Here in Atlanta (and I'm certain elsewhere too...it's a chain) we have Dave and Buster's, a restaurant/bar/arcade combo place. Open to everyone until 10pm, then 21+. Not a lot of old machines, but tons of new games, and all pretty well maintained. My only major complaint (besides the prices) is the total lack of fighting games...apparently they feel it's quite OK for me to put a bullet in someone's head from 1000 yards in Silent Scope, but I better not smack anyone around in the latest Street Fighter game.
A friend of mine at work recently took his family down to Disney World...apparently they have a new attraction in the complex...a giant arcade, focusing on the games of old. Everything's set on free-play, you just pay $40 or so to get in for the day. He said all the machines looked to have been restored fully, and they keep the controls un-gunked. His description of the place is making me want to plan a trip down there soon...
And Windows doesn't have raw access to the hard disk right now?
Let's try to remain somewhat serious here...there's nothing stopping them now, or yesterday, from sticking in something that checks for partitions with certain IDs (say, Linux and Linux Swap), and deletes them if found.
If they wanted to do this, they could have done it in ME. Or 2K. Or XP.
You know why they don't? Because deleting a user's data, regardless of the political/philosophical/economic reasons, is a fucking stupid idea. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, they're not that stupid.
There is absoultely nothing wrong with a "camping sniper fuck" in a CTF match. That's called "strategy". Camping in a deathmatch is pretty shitty, but the nature of CTF is such that you *want* players performing specific roles like this. I kinda like having a sniper covering me when I'm making a run into enemy territory...and I keep an eye out for enemy snipers waiting for me to step around a corner, too. It's simply the nature of the game.
That's what ebay is for. No, seriously. I have a fully-working Super Breakout arcade machine, purchased via ebay for $200. It cost another $50 to ship (Forward Air, depot-to-depot) and another $50 to rent a truck to go get the thing from Forward Air's depot. $300 isn't too bad, and 3 years later, it's still working great (except for having to replace a fuse or two on the power supply board). There's some really great deals out there if you look hard enough. Of course, there are games that are just ridiculously priced (I don't think I've ever seen a Ms PacMan cocktail table for less than $1500, or a Star Wars sit-down for less than $2000), but this can be avoided by sticking to games that weren't quite so insanely popular.
Heck, even if you can't find a machine in your price range (and thus can't fulfill the dream of a small in-home arcade that Silver Spoons drilled into our heads), it's easy to find marquee plates and such for cheap. What better way to decorate the abode of a gamer?
Not according to them...part of growing up Mormon is getting your "patriarchal blessing", usually at age 16. In addition to supposedly giving you lots of insight into your future life, you are at that point officially "adopted" into one of the tribes of Israel, thus making you non-gentile.
One of the things that Dell's success has been largely atrributed to is that they realize this point, and keep very little inventory on-hand. They avoid getting bitten too bad when the price of a given component drops overnight.
Or you end up spending a really big wad of cash (forget the amount, but it was rather large) and end up getting wonderful advice like "You should change the company's name from 'US Air' to 'US Airways'." Took 6 months to come up with that, too.
Nah, you just have to be really clever about it, such that the original programmer gets fired, and then the code makes the company billions in the video game industry, and you become a senior executive vice president of the company, and the original programmer is reduced to an arcade manager, and then he tries to hack into your systems, and then your mainframe decides to digitize him, and he helps a small group of rebels free the system.
Ok, maybe I've watched Tron a few too many times...
The "standard" editions of both XP home and XP Pro have activation; however, it is quite likely (pretty sure, but don't feel like digging up a specific reference) that OEMs and (very) large corporate clients will have special versions that do not contain the activation stuff. I know a guy who had a Win2K Pro cd that didn't require a serial number to install...supposedly it was a version for internal use at Compaq.
Actually, it's really more like if you're a business in that area, they send you a form letter, and hope you panic and buy a bunch of licenses to make sure your ass is covered, and they never do much of anything to anyone. At least, that's how it went down in Atlanta when they did this last summer...
Speaking as a technology worker in one of the cities selected for this operation last June/July, this is 99% scare tactic, 1% actual enforcement. Just about every organization that my company provides IT services to received the infamous letter. At the same time, local TV and radio stations were running ads that were part of this campaign. As a result, every single one of our clients went through and audited all of their software licenses. Discrepancies that were found (not many) were resolved, and most organizations bought a few "extra" licenses, "just to be on the safe side". I have a feeling that my experiences are not unique, and that this operation's real purpose wass a quick cash infusion for the software companies involved.
