My parents couldn't afford a C64 but they somehow got an old PC free.
That's really, really odd. C64s were always an order of magnitude cheaper than PCs. By 1983 C64s were maybe $300, while a PC with any decent accessories was well into the $3000 range.
I'd say you got lucky, but the C64 was a better piece of kit anyway:P
Standing in line 20-deep at every remaining shop in the country because Tim's chased out all the competition by means of incredibly heavily advertising a sub-par product?
Americans already have something like that, it's called Wal-Mart. Quality about the same, too.
It's pretty obvious that Asian-American families have lower tolerance for gang membership
Sweet christ do you ever need to visit Canada sometime. No, it's not pretty obvious at all. In fact it could easily be argued to be just about the opposite
We don't have black gangs in Canada, we have asian gangs. It's got sweet fuck all to do with race or culture, I'm afraid to say.
The funny thing is, once you step outside the bubble that is slashdot, people are generally happy with Vista.
No, really, they're not. Try looking into the Enterprise world sometime, and take a look at just how many large organizations are migrating to Vista. I'll wait for you. Don't worry, you have enough fingers. At best people TOLERATE Vista. I've yet to meet anyone who's happy with it - most people's kindest praise amounts to "well, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting".
If anything, posts like your own remind me of just how much the average Slashdotter LIKES Vista compared to the outside world.
Vista is a steaming pile that's on par with ME, and it's not Slashdot that's prompting Microsoft to rush 7 out the door. Kid yourself all you want, but CmdrTaco and his legions are not why you keep hearing horror stories about it.
You just don't see much beyond "my house", "my work", and "Slashdot". Otherwise known as "the plural of anecdote is not data".
What amazes me is how people that spell like that typically are by no means consistent. Look at how many other plurals the GP used, without apostrophes. What makes "students" so special that the brain felt the need for one?
WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP WITH THE BSG SPOILERS???
For fuck's sake, it's been all of 4 days. I know most of us by Slashdot law are obligated to sit at home on Friday nights watching series finales, but not all of us are up to date with our Tivos.
Seriously, if it's important enough to make jokes in a completely unrelated story, it's important enough that you can wait a frakkin WEEK before blabbing the ending all over the Internet.
You have GiJoe wrong. The Joes actually had red lasers and Cobra had the blue.
This in fact messed with my head as a child trying to reconcile good vs evil based on a colour scheme (original concept pioneered by cowboy movies). Star Wars really set the bar in terms of what colour lasers the bad guys used, so... For quite some time I was half-convinced that Cobra was actually an organization of freedom fighters battling the evil empire of the USA. It didn't help that Cobra never actually hurt anyone. For years after I wondered if Marvel had written GiJoe as some sort of anti-Reagan era metaphor for American imperialism.
Quite frankly, the way you describe the old Internet reminds me of Black & White television and movies. There's still a huge nostalgic following of that format as well.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll see "artistic" websites designed to look like 1996, for emotional effect.
Our memories are faulty devices
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Posted not to be a pedantic douche, but to point out that our memories are often imperfect. Starcraft, a revolution in online gaming in many respects, did not come out until 2 years after this article describes.
Everyone posting in this thread about how they had all this unlimited, highspeed, MMO-full gaming with massive multimedia collections in 1996 - I'm sorry, but you're not remembering things very well. And it's easy enough to find examples that show why.
1996 might not have been the $10/hr CIS days (that was 1994 for me), but it sure as hell wasn't anything like today. In 1996 we saw the very first TCP/IP games that weren't IPX tunneled through something like Heat.net. Web browsers existed, yes - and 95% of the pages out there were about someone's cat. Napster (ie: mp3 sharing of any large scale) was 3 years in the future. Software mp3 players had just appeared in the fall of 1995. Winamp, the first truly popular player, was a year away. Hardware players were at least 2 years away. Flash didn't really exist until the end of 1996.
Anyway, that's just pulled from the first few posts I could find. Y'all are remembering 1999 at earliest. 1996 was a very different online beast. Splitting hairs? No, showing just how much changed in such a short period of time.
