Yeah, I've thought about moving up to Hollywood for the cheaper rent, but the people up there are pretty freaky scary even by my standards. I currently pay $1000/month for a *room*, in a less happening, but decent neighborhood in LA proper, and I make $40k/year. Yeah, it sucks, but barring moving (with no guarantee I'll find a job that even pays that much), I really don't have a choice but to make do.
My hypothesis is that the internet gives people the anonymity that allows them to override the "do the right thing" feelings that almost all of have when interacting with real, physical people. It's that same thing that allows someone to deride someone online that would result in a severe beating in real-life that enables it.
Most people will never meet the people who write the games/software. As far as they're concerned, their brain can disconnect the product from the producer. With a girl handing you a drink, you have a face and a person to contend with.
I'm slowly going the Luddite route in many ways. The Internet is at once an enabler of social interaction on such a level never before thought possible, and yet at the same time it further entrenches the mentality of staying inside and never meeting the people immediately around you. It's a bizarre conundrum.
For the cracking teams, it's a challenge. For the casual leech, there are a million rationalizations, most of which boil down to "I'm too cheap/poor to buy it." Many are sorta justifiable, many are not. I'm poor.
My old 2 year school still teaches COBOL, RPG, and AIX classes (Southwest Tennessee Community College) and even offers a 2 year A.S. degree in those technologies. The University of Memphis used to teach COBOL in the MIS track, but I have a feeling they've jumped on the.NET bandwagon. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but Memphis, TN has a lot of legacy mainframes and one of my former employer still churns out around 10k lines of new COBOL code a year, at minimum.
What a lot of folks also don't realize is, you don't just rip out a multi-million dollar mainframe system and just replace it with something new. It's also not as simple as "just coding it in Java" and deploying on that hardware. Hell, even writing it in C has issues on many of these machines. The mainframe I was exposed to didn't support the full ASCII character set and you had to use trigraphs. You can't just "apt-get compiler-for-language-of-choice" on these machines, nor download a.msi and get an instant installer.
These are mainframes. They don't even have a filesystem that you would recognize, much less a bash prompt. JCL anyone?
The point is, it's not a simple matter of just porting the software into a modern language. You'll also have to build out the entire hardware system, write the software, test extensively, and then run both concurrently to ensure consistency, and all of that costs money. Lots and lots of money. If what you have works for what you need it for, there's no impetus to change until something like this comes along. However, I'd be willing to bet it's easier and cheaper to change *policy* (the laws) than to scrap the old system completely and rebuild it from scratch.
Yeah, this is pretty much what everyone warned about when DRM reared it's ugly head a few years ago.
However, that's not all it's good for. I use Napster. I don't buy tracks from Napster (well, I might do it now that they offer DRM-free MP3s), but I do use their subscription service. It's like an on-demand radio station. I can download my favorite tracks to play offline (for a month or so), and I also use the "To-Go" service with my Cowon D2. I spend about what I'd normally spend a month on CDs and I find the selection to be quite good. If I quit subscribing, I don't get to listen to the music I 'downloaded', but honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. I've found I just don't care too much about the physical product anymore. I've been steadily reducing my physical footprint over the years and CDs add clutter. Clutter is bad.
So, if you bought your DRMd music, you get what you deserve. As a subscription service, it works extremely well for what it is.
Those are COUGARS, not mountain lions. Still every-bit man-eaters, though. One got ahold of me one time when I was out at this bar and I had to give up the leg to get out alive.
/* Your $2000 Macbook is worth about $340 since it's 5 years old (30% per year). */
I'm trying not to nitpick, but just go peruse your craigslist mac listings and you'll find that your numbers are completely off the mark. Macs hold their value exceedingly well. Dual G4 1.x machines still regularly command a $500-$700 price in Los Angeles, not to mention other markets. It is a sad fact. If you're going to go mac, you can do exactly what you're advocating with your PCs: Buy new, then every 2 years, sell before Applecare runs out for 80-90% of what you paid, buy another new (better) one. You really can't do that with PCs because the resale value is complete shit for most vendor machines, but you can generally get better prices if you part out your homebuilds as most homebuilders tend to use higher quality/priced items to begin with.
Are you serious? I've never gotten a single one of my Sony branded laptops (Sony 505FX, Sony R505J series, and TR1A) to boot from any USB Optical drive other than the official Sony drives. The Sony PCMCIA CD-ROMs work, but AFAIK, nothing else is recognized at boot. I've heard rumors that a firewire optical will work just fine, but I'm reluctant to invest another $30-40 in something that may or may not work and will only be used to install an OS on an aging laptop. If you've got some info, spill it. There's a ton of us 505 series owners that'd love to hear it.