Yeah, once in a while they do bother to actually bust a company (usually based on inside information from a disgruntled (ex-)employee), but that's not nearly as cost-effective for them. Much cheaper to send out a few form letters and buy a few radio/TV spots than to mount a real investigation, and the financial results are better.
Funnily enough, I did send this idea in the other day for the same reasons...and it was rejected pretty quickly by CmdrTaco. Said something like "I don't really plan on that. I just fundamentally think of -1 as the trash heap."
It's really hard to get anything done these days without some sort of government-sanctioned (be it state, federal, whatever) picture identification. Can't cash a check, board a plane, get a loan, or a few hundred other things that you may or may not need on a daily basis, but there's going to be a point where you have to have it. For people who don't have a car or don't know how to drive, the non-driver ID is the easiest option. Not unique to NY, I imagine most states have them now. I know the 3 states I've lived in (AL, GA, SC) all offer non-driver IDs.
Oh, yeah. Starting your own business in this market is a brilliant idea. He'd have better luck responding to one of those make-$10000-a-week-with-real-estate spams.
And...how exactly is that different from our good friend:
"General protection fault in module BLAHBLAH.DLL at address 0xFECA1234. Press Enter to terminate the application. Press Esc to return to the application. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart Windows"
Hell, the only one of those options that'll get any useful result is the restart one...
IBM's Microdrives are a better deal (from a purely MB per $ stance...quick glance at Pricewatch shows 1GB Microdrives for $300), and is already designed around the CF slot interface, which a lot of cameras already have.
You could actually do that at pretty much any time you liked...just bring up the console and set sv_gravity to some number significantly lower than the default (the value of which escapes me at the moment). Also fun to turn the gravity up super-high...even the smallest falls hurt.
Re:I Hope I Don't Get Trolled For This
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 2
My favorite example of this craptacular bickering was at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 2000. I saw a FSF dude *arguing* with a Debian dude over the whole Linux-vs-GNU/Linux thing. Well, not really arguing...the Debian dude was just sorta standing there...but the FSF guy would not stop. Here's a guy that works with one of the distributions that DOES bother to say GNU/Linux...and this FSF fuckwad is getting on his case about that very issue.
Needless to say, I lost a lot of respect for the FSF.
The really sad thing is that the statement still isn't that far off, what with all the misspelled and typo'd variations that we've seen lawsuits over...
That's what the Home Recording Act or whatever was all about. There's 2 key differences that have been said a thousand times before, but apparently you haven't heard them yet. First, we're talking about digital copies. Yeah, a 128kbit mp3 doesn't sound as good as the original CD, but no matter how many copies you make, or how many generations of copies are made by others, the quality will never degrade further. In your boom box example, by generation 5 or 6, the copy you get is practically unlistenable.
Second is scale...you touched on this a little, but I think you're understating it to a degree. In the boom box days, you'd buy a tape, and make a copy for maybe a half-dozen friends on average. With P2P filesharing stuff, you now have a few thousand friends, and you don't mind making copies for all of them since you don't have to take the time to get blanks, or perform the actual physical copy process...you just leave your machine on and people come and get stuff. The scale is immensely larger than could ever be achieved back then.
Perhaps a while back, when Napster was first getting popular, you could go for an excuse like saying it wasn't designed for copyright infringement. Nowadays, however, there are two facts that render this excuse worthless:
1) With all the popular P2P filesharing systems, the vast majority of traffic (if I had to venture a guess, I'd say at least 95% and most likely more) has involved a copyright violation. Yes, there's the occasional small band just trying to get their name out there...but that's a tiny minority.
2) Due to the popularity of Napster and the widespread reporting of the legal entanglements, it is unreasonable to ask authorities to believe that the authors of any new P2P filesharing program thought the program would be used primarily for legitimate and legal transfers. It is even pretty unreasonable to ask the authorities to believe that the anticipated volume of illegal transfers (and thus ad revenue from a lot of the adware clients) was not a major factor in the decision to write and publish the software in the first place.
I'm not crying this out from some moral high-horse...I've got plenty of mp3's that I don't have the albums for...but this rhetoric of "it wasn't written with the purpose of facilitating illegal acts!" is getting old...it's worthless...and it'll never convince a court, because it is complete and utter bullshit. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22788.ht ml
As I understand it, Magic Lantern is designed in a style similar to that of your average email virus, an executable that they try to convince you to run...and if it gets that far, chances are it can do the DLL modification that the story mentions.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Atlanta (and I'm certain elsewhere too...it's a chain) we have Dave and Buster's, a restaurant/bar/arcade combo place. Open to everyone until 10pm, then 21+. Not a lot of old machines, but tons of new games, and all pretty well maintained. My only major complaint (besides the prices) is the total lack of fighting games...apparently they feel it's quite OK for me to put a bullet in someone's head from 1000 yards in Silent Scope, but I better not smack anyone around in the latest Street Fighter game.