Most of his predictions that he got right were brain-dead obvious in 1999 - we already had portable computers coming into common use, and cellphones everywhere. This trend was pretty clearly going to continue. Hell, the Gameboy was proof enough that we were about to see a generation who grew up with portable computing. "Body LANs" don't exist in any meaningful form. People at best are wearing the utility belt of gadgets, some of which might talk Bluetooth to each other.
The rest? Wireless? Please. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were just coming into fruition around that time, and obviously wireless use was going to come into play. Again, cellphones paved the way for this. Beyond that though... I still see millions of wired speakers, mice, keyboards, dvd players, you name it. I still don't see wireless as being the most common form of network access, hell any network admin worth his salt will rant about the general poor performance of Wi-Fi. Wireless printers and displays never really came about (I do find it amusing that he says "occasional keyboard" - the most obvious use of a low-bandwidth wireless interface). His vision of ubiquitous wireless access never came about - the best we have is the cellphone networks, which again, we already had 10 years ago.
Digital books, movies, music? Napster was already out by then. The entertainment industry did its best to stop this from happening and it's only been in the past year or three that it's even been practical (from a legal perspective).
Eyeglass displays have existed for a long, long time and never achieved much success.
A trillion calculations per second on a home computer, eh?
Anyway, just seems a bit underwhelming. He got so much completely wrong.
People are only willing to pay 10 cents per text IF there's no one else offering it cheaper.
Virtually any consumer good/service started out this way: "As long as people are willing to pay $250,000 for a car, that's how much manufacturers will charge, regardless of how many there are". Oops, until Mr. Ford came along and dropped the price.
The difference with cellphone carriers is that none of them want to act like Mr. Ford. It's the complete opposite of classic economics, or at least capitalist economics.
We saw it up here in Canada; absolutely no one was willing to pay for incoming text messages - until EVERY SINGLE CARRIER started charging for them at the same time. Suddenly, everyone was willing to pay for them. Funny how that works.
but if you're able to stop quicker than he is, you still won't hit him.
You cannot ever, Ever, EVER predict this will any accuracy. Claiming otherwise is a good indication of just how poor a driver you are. Short of doing a full engineering analysis on the difference between vehicles, your respective brake and tire life, and a host of other factors you cannot possibly predict, you can and often will be wrong.
Always drive as though the car in front of you can stop on a dime. Those who do not are those who end up in multi-car pileups.
Hint: it's entirely possible for the car in front of you to hit an immovable object.
Seriously folks, this is getting to the point of horseshit. I have yet to hear anyone actually DEFEND these changes; the best comes down to "it's not the end of the world". Akin to "hey, modern Windows is good, it doesn't crash very often anymore". ie: a backhanded compliment.
Time for a new meme. I'm fucking sick of the trashing of Slashdot, and the user page was the last straw. Let's raise this issue on every single story thread. There ain't enough compliant mods to handle us, and we always talk about what the Slash community could do with its numbers...
As this clearly isn't Rob et al's decision, let's fight fire with fire. Trash this site folks, because the site operators are doing it anyway. Let's make sure every single story has pointless offtopic threads like this until something fucking changes.
Honestly, for a while I thought I was the only one. I'm not in the "Slash has gone downhill re: comment quality crowd", but for fuck's sake - STOP TURNING THIS INTO FARK.
Sing it, brother! Just not within earshot of SOCAN.
These greedy fucks are the same ones who manage to suck money out of university fundraising activities. No, I'm not talking fundraising for the university - I'm talking fundraising for student clubs. If we so much as turned on a radio at any event, we were required to pay some insane fee ($100+ iirc) to SOCAN, for the privilege of BROADCASTING AD-SUPPORTED MUSIC. Regardless of the fact that our tiny fundraisers often didn't even raise $100 at a time. I'm talking tiny BBQs for 20 people, just something to have fun and kick some cash into the kitty, maybe buy some paint for our student lounge.
SOCAN can go fuck themselves and the horse they rode in on. No way does Nickelback deserve money from a bunch of penniless students just trying to relax on a stressful exam week. Never mind the fact that we only planned on playing the station that has a "no Nickelback guarantee" (yes, this actually exists in Canada, they're so reviled).