While $300 is quite excessive, I've gotten *great* usage of $60 Monster instrument cables. I play drunk punk-rock and roll. My gigs are beer filled, abusive, and cables get crushed, pulled, ripped, etc. Monster has a "no-questions asked" replacement policy and you can find them damn near anywhere. I've replaced 4 cables for free in less than a year, which isn't so bad because I generally go in to pick up strings and picks anyway. That's less than $20 a cable, so I'm already ahead. Soundwise, I can't tell the difference, but that's not why I bought it.:)
From Blizzard: 1) Money doesn't buy you happiness. 2) Money will buy you lots of shit that make you happy. 3) Did I mention we have lots of money? I know it's not really a lesson, but it's our list and we're rich, beyotch! 4) Money isn't very flavorful. We had a buffet lunch of money once and after the 10th or 11th thousand dollar salad, I had to switch to the lo-carb dressing. Ugh. 5) Money. 6) If you have money, girls (some) will like you for it. As long as you have a proper pre-nup, wear rubbers (always) or get a Vasectomy to reduce risk, enjoy the ride. 7) It's amazing what you can do with money. This one time, we filled the company pool up with crisp dollar bills. The first guy to dive in got massive paper cuts from the crispness. Wow, like millions of dollars worth of cuts. We had to drive him to the hospital, while we used $100 bills to try and stem the flow of blood. 8) The morning commute into the office is so much nicer in my Ferrari. Vroom Vroom my ass, Mazda. 9) Money money money money money! 10) Sometimes, you have more money than you can spend. Paper crafts are so much more fun! 11) Nerf warlocks, bitches.
Sounds like a great marketing ploy to me. Imagine all the unique email addresses he collects every day. I've heard lists of valid, unique email addresses can go for some decent money from scammers/spammers...
Do you also believe authors (also artists in their own right) should work other jobs and spend their spare time traveling to book store to book store, for signings and readings day after day?
Did you read my post or is this just a cut and paste response? I'm not complaining about the eee, merely the notorious lack of RAM expandability on various Sony products. For example, the C1 series I don't believe can take more than 768megs RAM, the 505 series that I have only take 368 max. Believe me, the more RAM I can throw in a machine, the better, because if you'd have read my post you would realize that I need a machine for various video/audio editing and performance work. I'm not in the EEE's target audience. My hope is that with the introduction of $299 EEEs that Sony will start to release more computers in a similar form factor and knock the prices down. An $899 C2D-based, 2 gig RAM, 4 hour battery life, 8-10" widescreen LCD, would do wonders for my particular usage.
Yeah, I know it's cool to hate on big companies. However.../* Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops */
Over-priced? Maybe. But full-fat? Are you not aware that Sony is one of the few laptop manufacturers who continually pushes the envelope for smaller, lighter, thinner and has been doing so for as long as I've been buying laptops? The 505 series, the Picturebooks, and I'm typing this on a Sony TR1A which is also my multimedia workstation (I make music and videos). If it weren't for Sony (and Panasonic, Fujitsu, IBM/Lenovo (x-series)), we probably wouldn't even be seeing the eee. Maybe you're just referring to all the bells and whistles, but these days, what does that mean? The eee comes pretty loaded by my standards, but is woefully short on ram and storage.
I'd like to see the eee succeed, in only that I'd like to see that form factor coming from Sony, et al but with more modern components. I dream of a re-release of the Picturebook with a ULV Core 2 Duo, a 4 hour battery life, and capacity for 2 gigs of RAM, starting at $899.;)
At the very least, it just means that if the eee succeeds, it might drive price points lower so that the profit margins on the ultraportables might not be as good as they are now. Which, from a consumer standpoint is a good thing.
Actually, yes. Playing with "vegan" jello-shots has been a small hobby of mine for a few weeks. As another poster mentioned, it's about not trying to get greedy with the alcohol. a Couple tablespoons of agar (bring to a boil in a simple syrup), plus your alcohol (I also have been adding fruit purees.. Don't go overboard on things like passion fruit for various reasons, but it won't set if you do) and stick it in the fridge. I actually have a bottle of pernod at h ome I was going to work with this week... Funny how you mention that...
