I'd like to be Spike, but I know I'm really Xander
I'm stealing your line.
I have to admit, I only got into Buffy et al recently, because continuing storylines in TV series, while I love them, are impossible without a regular schedule. I'm a full-blooded geek, I do the comics thing, I do the Star Wars thing, I write my own Atari 2600 utilities... but I never "got" Buffy, for the above reason mostly, but also because it really seemed to be a "chick" show. A show about a girl(s), for girls. With a few attractive supporting male charcters. Gilmore Girls with vampires. When Angel debuted, it seemed even MORE targetted squarely at 16 year old girls. This is how I viewed Buffy, and the occasional epidose I saw didn't draw me in enough, because it just seemed to be Sweet Valley High with vampires.
A couple of years ago I started getting the DVDs on the recommendation of a friend, and after the first season, I was hooked. I realized that the show was far more than some easily stereotyped genre film. Moved on to Angel, and actually got Firefly without even realizing it was Whedon's work. Been loving them all, even though it's damn near a thousand bucks spent at this point. I've tried explaining the attraction to non-fans, and most of them share my earlier opinion: it's a show for teenage girls.
Anyway, you've summed up exactly what it is about Whedon's work that draws me in: I'd like to be Spike, but I know I'm really Xander. Every show has its archetypes: the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader, the psycho (yes, I watched the Breakfast Club far too many times). Usually, I'd see the jock, wish I could be him, realize I'm the nerd, and get all irritated. With Buffy and the rest, that sort of realization makes me feel GOOD about myself.
Maybe it's just that the characters are not one-dimensional. The show presents the typical, simplistic view (cool tough guy vs. useless weak sidekick), but by the end you realize just who the real hero is of the two. And in a far more believable way than something like Spider-Man. The scene with Xander and Tara talking about what it's like to be "ordinary" people was something I've never seen done properly in fiction before. Amazing stuff.
The biggest problem with post-secondary, I've found, is that we're sending teenagers into it, entirely unprepared. I can only speak for my own experiences, but up in the Great White North, high school is EASY. Dead easy. It's more of a social experience than anything, and it's just kind of something you do, because your parents make you, but also because everyone you know also does it.
University/College? Costs a hell of a lot of money. Even worse, it might be paid for you, in which case you really don't care if you blow it off. Trying to envision your life 4-5 years down the road when you're 18? Good luck. I've met maybe 3 people in my entire life who could seriously think more than a year ahead at that age.
My story: I did the usual, University straight out of high school. Did a microbiology degree, because it looked "interesting". Didn't think CS had a promising future, and it seemed "hard", even though I was a natural ever since our Vic20, and loved doing it. Needless to say, at 18 you have no clue what you want to do, nor the motivation to stick with anything. I hurried to finish the degree so that I could start making some money finally. As a Micro degree basically qualifies you for minimum wage tech work (at least in the city I lived in at the time), I ended up spending the next 5 years doing something entirely unrelated, and ended up managing a small business.
Long story short, I ended up again doing tech stuff as a part of the job, but for less than half what a CS grad would have made doing the same type of work. Quit the job, went back to school, graduated at 30. Positively ancient. Best thing I've ever done, even though I'm 8 years behind my peers in terms of retirement savings and mortgage payments.
I've watched 18-21 year olds in school, when I was that age. I've now watched them from a vastly different perspective. Know what I realized? University is really friggin easy, IF YOU'RE MOTIVATED. I spent half the time on homework and studying as the rest of the class, and I was 8 years out of high school calculus, etc, so I had a lot more catching up to do. But I was able to focus, and realize that 4 years of my life was nothing. School was a breeze, and I'm not any smarter than I was 10 years ago. Probably less so, because I really forgot most higher maths.
I realize most parents can't handle the thought of being a bit cruel to their children, but I wholeheartedly agree: make your kids WORK for a year or three. They'll work 10x harder when they finally do get their education. They'll also do a lot better, simply because they can finally see the bigger picture.
Considering I read Slashdot pretty much every day, I'm exposed to a LOT of information (correct or not...) about the posters here. Name, age, gender, occupation, location, you name it. Unfortunately natural language processing is nowhere near up to the task, so it'd have to be done manually. Still, it'd be pretty fun to compile a database over the next couple of years, with links to a particular post for any given information item.