First, the "entire country" is not "effectively bilingual".
This is correct. For non-Canadians out there, we have Quebec, with only one enforced language, French. And the rest of Canada, with 2 official languages, English and French.
Canada is only bilingual outside of Quebec. Ironic, that.
I like how this was modded "Informative". It's by an AC, so there's no "hey, it's funny, but let's give the poor schlep a karma boost" thinking going on.
I guess some mods figured it was worth it to get the word out to the 2 women who read Slashdot.... and the rest of us, who sneak into the girl's can.
What I want to know is in the posters of the evolution of man you see in all the museums, why do the cave men have long hair and beards while the modern man has no facial hair (lacking a secondary sexual characteristic) and have short hair? Bald I can see, but short? I've never met a human with naturally short, doglike hair like you see on those posters.
We had (have?) much more sophisticated tools than Neandethals. Try shaving (or getting a buzz cut) with a stone axe sometime.
This is so true of a lot of companies that it's scary. I've watched 5 figure consultant fees get pissed away on something that took all of 5 minutes to figure out - for a person who actually understood the systems involved.
When I can say "hmm, I could have solved that for you in 5 minutes, for free" on a monthly basis, it's positively frightening. The worst part about it is, along with the blatantly incompetent people being paid a lot of money, I fall under that umbrella too - so it's really hard to want to leave:P
Slashdot Mirror
Conficker required no such user action as "installing stuff because a pop up tells them to".
Stop, stop, stop repeating this meme. It's just not true.
Call me crazy, but can you imagine a charity (secular) giving away only 10c on the dollar and not being hassled for it?
Yes, it's called the United Way.
My parents couldn't afford a C64 but they somehow got an old PC free.
That's really, really odd. C64s were always an order of magnitude cheaper than PCs. By 1983 C64s were maybe $300, while a PC with any decent accessories was well into the $3000 range.
I'd say you got lucky, but the C64 was a better piece of kit anyway :P
Standing in line 20-deep at every remaining shop in the country because Tim's chased out all the competition by means of incredibly heavily advertising a sub-par product?
Americans already have something like that, it's called Wal-Mart. Quality about the same, too.
It's pretty obvious that Asian-American families have lower tolerance for gang membership
Sweet christ do you ever need to visit Canada sometime. No, it's not pretty obvious at all. In fact it could easily be argued to be just about the opposite
We don't have black gangs in Canada, we have asian gangs. It's got sweet fuck all to do with race or culture, I'm afraid to say.
If they can find a file in explorer they can find a key in the registry. Not that you ever need to open the registry.
If they can write a letter in Word, they can edit a text config file.
Not that you ever need to open a config file.
The funny thing is, once you step outside the bubble that is slashdot, people are generally happy with Vista.
No, really, they're not. Try looking into the Enterprise world sometime, and take a look at just how many large organizations are migrating to Vista. I'll wait for you. Don't worry, you have enough fingers. At best people TOLERATE Vista. I've yet to meet anyone who's happy with it - most people's kindest praise amounts to "well, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting".
If anything, posts like your own remind me of just how much the average Slashdotter LIKES Vista compared to the outside world.
Vista is a steaming pile that's on par with ME, and it's not Slashdot that's prompting Microsoft to rush 7 out the door. Kid yourself all you want, but CmdrTaco and his legions are not why you keep hearing horror stories about it.
You just don't see much beyond "my house", "my work", and "Slashdot". Otherwise known as "the plural of anecdote is not data".
more importantly, why would anyone resist personal searches and eavesdropping if they've got nothing to hide?
We'll get right on installing those cameras and microphones in your bedroom, then.
Oh, and in your children's bedroom. And bathroom.
You've got nothing to hide, right?
What amazes me is how people that spell like that typically are by no means consistent. Look at how many other plurals the GP used, without apostrophes. What makes "students" so special that the brain felt the need for one?
WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP WITH THE BSG SPOILERS???