Sorta, not really. Vegan "ice cream" has come a long way over the past few years, from being disgusting "Well, it's sorta like the real thing" to some very passable stuff, usually made from Soy Milk. So, a vegan tagging the article would be quite right in doing so, even though I think a !vegetarian tag would also be more appropriate as you stated. The argument you present, however, is mostly semantics and really "counter-productive" to anything unless you're just bored.
Leave the vegans alone. They get enough shit with their lives as it is.:)
(BTW, if you don't like gelatin, try working with agar agar. I've been messing around with some various recipes as I've got a ton of vegan friends and it's working out decently well. It sets up much firmer, so you have to be more careful with it, but once you understand that, it makes a pretty good substitute.)
I've been noticing for years the trend of "wussifying" our youth. You're right, when we were kids (I'm in my mid-30s), I played in ditches, played soccer, got beat-up by the neighborhood bully, rode bikes on the trails and make "jumps", played lots of hide and go seek or kick the can, we ran home from school, ran down the street, just being kids.
You know what ruined it for me?
Air Conditioning. Cheap electricity, Central A/C, and summers just got too hot to bother going out in. Heating in the winter made going out in it too cold, nevermind our forebears survived quite handily. A couple years ago, I started an experiment. I quit using the A/C except for when I was expecting company. I opened up my windows, turned on a fan to circulate the air, and wouldn't you know it? I was hot, but after a couple weeks, I got used to it. Walking into an office building felt like I was walking into a meat freezer. My electricity bill halved, if not more. I was amazed. I went out for walks more. I lost 30 pounds that summer, because it was no longer "too hot" to go outside.
SO, I don't think it's video games, for sure. Video games are just what you do when it's too hot to go outside, and it becomes a habit. Turn off your a/c, let your athlon crank your room to 120 degrees, and you'll *want* to go do something else for awhile.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've thought about moving up to Hollywood for the cheaper rent, but the people up there are pretty freaky scary even by my standards. I currently pay $1000/month for a *room*, in a less happening, but decent neighborhood in LA proper, and I make $40k/year. Yeah, it sucks, but barring moving (with no guarantee I'll find a job that even pays that much), I really don't have a choice but to make do.
The Lenovo S10 just went up on the Lenovo site today at $439. It's another ~10" screen with similar specs to the MSI Wind. GG race to the bottom!
My hypothesis is that the internet gives people the anonymity that allows them to override the "do the right thing" feelings that almost all of have when interacting with real, physical people. It's that same thing that allows someone to deride someone online that would result in a severe beating in real-life that enables it.
Most people will never meet the people who write the games/software. As far as they're concerned, their brain can disconnect the product from the producer. With a girl handing you a drink, you have a face and a person to contend with.
I'm slowly going the Luddite route in many ways. The Internet is at once an enabler of social interaction on such a level never before thought possible, and yet at the same time it further entrenches the mentality of staying inside and never meeting the people immediately around you. It's a bizarre conundrum.
Because we can.
-Pirates
For the cracking teams, it's a challenge. For the casual leech, there are a million rationalizations, most of which boil down to "I'm too cheap/poor to buy it." Many are sorta justifiable, many are not. I'm poor.
My old 2 year school still teaches COBOL, RPG, and AIX classes (Southwest Tennessee Community College) and even offers a 2 year A.S. degree in those technologies. The University of Memphis used to teach COBOL in the MIS track, but I have a feeling they've jumped on the .NET bandwagon. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but Memphis, TN has a lot of legacy mainframes and one of my former employer still churns out around 10k lines of new COBOL code a year, at minimum.
What a lot of folks also don't realize is, you don't just rip out a multi-million dollar mainframe system and just replace it with something new. It's also not as simple as "just coding it in Java" and deploying on that hardware. Hell, even writing it in C has issues on many of these machines. The mainframe I was exposed to didn't support the full ASCII character set and you had to use trigraphs. You can't just "apt-get compiler-for-language-of-choice" on these machines, nor download a .msi and get an instant installer.
These are mainframes. They don't even have a filesystem that you would recognize, much less a bash prompt. JCL anyone?
The point is, it's not a simple matter of just porting the software into a modern language. You'll also have to build out the entire hardware system, write the software, test extensively, and then run both concurrently to ensure consistency, and all of that costs money. Lots and lots of money. If what you have works for what you need it for, there's no impetus to change until something like this comes along. However, I'd be willing to bet it's easier and cheaper to change *policy* (the laws) than to scrap the old system completely and rebuild it from scratch.