Then, in the middle of an intense flamewar, start making the attacks personal. Real name, age, occupation, how many kids, pets... all with links to previous posts stating said information.
It would freak the hell out of a lot of people until everyone caught on. I'd become the Slashdot-stalker!:)
Seriously though, it would be interesting to compile some user data in this way. It's amazing what personal information people will give out on a message board over time, that they would never have considered if it was in a registration form.
You sound like the typical teen I run into these days. You're claiming that roughly 4GB of music would be "not crap" in a person's collection.
Now, I don't go crazy and use lossless or anything. I encode albums to about 100MB each. 4GB is roughly 40 albums. You honestly don't think there are more than 40 albums of music ever released? Hell, pick the best album for the year going allllll the way back to the stone age (1965) and you've already hit 4GB.
For those of us over 20, it's pretty easy to build up a music collection numbering in the hundreds of CDs. Before I went all mp3, I owned over 400, all of which I liked, all of which I listened to. That's 40GB of mp3s right there. I stopped buying CDs in around 1998. I'm well over 60GB of mp3s now, and I'm constantly deleting music I no longer listen to very much just to keep my collection sane.
See, some of us have been listening to music for a long time. I've spent the past 15 years of my life with a walkman/discman/mp3 player, and probably listen to that alone 2 hours a day. Add in another 2-4 hours a day on the computer at home. That's nearly 2000 hours a year. Even with 600 albums, I've still heard most of what I have dozens of times by now. By the time I'm 50 it'll be much more so.
100GB is about 1000 albums for me. If you honestly don't see how someone could enjoy 1000 different albums, you're either 16 years old and only know 5 bands, or you're the perfect Clearchannel customer: Listening to the same damn 5 songs all day long.
Either way, it's trivially easy to prove you wrong. You must have incredibly limited taste in music to think that anything over 40 albums, over the past 70-odd years of recorded music, is crap.
I have never heard an argument about why raising the temperature a few degrees is actually bad, and I'm not talking about raising sea level 5 or 10 feet.
While I tend to agree with the rest of your post, and am very skeptical on long-term global warming in general, this is a pretty idiotic way to argue. You just proved that you have in fact heard arguments about why raising temperatures is a bad thing.
Anyway, here's a few off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure you've heard them all if you've been reading any sort of news since 1990 or so:
1. raised sea levels
2. increased and/or new desertification (think of the Sahara doubling in size)
3. more extreme weather globally - colder winters, hotter summers, more violent hurricanes/tornadoes/typhoons/monsoons
Then we have the really bizarre things, like:
Melting of the polar ice caps decreses the salinity of the oceans, stopping the gulf stream, and plunging Europe into an ice age. Note, this is much of what the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was based on. Junk science at its finest, but don't tell me you've never heard of this theory if you've done the slightest bit of reading on global warming.
You may disagree with the arguments, but I'm pretty sure you've heard of them:)
The "I download Linux distros" argument was always a bit shaky
Just out of curiousity, why? What in the slightest is shaky about it? I download Linux distros from BitTorrent. I download a lot of Free software from BitTorrent. Pretty much everything I download these days that's of any significant size comes from BitTorrent, and I haven't downloaded anything "sketchy" in years and years.
Is it a shaky argument because it's not a commercial company distributing a paid product? Because the masses are doing something different than I? Because Linux is only used by dirty pirates who only want things for free anyway?
Why do you perceive a difference between a Knoppix ISO and a WoW patch? They're both 100% legal.
What I find most fascinating is that no one seems willing to recognize that the more users you have, the greater the interest in hacking becomes.
You do realize that this exact point is made in reference to every single Slashdot article discussing IE/Firefox, Windows/Linux, Windows/OSX, Windows/Unix, Windows/OS2, (...), right?
EVERYONE with a brain recognizes this. However, it's not by far the determining factor in computer security. Apache proves it. Oracle proves it. The utter lack of any major worm attacking a non-Microsoft product since Morris proves it.
