or some other technology avoiding society in this situation. They probably landed in North America and were like "Ya we don't need to adapt that much, it's not like staying behind in buggy technology would hurt us much" and then the industrial revolution came along and they were like "Fuck!".
My dad uses msn messenger (or whatever its called that comes with XP) to hold meetings with people from the company he works for (he's a financial advisor). The only problem is that no one involved is apt enough for everyone to get their machines to work when they want to do something fancy like teleconferencing. In his case he couldn't get the router to open the ports he needed, but there have been problems from the other side of the line as well. The technology is all there but the expertise is lacking.
So if your thinking of implementing something like that with a bunch of non-computer savvy middle aged people without some amount tech support, forget it.
If you live in Ontario try going to a local high school, they just trashed a lot of old IBM's for some newer pentium stuff two years ago. All of the keyboards on the old machines were IBM model-M's with keys that you could shift around. I figured they were mostly so IBM engineers could write swears and insults on eachothers keyboards between extended arguments over eachother's sexual orientation but that seems to be just a high school thing. Anyways the typing labs were goddamn loud when I was in grade 9, imagine 35 IBM keyboards all going at full capacity in a room with no soft surfaces what-so-ever to absorb the sound.
See if your local school board will sell/donate/give away/tolerate the theft of some of these keyboards. I don't think they'd mind a trade or something since as far as I know these computers are being used for teaching the insides of a PC.
I was just thinking of this a couple days ago and now this article pops up on slashdot. I think it would be incredibly efficient to be able to click a mouse button or select an option on a pop-up menu that would display a tree with the last branch at the position of your cursor. I often find myself clicking back to a site so I could find one that branched off it (especially if I took a wrong turn). I use tabs but find it's a sloppy remedy since I have to register wether or not this site is worth opening in a new window.
I even thought about making a modification to ELinks (awesome text browser BTW) but then figured I was too lazy to see it through to completion.
Also, speaking of input systems, I'm addicted to mouse gestures. Sometimes I'll be in some file manager and I'll right click + drag right to go back before realizing that it doesn't work there. This kind of interface confusion is most befuddling in windows because middle clicking in IE brings up a handy scroll tool that lets you scroll really fast while middle clicking in the file explorer does not. I thought they were supposed to be the same program!
Anyways, I'm on a tangent of a tangent so I'll click submit.
This is important to national defence.
A laser mounted on the moon: China could take that out in a half hour, but a laser beam on mars: now that's something!
They should have waited for the Point Release.
I feel the opposite way. I was in the states a couple weeks ago and aside from the shiny patch, I couldn't believe how much the money looked like play money. It looks like you could print out a 20, mark it with a pink high-lighter and a cashier who has just spent the entire day handling money would never notice it. Most of the anti-copy measures on the bills seem like they need a magnifying glass or very close inspection to find. That's all neat if you're thinking about international conspiracies with briefcases full of money like in some movie, but most counterfit bills are passed over in small amounts at local stores. (It has to end up somewhere, right?)
That being said, the new Canadian money isn't that great either, while it does have neat shiny patches, brail, little tiny print all over, lots of colour, and other things, they look like coupons. The new 5 even has children playing hockey on it.. ugh. I'd rather have that Canadian Tire guy with the silly hat. And we still have the queen on our money even though we have nothing at all to do with England anymore. Why couldn't the Bank of Canada put some Canadian scientists or writers on there? They deserve a lot more recognition.
I think it's all a plot to encourage spending by making the tangible currency unbearable, what with the gay bills and gigantic coins.
If you go to the link on the parent, Bruce McIndoe, Marty Pfinsgraff and Greg Meyer all look exactly alike. The most probable conclusion is that they're all part of some secret government cloning program.
The salon article makes fun of the probability that future civilizations will want to dig up the burial site more if we put a monument there. The major difference, however, between our burial and historical ones is that ours really is cursed. If we put huge diagrams of the symptoms of radiation sickness (figures vomitting, losing hair, becoming frail, etc., eventually leading to death) all over the place then when somebody actually has this happen to them after spending some time on the site, they'll get out of there pretty fast and probably tell their friends to stay away.
Also, we need only worry about civilizations more primitive than our own, as any other civ will know about radiation and why we marked the site. This means that the rosetta stone idea, while making for a neat time capsule, will be wasted since we never bothered to research archeological sites in that much depth until recently (a couple centuries or so ago). The entire idea of trying to convey in plain text that it is not the site but something under the site which eminates dangerous energy rays seems far too abstract, we should instead concentrate of conveying the idea to people that the land itself is sick.
The problem with my approach is that the land isn't that sick, the government article mentions that any radiation detected could be confused with background radiation. We should make it more radioactive on purpose to prevent permanent settlement, which is a major possibility if people of the future start thinking the site is sacred. Not marking the place at all is also not a very good option, as there is a good probability imho that somebody over the next 10,000 years will stay there for a while.
Does anyone find it odd that an article talking about video game crashes says nothing about all those expensive 32bit systems that flooded the market around 94-96 (my dating may be off) with prices that were outrageous at the time. There's no mention of the Panasonic Real 3DO, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega 32X/CD or the Phillips/Magnavox CD-I only the Playstation and Saturn. Perhaps more research was needed.
I find the Atari Jaguar's history most interesting right now: a system whos 2 32bit processors made it very powerful and also impossible to program a decent looking game on. Then there were also the 3DO and CD-I, complete multimedia experiences with kerioke additions and all. Sounds like the Playstation 2 albeit to a more extreme level. I find it ironic that Sony eventually beat out the Jaguar and it's competitors with the Playstation only to repeat Atari and company with the Playstation 2, however the market and developers seem more friendly this time around.
Sega also looks to be repeating the past, the Dreamcast looks to have a fairly established user base (including myself, it's neat) but at the cost of less powerful hardware. They've done the same with the Saturn, Sega CD, 32X and Genesis. There is also a matter of capital, the only Dreamcast commercials I ever see are in that one slot during the simpsons and the company hasn't made a profit in 4 years, making for some pretty lamo marketing, especially when it looks to be the only console for under US$150 in this generation, judging by component prices.
But then again maybe it would have been a bigger mistake for these companies to have looked at the past. The Gamecube will have a proprietary DVD drive but it won't play movies, which is a huge selling point for the Playstation 2 and helps justify the rediculous price tag. Nintendo says it's because people want a game machine, not a multimedia machine. Hey, didn't the CD-I have a couple of Zelda games? They also said cartridges would be far better than CD's a while ago because there would be no load times and look where that got them. The N64 would have been a great CD based system.
Instead of comparing these systems to some old 1984 consoles with a completely different market and completely different games maybe the writer should have focused on more recent events, especially with the changing demographics. 16 year olds who were born in 1984 have a lot more cash to lay down on a system then their parents did, or even their siblings of 6 years ago. The writer also takes for granted that every console generation has a lot of competitors that get weeded out. A crash seems very unlikely with this economy.
PS I realize the CD-I wasn't really meant to be a gaming machine but it made for good comparing.