A friend of mine at work recently took his family down to Disney World...apparently they have a new attraction in the complex...a giant arcade, focusing on the games of old. Everything's set on free-play, you just pay $40 or so to get in for the day. He said all the machines looked to have been restored fully, and they keep the controls un-gunked. His description of the place is making me want to plan a trip down there soon...
And Windows doesn't have raw access to the hard disk right now?
Let's try to remain somewhat serious here...there's nothing stopping them now, or yesterday, from sticking in something that checks for partitions with certain IDs (say, Linux and Linux Swap), and deletes them if found.
If they wanted to do this, they could have done it in ME. Or 2K. Or XP.
You know why they don't? Because deleting a user's data, regardless of the political/philosophical/economic reasons, is a fucking stupid idea. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, they're not that stupid.
There is absoultely nothing wrong with a "camping sniper fuck" in a CTF match. That's called "strategy". Camping in a deathmatch is pretty shitty, but the nature of CTF is such that you *want* players performing specific roles like this. I kinda like having a sniper covering me when I'm making a run into enemy territory...and I keep an eye out for enemy snipers waiting for me to step around a corner, too. It's simply the nature of the game.
"windows version of mIRC"
I'm gonna go find a corner and weep for a while...
That's what ebay is for. No, seriously. I have a fully-working Super Breakout arcade machine, purchased via ebay for $200. It cost another $50 to ship (Forward Air, depot-to-depot) and another $50 to rent a truck to go get the thing from Forward Air's depot. $300 isn't too bad, and 3 years later, it's still working great (except for having to replace a fuse or two on the power supply board). There's some really great deals out there if you look hard enough. Of course, there are games that are just ridiculously priced (I don't think I've ever seen a Ms PacMan cocktail table for less than $1500, or a Star Wars sit-down for less than $2000), but this can be avoided by sticking to games that weren't quite so insanely popular.
Heck, even if you can't find a machine in your price range (and thus can't fulfill the dream of a small in-home arcade that Silver Spoons drilled into our heads), it's easy to find marquee plates and such for cheap. What better way to decorate the abode of a gamer?
Not according to them...part of growing up Mormon is getting your "patriarchal blessing", usually at age 16. In addition to supposedly giving you lots of insight into your future life, you are at that point officially "adopted" into one of the tribes of Israel, thus making you non-gentile.
One of the things that Dell's success has been largely atrributed to is that they realize this point, and keep very little inventory on-hand. They avoid getting bitten too bad when the price of a given component drops overnight.
Or you end up spending a really big wad of cash (forget the amount, but it was rather large) and end up getting wonderful advice like "You should change the company's name from 'US Air' to 'US Airways'." Took 6 months to come up with that, too.
I need a racket like that...
Nah, you just have to be really clever about it, such that the original programmer gets fired, and then the code makes the company billions in the video game industry, and you become a senior executive vice president of the company, and the original programmer is reduced to an arcade manager, and then he tries to hack into your systems, and then your mainframe decides to digitize him, and he helps a small group of rebels free the system.
Ok, maybe I've watched Tron a few too many times...
The "standard" editions of both XP home and XP Pro have activation; however, it is quite likely (pretty sure, but don't feel like digging up a specific reference) that OEMs and (very) large corporate clients will have special versions that do not contain the activation stuff. I know a guy who had a Win2K Pro cd that didn't require a serial number to install...supposedly it was a version for internal use at Compaq.
Actually, it's really more like if you're a business in that area, they send you a form letter, and hope you panic and buy a bunch of licenses to make sure your ass is covered, and they never do much of anything to anyone. At least, that's how it went down in Atlanta when they did this last summer...
Speaking as a technology worker in one of the cities selected for this operation last June/July, this is 99% scare tactic, 1% actual enforcement. Just about every organization that my company provides IT services to received the infamous letter. At the same time, local TV and radio stations were running ads that were part of this campaign. As a result, every single one of our clients went through and audited all of their software licenses. Discrepancies that were found (not many) were resolved, and most organizations bought a few "extra" licenses, "just to be on the safe side". I have a feeling that my experiences are not unique, and that this operation's real purpose wass a quick cash infusion for the software companies involved.