Believe it or not, there have been, and still are, many areas where Microsoft is not the dominant player, and since the Internet got big to boot. The reason most people *ignore* user base is that it's pretty much irrelevent once you get over a handful of users.
Also, even if we're going to use the "number of consoles sold" metric, hasn't the Gamecube pretty much kept up with, or beaten, the Xbox?
So, in other words, Zonk's basically saying "everyone but Sony has failed".
Brilliant.
I find this sort of thinking especially funny, considering that Nintendo just came off what *could* be considered a failure in the N64, and is now neck and neck in a 3-console world. Microsoft, on the other hand, went squarely for the Playstation market, and hasn't managed to beat the "kiddy system" that was the descendent of the "failure".
To most in the gaming world, Nintendo was just about dead 5 years ago. To be where they are today is pretty damned impressive, if you ask me.
Actually, pretty much everyone in Canada knows what an Inukshuk is, and how to pronounce the name properly. There's a sorta neat one sitting in downtown Winnipeg at the moment, and the logo for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is an Inukshuk (can't wait to see the mascot for THAT!).
In fact, over the past few decades they've become a common roadside feature in rockier areas of the country. Northwestern Ontario is positively LITTERED with these things, in some places several per kilometre on both sides of the Trans-Canada Highway. Regular folk, aboriginal or otherwise, climb up the rock cliffs on either side of the road and build them for fun.
Yeah, and quite frankly I can't figure that attitude out.
Up here in Canuckistan, virtually every other mp3 player, for the same capacity, costs as much OR MORE than an ipod.
Back in 2003 I got a 40gb RCA Lyra for around $450CDN. The same ipod at the time was nearly $700. So yeah, huge price difference. But these days? My next player is going to be an ipod, mostly because they're CHEAPER than nearly every other player. Add in the positive feedback I hear from owners, and I'm sold.
No, it won't play 85 file formats that I don't even own. No, it doesn't have an FM radio - I bought an mp3 player specifically so that I WOULDN'T have to listen to the radio. No, it doesn't have a microphone (? what the hell is this complaint about anyway ?).
Apple makes em high capacity, cheap, and solid state. Pick any 2. Just not high capacity and solid state, yet:)
For example- Google Maps. It's not even remotely clever aside from the panning bit
Ha!
Show me another competing service. Terraserve? Sorry, they only really have maps from the US. Nice black and white images, though.
I've spent nearly 5 years trying to find a good source of decent quality satellite imagery of some rather remote parts of rural Canada - Google Maps is not only the only source, it's by far the best mapper I've seen. Try doing damn near anything with Mapquest if you're not looking for a city address.
Sorry, city maps have been easy to find for decades. Knowing which street corner a particular coffee shop is on isn't exactly ground-breaking. But being able to find routes to a 1/2 mile wide lake, 50 miles off the highway in northern Ontario?
Priceless.
There's a reason us Google fans like them: they're not simply re-making what already exists (yay, printable city maps). They're providing things that never existed before.
You know, it already has been said. Hundreds of times, in every article posted relating to this subject. You're not contributing anything to the discussion.
I know I'll be moderated down for this
Ah, never mind. You were just karma whoring. Worked like a charm!:)
Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format. As a result, songs purchased from Napster, for example, will not play on an iPod.
Am I the ONLY person on the entire planet that feel zero sympathy for Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and anyone else whining about this issue??????
SELL YOUR FUCKING MUSIC IN AN OPEN FORMAT THAT ANYONE CAN PLAY, AND THESE "ISSUES" GO AWAY!
Geez. It's not like your DRM is stopping us from copying whenever we feel like it, anyway.
Imagine if CDs had this sort of compatibility issue. Sometimes I wonder if anyone in the music industry has any brains at all.
independent musicians are screwed because they cant sell protected songs for the price they want.
Independents seemed to survive just fine in the world of CDs, with unprotected songs at whatever price they wanted. Hell, considering the cost of pressing a few hundred/thousand CDs, an indy these days should be able to make a lot more cash with online distribution. Assuming getting rich is your game plan, which is laughable at best.
Sorry, but as a former indy, anyone who is actually concerned about DRM on their music has only one name: whore.
Sony's managed to out-hype and out-market 2 of its game platform competitors now, with a somewhat (or majorly) inferior product.