Come on people. It's not like this is rocket sci----OH. Nevermind, carry-on.
There's a few games that I quite enjoy that are java applets.
NES Golf
Stuff over at Puppy Games using LWJGL
etc.
So, don't knock it.
Yeah, this is pretty much what everyone warned about when DRM reared it's ugly head a few years ago.
However, that's not all it's good for. I use Napster. I don't buy tracks from Napster (well, I might do it now that they offer DRM-free MP3s), but I do use their subscription service. It's like an on-demand radio station. I can download my favorite tracks to play offline (for a month or so), and I also use the "To-Go" service with my Cowon D2. I spend about what I'd normally spend a month on CDs and I find the selection to be quite good. If I quit subscribing, I don't get to listen to the music I 'downloaded', but honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. I've found I just don't care too much about the physical product anymore. I've been steadily reducing my physical footprint over the years and CDs add clutter. Clutter is bad.
So, if you bought your DRMd music, you get what you deserve. As a subscription service, it works extremely well for what it is.
I'm talking about 40+ year old women on the prowl for 20 somethings. Figures a joke about sex would go right over a /.'ers head. :(
/* with a few in south Florida */
Those are COUGARS, not mountain lions. Still every-bit man-eaters, though. One got ahold of me one time when I was out at this bar and I had to give up the leg to get out alive.
/* Your $2000 Macbook is worth about $340 since it's 5 years old (30% per year). */
I'm trying not to nitpick, but just go peruse your craigslist mac listings and you'll find that your numbers are completely off the mark. Macs hold their value exceedingly well. Dual G4 1.x machines still regularly command a $500-$700 price in Los Angeles, not to mention other markets. It is a sad fact. If you're going to go mac, you can do exactly what you're advocating with your PCs: Buy new, then every 2 years, sell before Applecare runs out for 80-90% of what you paid, buy another new (better) one. You really can't do that with PCs because the resale value is complete shit for most vendor machines, but you can generally get better prices if you part out your homebuilds as most homebuilders tend to use higher quality/priced items to begin with.
Are you serious? I've never gotten a single one of my Sony branded laptops (Sony 505FX, Sony R505J series, and TR1A) to boot from any USB Optical drive other than the official Sony drives. The Sony PCMCIA CD-ROMs work, but AFAIK, nothing else is recognized at boot. I've heard rumors that a firewire optical will work just fine, but I'm reluctant to invest another $30-40 in something that may or may not work and will only be used to install an OS on an aging laptop. If you've got some info, spill it. There's a ton of us 505 series owners that'd love to hear it.
Asteroid mining/refining?
Water sports? That could get nasty, not to mention smelly...
While $300 is quite excessive, I've gotten *great* usage of $60 Monster instrument cables. I play drunk punk-rock and roll. My gigs are beer filled, abusive, and cables get crushed, pulled, ripped, etc. Monster has a "no-questions asked" replacement policy and you can find them damn near anywhere. I've replaced 4 cables for free in less than a year, which isn't so bad because I generally go in to pick up strings and picks anyway. That's less than $20 a cable, so I'm already ahead. Soundwise, I can't tell the difference, but that's not why I bought it. :)
From Blizzard:
1) Money doesn't buy you happiness.
2) Money will buy you lots of shit that make you happy.
3) Did I mention we have lots of money? I know it's not really a lesson, but it's our list and we're rich, beyotch!
4) Money isn't very flavorful. We had a buffet lunch of money once and after the 10th or 11th thousand dollar salad, I had to switch to the lo-carb dressing. Ugh.
5) Money.
6) If you have money, girls (some) will like you for it. As long as you have a proper pre-nup, wear rubbers (always) or get a Vasectomy to reduce risk, enjoy the ride.
7) It's amazing what you can do with money. This one time, we filled the company pool up with crisp dollar bills. The first guy to dive in got massive paper cuts from the crispness. Wow, like millions of dollars worth of cuts. We had to drive him to the hospital, while we used $100 bills to try and stem the flow of blood.
8) The morning commute into the office is so much nicer in my Ferrari. Vroom Vroom my ass, Mazda.
9) Money money money money money!
10) Sometimes, you have more money than you can spend. Paper crafts are so much more fun!
11) Nerf warlocks, bitches.
Sounds like a great marketing ploy to me. Imagine all the unique email addresses he collects every day. I've heard lists of valid, unique email addresses can go for some decent money from scammers/spammers...