For fuck's sake, it's been all of 4 days. I know most of us by Slashdot law are obligated to sit at home on Friday nights watching series finales, but not all of us are up to date with our Tivos.
Seriously, if it's important enough to make jokes in a completely unrelated story, it's important enough that you can wait a frakkin WEEK before blabbing the ending all over the Internet.
God, I'm going to hate myself for this...
You have GiJoe wrong. The Joes actually had red lasers and Cobra had the blue.
This in fact messed with my head as a child trying to reconcile good vs evil based on a colour scheme (original concept pioneered by cowboy movies). Star Wars really set the bar in terms of what colour lasers the bad guys used, so... For quite some time I was half-convinced that Cobra was actually an organization of freedom fighters battling the evil empire of the USA. It didn't help that Cobra never actually hurt anyone. For years after I wondered if Marvel had written GiJoe as some sort of anti-Reagan era metaphor for American imperialism.
Quite frankly, the way you describe the old Internet reminds me of Black & White television and movies. There's still a huge nostalgic following of that format as well.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll see "artistic" websites designed to look like 1996, for emotional effect.
Starcraft was released March 31, 1998.
Posted not to be a pedantic douche, but to point out that our memories are often imperfect. Starcraft, a revolution in online gaming in many respects, did not come out until 2 years after this article describes.
Everyone posting in this thread about how they had all this unlimited, highspeed, MMO-full gaming with massive multimedia collections in 1996 - I'm sorry, but you're not remembering things very well. And it's easy enough to find examples that show why.
1996 might not have been the $10/hr CIS days (that was 1994 for me), but it sure as hell wasn't anything like today. In 1996 we saw the very first TCP/IP games that weren't IPX tunneled through something like Heat.net. Web browsers existed, yes - and 95% of the pages out there were about someone's cat. Napster (ie: mp3 sharing of any large scale) was 3 years in the future. Software mp3 players had just appeared in the fall of 1995. Winamp, the first truly popular player, was a year away. Hardware players were at least 2 years away. Flash didn't really exist until the end of 1996.
Anyway, that's just pulled from the first few posts I could find. Y'all are remembering 1999 at earliest. 1996 was a very different online beast. Splitting hairs? No, showing just how much changed in such a short period of time.
Because "what's good" does not often equal "what's popular".
I can't believe I actually have to point this out, but someone else apparently agreed and modded you, so...
Butte is the only city in the United States where possession and consumption of open containers of alcoholic beverages always are allowed on the street throughout the entire city (although not in vehicles).
Most of his predictions that he got right were brain-dead obvious in 1999 - we already had portable computers coming into common use, and cellphones everywhere. This trend was pretty clearly going to continue. Hell, the Gameboy was proof enough that we were about to see a generation who grew up with portable computing. "Body LANs" don't exist in any meaningful form. People at best are wearing the utility belt of gadgets, some of which might talk Bluetooth to each other.
The rest? Wireless? Please. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were just coming into fruition around that time, and obviously wireless use was going to come into play. Again, cellphones paved the way for this. Beyond that though... I still see millions of wired speakers, mice, keyboards, dvd players, you name it. I still don't see wireless as being the most common form of network access, hell any network admin worth his salt will rant about the general poor performance of Wi-Fi. Wireless printers and displays never really came about (I do find it amusing that he says "occasional keyboard" - the most obvious use of a low-bandwidth wireless interface). His vision of ubiquitous wireless access never came about - the best we have is the cellphone networks, which again, we already had 10 years ago.
Digital books, movies, music? Napster was already out by then. The entertainment industry did its best to stop this from happening and it's only been in the past year or three that it's even been practical (from a legal perspective).
Eyeglass displays have existed for a long, long time and never achieved much success.
A trillion calculations per second on a home computer, eh?
Anyway, just seems a bit underwhelming. He got so much completely wrong.
Not at all.
People are only willing to pay 10 cents per text IF there's no one else offering it cheaper.
Virtually any consumer good/service started out this way: "As long as people are willing to pay $250,000 for a car, that's how much manufacturers will charge, regardless of how many there are". Oops, until Mr. Ford came along and dropped the price.