Depending on how you look at it, the PS1 demolished both the N64 and Dreamcast - and really, it wasn't superior to either. Whether it was load times or sheer graphic capabilities, the PS1 was a pretty dreadful platform except for the fact that everyone had one, and it had thousands of mediocre games released.
The PS2 was the final nail in the Dreamcast coffin, and at the time most DC games looked and played far better than PS2 fare. The PS2 is still leading the Xbox and Gamecube in sales.
Maybe Sony's just finally getting a taste of their own medicine.
As another poster pointed out, sarcasm is often insightful.
What Smidge has pointed out (quite nicely, I must say) is that pretty much EVERY scientific theory/explanation can be trivialized in this matter. Let's face it, here's what ID boils down to:
1. The world, and everything in it, are complex. No one would argue this.
2. In trying to understand complex things, we might miss some details, or in fact most of the detail. Again, no one would argue this.
3. Because we can't claim a perfect, 110% understanding of something, there's simply no way we can ever understand any of it. Logical fallacy. However, because of this:
4. Therefore everything was created by God. Everything is the way it is because of God. Otherwise how could things be this way?
Oh, and
5. My theory's as good as yours, because I say so, and yours is quite frankly far to complicated to understand whereas mine is simple and therefore correct.
#3 is WHY ID is not 100% laughed at by people, and #5 is why it's accepted so widely.
However, what this article is about is worms. Specifically, "flash" worms that spread faster than AV vendors can respond with signature updates. Worms don't spread through user interaction, they spread through vulnerabilities in the OS/application suite, and they spread FAST. Most places were hit with Zobot hours before users had much if anything to do with it, and in some cases days before virus signatures were out.
even if everyone in the world used Linux, the hackers would still write viruses to exploit the same vulnerabilities
Nice try, but no Linux distribution that I'm aware of has its hardware discovery service bound to the network interface, by default. And very few Linux distros (if any these days) are shipped with *any* listening services by default. A worm like this, or Code Red, or Nimda, or Slammer, or Blaster, or Sasser simply isn't possible. If it was, believe me, you'd have seen it - there's a whole buttload of Linux servers out there in the wild, and believe me, worm authors would love that prize.
But sure, keep spreading the "nothing is 100% secure, therefore everything is equally insecure" myth. I need a chuckle from time to time.
See, I don't buy this. At least not as an overall consensus. I just think we hear from the cheapskates more often, and also people value movies far less than other forms of entertainment. You may be different than the average person, so I'm not commenting specifically on how you view things:)
Most people I know see nothing wrong with dropping $20-40+ PER TICKET for a sporting event. $40-80 for a concert. $100+ for the latest broadway musical. All entertainment that lasts 2-3 hours.
But $10 for a movie? Somehow, THAT'S a rip-off.
Maybe the cheapness of a DVD rental does it for people, but then again, why pay $80 for a concert ticket when the CD by the same artist is 1/4 the price? The only answer I can think of is venue. You're paying one hell of a premium to see music performed live, and personally, I'll pay a premium to see a movie on a 30' wide screen with a $50,000 sound system. But maybe that's just me:)
You don't walk into a restaurant, sit down at a dirty table and think "My God, the previous people to eat here were complete slobs!"
No, but a lot of people sure do give me dirty looks when I don't do McDonalds employees' jobs for them. And by people I mean fellow patrons, not the employees.
It's one thing to not throw human feces around in a restaurant, but if I wanted to clean up after myself I would have eaten at home, for a lot cheaper. Unfortunately, McDonalds et al have convinced the populace that it is OUR responsibility to clean up our tables, because they have oh-so convenient garbage cans on the way out. This attitude spills over into many other venues, I find.
Slashdot Mirror
Spammers say the exact same things you do.
I don't want either you of contacting me, ever. Period. Never.
Why is this concept so difficult to understand?
I'd like to be Spike, but I know I'm really Xander
I'm stealing your line.