Do you also believe authors (also artists in their own right) should work other jobs and spend their spare time traveling to book store to book store, for signings and readings day after day?
Did you read my post or is this just a cut and paste response? I'm not complaining about the eee, merely the notorious lack of RAM expandability on various Sony products. For example, the C1 series I don't believe can take more than 768megs RAM, the 505 series that I have only take 368 max. Believe me, the more RAM I can throw in a machine, the better, because if you'd have read my post you would realize that I need a machine for various video/audio editing and performance work. I'm not in the EEE's target audience. My hope is that with the introduction of $299 EEEs that Sony will start to release more computers in a similar form factor and knock the prices down. An $899 C2D-based, 2 gig RAM, 4 hour battery life, 8-10" widescreen LCD, would do wonders for my particular usage.
So, read the post, then reply.
Yeah, I know it's cool to hate on big companies. However... /* Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops */
;)
Over-priced? Maybe. But full-fat? Are you not aware that Sony is one of the few laptop manufacturers who continually pushes the envelope for smaller, lighter, thinner and has been doing so for as long as I've been buying laptops? The 505 series, the Picturebooks, and I'm typing this on a Sony TR1A which is also my multimedia workstation (I make music and videos). If it weren't for Sony (and Panasonic, Fujitsu, IBM/Lenovo (x-series)), we probably wouldn't even be seeing the eee. Maybe you're just referring to all the bells and whistles, but these days, what does that mean? The eee comes pretty loaded by my standards, but is woefully short on ram and storage.
I'd like to see the eee succeed, in only that I'd like to see that form factor coming from Sony, et al but with more modern components. I dream of a re-release of the Picturebook with a ULV Core 2 Duo, a 4 hour battery life, and capacity for 2 gigs of RAM, starting at $899.
At the very least, it just means that if the eee succeeds, it might drive price points lower so that the profit margins on the ultraportables might not be as good as they are now. Which, from a consumer standpoint is a good thing.
Oh yeah? I don't even HAVE a TV!
"Your honor, I trusted myspace to verify the age of the people I met online. I know she only looks 13 your honor, but her profile said she was 19!"
Actually, yes. Playing with "vegan" jello-shots has been a small hobby of mine for a few weeks. As another poster mentioned, it's about not trying to get greedy with the alcohol. a Couple tablespoons of agar (bring to a boil in a simple syrup), plus your alcohol (I also have been adding fruit purees.. Don't go overboard on things like passion fruit for various reasons, but it won't set if you do) and stick it in the fridge. I actually have a bottle of pernod at h ome I was going to work with this week... Funny how you mention that...
Sorta, not really. Vegan "ice cream" has come a long way over the past few years, from being disgusting "Well, it's sorta like the real thing" to some very passable stuff, usually made from Soy Milk. So, a vegan tagging the article would be quite right in doing so, even though I think a !vegetarian tag would also be more appropriate as you stated. The argument you present, however, is mostly semantics and really "counter-productive" to anything unless you're just bored.
:)
Leave the vegans alone. They get enough shit with their lives as it is.
(BTW, if you don't like gelatin, try working with agar agar. I've been messing around with some various recipes as I've got a ton of vegan friends and it's working out decently well. It sets up much firmer, so you have to be more careful with it, but once you understand that, it makes a pretty good substitute.)
I've been noticing for years the trend of "wussifying" our youth. You're right, when we were kids (I'm in my mid-30s), I played in ditches, played soccer, got beat-up by the neighborhood bully, rode bikes on the trails and make "jumps", played lots of hide and go seek or kick the can, we ran home from school, ran down the street, just being kids.
:)
You know what ruined it for me?
Air Conditioning. Cheap electricity, Central A/C, and summers just got too hot to bother going out in. Heating in the winter made going out in it too cold, nevermind our forebears survived quite handily. A couple years ago, I started an experiment. I quit using the A/C except for when I was expecting company. I opened up my windows, turned on a fan to circulate the air, and wouldn't you know it? I was hot, but after a couple weeks, I got used to it. Walking into an office building felt like I was walking into a meat freezer. My electricity bill halved, if not more. I was amazed. I went out for walks more. I lost 30 pounds that summer, because it was no longer "too hot" to go outside.
SO, I don't think it's video games, for sure. Video games are just what you do when it's too hot to go outside, and it becomes a habit. Turn off your a/c, let your athlon crank your room to 120 degrees, and you'll *want* to go do something else for awhile.