Yeah, once in a while they do bother to actually bust a company (usually based on inside information from a disgruntled (ex-)employee), but that's not nearly as cost-effective for them. Much cheaper to send out a few form letters and buy a few radio/TV spots than to mount a real investigation, and the financial results are better.
Funnily enough, I did send this idea in the other day for the same reasons...and it was rejected pretty quickly by CmdrTaco. Said something like "I don't really plan on that. I just fundamentally think of -1 as the trash heap."
Oh well.
It's really hard to get anything done these days without some sort of government-sanctioned (be it state, federal, whatever) picture identification. Can't cash a check, board a plane, get a loan, or a few hundred other things that you may or may not need on a daily basis, but there's going to be a point where you have to have it. For people who don't have a car or don't know how to drive, the non-driver ID is the easiest option. Not unique to NY, I imagine most states have them now. I know the 3 states I've lived in (AL, GA, SC) all offer non-driver IDs.
Oh, yeah. Starting your own business in this market is a brilliant idea. He'd have better luck responding to one of those make-$10000-a-week-with-real-estate spams.
And...how exactly is that different from our good friend:
"General protection fault in module BLAHBLAH.DLL at address 0xFECA1234. Press Enter to terminate the application. Press Esc to return to the application. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart Windows"
Hell, the only one of those options that'll get any useful result is the restart one...
"won't build no more major wonders anymore."
Damn. Just...damn.
Damn.
Damn.
IBM's Microdrives are a better deal (from a purely MB per $ stance...quick glance at Pricewatch shows 1GB Microdrives for $300), and is already designed around the CF slot interface, which a lot of cameras already have.
You could actually do that at pretty much any time you liked...just bring up the console and set sv_gravity to some number significantly lower than the default (the value of which escapes me at the moment). Also fun to turn the gravity up super-high...even the smallest falls hurt.
My favorite example of this craptacular bickering was at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 2000. I saw a FSF dude *arguing* with a Debian dude over the whole Linux-vs-GNU/Linux thing. Well, not really arguing...the Debian dude was just sorta standing there...but the FSF guy would not stop. Here's a guy that works with one of the distributions that DOES bother to say GNU/Linux...and this FSF fuckwad is getting on his case about that very issue.
Needless to say, I lost a lot of respect for the FSF.
They need to get off their asses and put out a damned DVD release of that movie. I'm tired of my crappy VHS copy.
The really sad thing is that the statement still isn't that far off, what with all the misspelled and typo'd variations that we've seen lawsuits over...
That's what the Home Recording Act or whatever was all about. There's 2 key differences that have been said a thousand times before, but apparently you haven't heard them yet. First, we're talking about digital copies. Yeah, a 128kbit mp3 doesn't sound as good as the original CD, but no matter how many copies you make, or how many generations of copies are made by others, the quality will never degrade further. In your boom box example, by generation 5 or 6, the copy you get is practically unlistenable.
Second is scale...you touched on this a little, but I think you're understating it to a degree. In the boom box days, you'd buy a tape, and make a copy for maybe a half-dozen friends on average. With P2P filesharing stuff, you now have a few thousand friends, and you don't mind making copies for all of them since you don't have to take the time to get blanks, or perform the actual physical copy process...you just leave your machine on and people come and get stuff. The scale is immensely larger than could ever be achieved back then.
Perhaps a while back, when Napster was first getting popular, you could go for an excuse like saying it wasn't designed for copyright infringement. Nowadays, however, there are two facts that render this excuse worthless:
1) With all the popular P2P filesharing systems, the vast majority of traffic (if I had to venture a guess, I'd say at least 95% and most likely more) has involved a copyright violation. Yes, there's the occasional small band just trying to get their name out there...but that's a tiny minority.
2) Due to the popularity of Napster and the widespread reporting of the legal entanglements, it is unreasonable to ask authorities to believe that the authors of any new P2P filesharing program thought the program would be used primarily for legitimate and legal transfers. It is even pretty unreasonable to ask the authorities to believe that the anticipated volume of illegal transfers (and thus ad revenue from a lot of the adware clients) was not a major factor in the decision to write and publish the software in the first place.
I'm not crying this out from some moral high-horse...I've got plenty of mp3's that I don't have the albums for...but this rhetoric of "it wasn't written with the purpose of facilitating illegal acts!" is getting old...it's worthless...and it'll never convince a court, because it is complete and utter bullshit. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
Read this story from The Register:
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22788.h
As I understand it, Magic Lantern is designed in a style similar to that of your average email virus, an executable that they try to convince you to run...and if it gets that far, chances are it can do the DLL modification that the story mentions.