I have to admit, I only got into Buffy et al recently, because continuing storylines in TV series, while I love them, are impossible without a regular schedule. I'm a full-blooded geek, I do the comics thing, I do the Star Wars thing, I write my own Atari 2600 utilities... but I never "got" Buffy, for the above reason mostly, but also because it really seemed to be a "chick" show. A show about a girl(s), for girls. With a few attractive supporting male charcters. Gilmore Girls with vampires. When Angel debuted, it seemed even MORE targetted squarely at 16 year old girls. This is how I viewed Buffy, and the occasional epidose I saw didn't draw me in enough, because it just seemed to be Sweet Valley High with vampires.
A couple of years ago I started getting the DVDs on the recommendation of a friend, and after the first season, I was hooked. I realized that the show was far more than some easily stereotyped genre film. Moved on to Angel, and actually got Firefly without even realizing it was Whedon's work. Been loving them all, even though it's damn near a thousand bucks spent at this point. I've tried explaining the attraction to non-fans, and most of them share my earlier opinion: it's a show for teenage girls.
Anyway, you've summed up exactly what it is about Whedon's work that draws me in: I'd like to be Spike, but I know I'm really Xander. Every show has its archetypes: the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader, the psycho (yes, I watched the Breakfast Club far too many times). Usually, I'd see the jock, wish I could be him, realize I'm the nerd, and get all irritated. With Buffy and the rest, that sort of realization makes me feel GOOD about myself.
Maybe it's just that the characters are not one-dimensional. The show presents the typical, simplistic view (cool tough guy vs. useless weak sidekick), but by the end you realize just who the real hero is of the two. And in a far more believable way than something like Spider-Man. The scene with Xander and Tara talking about what it's like to be "ordinary" people was something I've never seen done properly in fiction before. Amazing stuff.
Fully agreed.
The biggest problem with post-secondary, I've found, is that we're sending teenagers into it, entirely unprepared. I can only speak for my own experiences, but up in the Great White North, high school is EASY. Dead easy. It's more of a social experience than anything, and it's just kind of something you do, because your parents make you, but also because everyone you know also does it.
University/College? Costs a hell of a lot of money. Even worse, it might be paid for you, in which case you really don't care if you blow it off. Trying to envision your life 4-5 years down the road when you're 18? Good luck. I've met maybe 3 people in my entire life who could seriously think more than a year ahead at that age.
My story: I did the usual, University straight out of high school. Did a microbiology degree, because it looked "interesting". Didn't think CS had a promising future, and it seemed "hard", even though I was a natural ever since our Vic20, and loved doing it. Needless to say, at 18 you have no clue what you want to do, nor the motivation to stick with anything. I hurried to finish the degree so that I could start making some money finally. As a Micro degree basically qualifies you for minimum wage tech work (at least in the city I lived in at the time), I ended up spending the next 5 years doing something entirely unrelated, and ended up managing a small business.
Long story short, I ended up again doing tech stuff as a part of the job, but for less than half what a CS grad would have made doing the same type of work. Quit the job, went back to school, graduated at 30. Positively ancient. Best thing I've ever done, even though I'm 8 years behind my peers in terms of retirement savings and mortgage payments.
I've watched 18-21 year olds in school, when I was that age. I've now watched them from a vastly different perspective. Know what I realized? University is really friggin easy, IF YOU'RE MOTIVATED. I spent half the time on homework and studying as the rest of the class, and I was 8 years out of high school calculus, etc, so I had a lot more catching up to do. But I was able to focus, and realize that 4 years of my life was nothing. School was a breeze, and I'm not any smarter than I was 10 years ago. Probably less so, because I really forgot most higher maths.
I realize most parents can't handle the thought of being a bit cruel to their children, but I wholeheartedly agree: make your kids WORK for a year or three. They'll work 10x harder when they finally do get their education. They'll also do a lot better, simply because they can finally see the bigger picture.
Agreed. This was like reading an interview with a slightly-more-clever Eliza.
Q: Based on your experience with WoW, what would you have done differently?
A: We learn from our past experiences to do things differently.
Ya know, I've been having a similar thought:
:)
Considering I read Slashdot pretty much every day, I'm exposed to a LOT of information (correct or not...) about the posters here. Name, age, gender, occupation, location, you name it. Unfortunately natural language processing is nowhere near up to the task, so it'd have to be done manually. Still, it'd be pretty fun to compile a database over the next couple of years, with links to a particular post for any given information item.