The difference with cellphone carriers is that none of them want to act like Mr. Ford. It's the complete opposite of classic economics, or at least capitalist economics.
We saw it up here in Canada; absolutely no one was willing to pay for incoming text messages - until EVERY SINGLE CARRIER started charging for them at the same time. Suddenly, everyone was willing to pay for them. Funny how that works.
but if you're able to stop quicker than he is, you still won't hit him.
You cannot ever, Ever, EVER predict this will any accuracy. Claiming otherwise is a good indication of just how poor a driver you are. Short of doing a full engineering analysis on the difference between vehicles, your respective brake and tire life, and a host of other factors you cannot possibly predict, you can and often will be wrong.
Always drive as though the car in front of you can stop on a dime. Those who do not are those who end up in multi-car pileups.
Hint: it's entirely possible for the car in front of you to hit an immovable object.
Seriously folks, this is getting to the point of horseshit. I have yet to hear anyone actually DEFEND these changes; the best comes down to "it's not the end of the world". Akin to "hey, modern Windows is good, it doesn't crash very often anymore". ie: a backhanded compliment.
Time for a new meme. I'm fucking sick of the trashing of Slashdot, and the user page was the last straw. Let's raise this issue on every single story thread. There ain't enough compliant mods to handle us, and we always talk about what the Slash community could do with its numbers...
As this clearly isn't Rob et al's decision, let's fight fire with fire. Trash this site folks, because the site operators are doing it anyway. Let's make sure every single story has pointless offtopic threads like this until something fucking changes.
Honestly, for a while I thought I was the only one. I'm not in the "Slash has gone downhill re: comment quality crowd", but for fuck's sake - STOP TURNING THIS INTO FARK.
Sing it, brother! Just not within earshot of SOCAN.
These greedy fucks are the same ones who manage to suck money out of university fundraising activities. No, I'm not talking fundraising for the university - I'm talking fundraising for student clubs. If we so much as turned on a radio at any event, we were required to pay some insane fee ($100+ iirc) to SOCAN, for the privilege of BROADCASTING AD-SUPPORTED MUSIC. Regardless of the fact that our tiny fundraisers often didn't even raise $100 at a time. I'm talking tiny BBQs for 20 people, just something to have fun and kick some cash into the kitty, maybe buy some paint for our student lounge.
SOCAN can go fuck themselves and the horse they rode in on. No way does Nickelback deserve money from a bunch of penniless students just trying to relax on a stressful exam week. Never mind the fact that we only planned on playing the station that has a "no Nickelback guarantee" (yes, this actually exists in Canada, they're so reviled).
First, the "entire country" is not "effectively bilingual".
This is correct. For non-Canadians out there, we have Quebec, with only one enforced language, French. And the rest of Canada, with 2 official languages, English and French.
Canada is only bilingual outside of Quebec. Ironic, that.
I like how this was modded "Informative". It's by an AC, so there's no "hey, it's funny, but let's give the poor schlep a karma boost" thinking going on.
I guess some mods figured it was worth it to get the word out to the 2 women who read Slashdot. ... and the rest of us, who sneak into the girl's can.
Shepard was also an Apollo astronaut. ;)
What I want to know is in the posters of the evolution of man you see in all the museums, why do the cave men have long hair and beards while the modern man has no facial hair (lacking a secondary sexual characteristic) and have short hair? Bald I can see, but short? I've never met a human with naturally short, doglike hair like you see on those posters.
We had (have?) much more sophisticated tools than Neandethals. Try shaving (or getting a buzz cut) with a stone axe sometime.
That's the general idea, anyway.
Is there a way to mod a comment +1000?
This is so true of a lot of companies that it's scary. I've watched 5 figure consultant fees get pissed away on something that took all of 5 minutes to figure out - for a person who actually understood the systems involved.
When I can say "hmm, I could have solved that for you in 5 minutes, for free" on a monthly basis, it's positively frightening. The worst part about it is, along with the blatantly incompetent people being paid a lot of money, I fall under that umbrella too - so it's really hard to want to leave :P