Then, in the middle of an intense flamewar, start making the attacks personal. Real name, age, occupation, how many kids, pets... all with links to previous posts stating said information.
It would freak the hell out of a lot of people until everyone caught on. I'd become the Slashdot-stalker!
Seriously though, it would be interesting to compile some user data in this way. It's amazing what personal information people will give out on a message board over time, that they would never have considered if it was in a registration form.
You sound like the typical teen I run into these days. You're claiming that roughly 4GB of music would be "not crap" in a person's collection.
Now, I don't go crazy and use lossless or anything. I encode albums to about 100MB each. 4GB is roughly 40 albums. You honestly don't think there are more than 40 albums of music ever released? Hell, pick the best album for the year going allllll the way back to the stone age (1965) and you've already hit 4GB.
For those of us over 20, it's pretty easy to build up a music collection numbering in the hundreds of CDs. Before I went all mp3, I owned over 400, all of which I liked, all of which I listened to. That's 40GB of mp3s right there. I stopped buying CDs in around 1998. I'm well over 60GB of mp3s now, and I'm constantly deleting music I no longer listen to very much just to keep my collection sane.
See, some of us have been listening to music for a long time. I've spent the past 15 years of my life with a walkman/discman/mp3 player, and probably listen to that alone 2 hours a day. Add in another 2-4 hours a day on the computer at home. That's nearly 2000 hours a year. Even with 600 albums, I've still heard most of what I have dozens of times by now. By the time I'm 50 it'll be much more so.
100GB is about 1000 albums for me. If you honestly don't see how someone could enjoy 1000 different albums, you're either 16 years old and only know 5 bands, or you're the perfect Clearchannel customer: Listening to the same damn 5 songs all day long.
Either way, it's trivially easy to prove you wrong. You must have incredibly limited taste in music to think that anything over 40 albums, over the past 70-odd years of recorded music, is crap.
So you crash and die if something DOES NOT get in your way? :)
I have never heard an argument about why raising the temperature a few degrees is actually bad, and I'm not talking about raising sea level 5 or 10 feet.
:)
While I tend to agree with the rest of your post, and am very skeptical on long-term global warming in general, this is a pretty idiotic way to argue. You just proved that you have in fact heard arguments about why raising temperatures is a bad thing.
Anyway, here's a few off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure you've heard them all if you've been reading any sort of news since 1990 or so:
1. raised sea levels
2. increased and/or new desertification (think of the Sahara doubling in size)
3. more extreme weather globally - colder winters, hotter summers, more violent hurricanes/tornadoes/typhoons/monsoons
Then we have the really bizarre things, like:
Melting of the polar ice caps decreses the salinity of the oceans, stopping the gulf stream, and plunging Europe into an ice age. Note, this is much of what the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was based on. Junk science at its finest, but don't tell me you've never heard of this theory if you've done the slightest bit of reading on global warming.
You may disagree with the arguments, but I'm pretty sure you've heard of them
Willie! Remove the coloured chalk!
The "I download Linux distros" argument was always a bit shaky
Just out of curiousity, why? What in the slightest is shaky about it? I download Linux distros from BitTorrent. I download a lot of Free software from BitTorrent. Pretty much everything I download these days that's of any significant size comes from BitTorrent, and I haven't downloaded anything "sketchy" in years and years.
Is it a shaky argument because it's not a commercial company distributing a paid product? Because the masses are doing something different than I? Because Linux is only used by dirty pirates who only want things for free anyway?
Why do you perceive a difference between a Knoppix ISO and a WoW patch? They're both 100% legal.
I'm genuinely curious, why?
What I find most fascinating is that no one seems willing to recognize that the more users you have, the greater the interest in hacking becomes.
You do realize that this exact point is made in reference to every single Slashdot article discussing IE/Firefox, Windows/Linux, Windows/OSX, Windows/Unix, Windows/OS2, (...), right?
EVERYONE with a brain recognizes this. However, it's not by far the determining factor in computer security. Apache proves it. Oracle proves it. The utter lack of any major worm attacking a non-Microsoft product since Morris proves it.
Believe it or not, there have been, and still are, many areas where Microsoft is not the dominant player, and since the Internet got big to boot. The reason most people *ignore* user base is that it's pretty much irrelevent once you get over a handful of users.
Also, even if we're going to use the "number of consoles sold" metric, hasn't the Gamecube pretty much kept up with, or beaten, the Xbox?
So, in other words, Zonk's basically saying "everyone but Sony has failed".
Brilliant.
I find this sort of thinking especially funny, considering that Nintendo just came off what *could* be considered a failure in the N64, and is now neck and neck in a 3-console world. Microsoft, on the other hand, went squarely for the Playstation market, and hasn't managed to beat the "kiddy system" that was the descendent of the "failure".
To most in the gaming world, Nintendo was just about dead 5 years ago. To be where they are today is pretty damned impressive, if you ask me.
Actually, pretty much everyone in Canada knows what an Inukshuk is, and how to pronounce the name properly. There's a sorta neat one sitting in downtown Winnipeg at the moment, and the logo for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is an Inukshuk (can't wait to see the mascot for THAT!).
:)
In fact, over the past few decades they've become a common roadside feature in rockier areas of the country. Northwestern Ontario is positively LITTERED with these things, in some places several per kilometre on both sides of the Trans-Canada Highway. Regular folk, aboriginal or otherwise, climb up the rock cliffs on either side of the road and build them for fun.
Don't worry, we're cool with it
Yeah, and quite frankly I can't figure that attitude out.
:)
Up here in Canuckistan, virtually every other mp3 player, for the same capacity, costs as much OR MORE than an ipod.
Back in 2003 I got a 40gb RCA Lyra for around $450CDN. The same ipod at the time was nearly $700. So yeah, huge price difference. But these days? My next player is going to be an ipod, mostly because they're CHEAPER than nearly every other player. Add in the positive feedback I hear from owners, and I'm sold.
No, it won't play 85 file formats that I don't even own. No, it doesn't have an FM radio - I bought an mp3 player specifically so that I WOULDN'T have to listen to the radio. No, it doesn't have a microphone (? what the hell is this complaint about anyway ?).
Apple makes em high capacity, cheap, and solid state. Pick any 2. Just not high capacity and solid state, yet
Ah, Tim Horton's: The Canadian equivalent of the much-hated Wal-Mart or Starbucks.
:)
Only ours was founded by a guy who played for the Leafs, so somehow it's not evil
For example- Google Maps. It's not even remotely clever aside from the panning bit
Ha!
Show me another competing service. Terraserve? Sorry, they only really have maps from the US. Nice black and white images, though.
I've spent nearly 5 years trying to find a good source of decent quality satellite imagery of some rather remote parts of rural Canada - Google Maps is not only the only source, it's by far the best mapper I've seen. Try doing damn near anything with Mapquest if you're not looking for a city address.
Sorry, city maps have been easy to find for decades. Knowing which street corner a particular coffee shop is on isn't exactly ground-breaking. But being able to find routes to a 1/2 mile wide lake, 50 miles off the highway in northern Ontario?
Priceless.
There's a reason us Google fans like them: they're not simply re-making what already exists (yay, printable city maps). They're providing things that never existed before.
Just so y'all know, it links to a porn link site.
Might have the courtesy to warn people next time, asshat. Thankfully, I took today off.
it needs to be said.
:)
You know, it already has been said. Hundreds of times, in every article posted relating to this subject. You're not contributing anything to the discussion.
I know I'll be moderated down for this
Ah, never mind. You were just karma whoring. Worked like a charm!
Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format. As a result, songs purchased from Napster, for example, will not play on an iPod.
Am I the ONLY person on the entire planet that feel zero sympathy for Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and anyone else whining about this issue??????
SELL YOUR FUCKING MUSIC IN AN OPEN FORMAT THAT ANYONE CAN PLAY, AND THESE "ISSUES" GO AWAY!
Geez. It's not like your DRM is stopping us from copying whenever we feel like it, anyway.
Imagine if CDs had this sort of compatibility issue. Sometimes I wonder if anyone in the music industry has any brains at all.
independent musicians are screwed because they cant sell protected songs for the price they want.
Independents seemed to survive just fine in the world of CDs, with unprotected songs at whatever price they wanted. Hell, considering the cost of pressing a few hundred/thousand CDs, an indy these days should be able to make a lot more cash with online distribution. Assuming getting rich is your game plan, which is laughable at best.
Sorry, but as a former indy, anyone who is actually concerned about DRM on their music has only one name: whore.
People don't always buy the superior product
No kidding.
Sony's managed to out-hype and out-market 2 of its game platform competitors now, with a somewhat (or majorly) inferior product.
Depending on how you look at it, the PS1 demolished both the N64 and Dreamcast - and really, it wasn't superior to either. Whether it was load times or sheer graphic capabilities, the PS1 was a pretty dreadful platform except for the fact that everyone had one, and it had thousands of mediocre games released.
The PS2 was the final nail in the Dreamcast coffin, and at the time most DC games looked and played far better than PS2 fare. The PS2 is still leading the Xbox and Gamecube in sales.
Maybe Sony's just finally getting a taste of their own medicine.
As another poster pointed out, sarcasm is often insightful.
What Smidge has pointed out (quite nicely, I must say) is that pretty much EVERY scientific theory/explanation can be trivialized in this matter. Let's face it, here's what ID boils down to:
1. The world, and everything in it, are complex. No one would argue this.
2. In trying to understand complex things, we might miss some details, or in fact most of the detail. Again, no one would argue this.
3. Because we can't claim a perfect, 110% understanding of something, there's simply no way we can ever understand any of it. Logical fallacy. However, because of this:
4. Therefore everything was created by God. Everything is the way it is because of God. Otherwise how could things be this way?
Oh, and
5. My theory's as good as yours, because I say so, and yours is quite frankly far to complicated to understand whereas mine is simple and therefore correct.
#3 is WHY ID is not 100% laughed at by people, and #5 is why it's accepted so widely.
Sure, users can cause problems on every platform.
However, what this article is about is worms. Specifically, "flash" worms that spread faster than AV vendors can respond with signature updates. Worms don't spread through user interaction, they spread through vulnerabilities in the OS/application suite, and they spread FAST. Most places were hit with Zobot hours before users had much if anything to do with it, and in some cases days before virus signatures were out.
even if everyone in the world used Linux, the hackers would still write viruses to exploit the same vulnerabilities
Nice try, but no Linux distribution that I'm aware of has its hardware discovery service bound to the network interface, by default. And very few Linux distros (if any these days) are shipped with *any* listening services by default. A worm like this, or Code Red, or Nimda, or Slammer, or Blaster, or Sasser simply isn't possible. If it was, believe me, you'd have seen it - there's a whole buttload of Linux servers out there in the wild, and believe me, worm authors would love that prize.
But sure, keep spreading the "nothing is 100% secure, therefore everything is equally insecure" myth. I need a chuckle from time to time.
See, I don't buy this. At least not as an overall consensus. I just think we hear from the cheapskates more often, and also people value movies far less than other forms of entertainment. You may be different than the average person, so I'm not commenting specifically on how you view things :)
:)
Most people I know see nothing wrong with dropping $20-40+ PER TICKET for a sporting event. $40-80 for a concert. $100+ for the latest broadway musical. All entertainment that lasts 2-3 hours.
But $10 for a movie? Somehow, THAT'S a rip-off.
Maybe the cheapness of a DVD rental does it for people, but then again, why pay $80 for a concert ticket when the CD by the same artist is 1/4 the price? The only answer I can think of is venue. You're paying one hell of a premium to see music performed live, and personally, I'll pay a premium to see a movie on a 30' wide screen with a $50,000 sound system. But maybe that's just me
You don't walk into a restaurant, sit down at a dirty table and think "My God, the previous people to eat here were complete slobs!"
No, but a lot of people sure do give me dirty looks when I don't do McDonalds employees' jobs for them. And by people I mean fellow patrons, not the employees.
It's one thing to not throw human feces around in a restaurant, but if I wanted to clean up after myself I would have eaten at home, for a lot cheaper. Unfortunately, McDonalds et al have convinced the populace that it is OUR responsibility to clean up our tables, because they have oh-so convenient garbage cans on the way out. This attitude spills over into many other venues, I find.