Another overpriced system with overpriced games
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Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 3, Flamebait
Sure it's neat, but save some money and get a Dreamcast. You can buy DCs on Ebay all day for $40. It has some great games like DOA2, Soul Caliber, NBA2K1, Crazy Taxi (a classic), and Shenmue.
I'm writing this from the perspective of a buyer. I've used PayPal for many Ebay auctions, and it's quick and easy. The reason I won't be sticking with PayPal is they only let you use your credit card up to a certain total of transactions (like $1000 or so), then they require your checking account number to fully validate you.
Um, no thanks, I'm not giving PayPal my checking account #. All I want to do is pay others by credit card, my checking account doesn't need to be involved at all. After they get your checking account #, the money you send via PayPal comes from your checking account by default. They claim you can still have the money come from your credit card if you pick a certain option each time you pay. Once again, no thanks, something doesn't sound right here.
I've only got around $150 of PayPal use left before they cut me off. Oh well, their loss, if their cut of the credit card transactions wasn't enough then too bad.
If you don't want your citizens to be offended, don't let them on the Internet.
If your country wants to make laws that forbid certain content, then don't let your citizens communicate outside your country because your laws don't apply to other countries.
To me a good engine is a good engine, what you do with it makes all the difference. Lots of first person shooters are based on the Quake3 or Unreal Tournament engine.
Day of Defeat is a Half-Life mod, and Half-Life is based on a heavily modded Quake (maybe you could call it Quake 1.5) engine. So both are basically Quake mods.
I love Day of Defeat, but I also think RTCW has potential, partly because of the newer engine and larger outdoor environments.
I'm also eagerly awaiting Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. And Ghost Recon. And Soldier of Fortune 2. And Team Fortress 2 if they really are making it (I wonder sometimes). The list goes on.
Perhaps if you're writing code for a small portion of a much larger project you could get by with a locked-down machine.
But if you are responsible for making sure the program installs and runs on a standard Windows computer, there's no way that you could do that on a locked-down machine. You need to test on a machine that's just like the end user's.
If your company decides to do this I hope they can take a productivity hit.
1. Someone who wants to wreak havoc.
2. An OS with security holes.
3. Users who either don't secure their machine or allow it to become infected.
The root of the whole virus problem is #1. Of course that's just the way the world works, you've always got assholes trying to wreak some havoc. No matter how secure the OS is, people will find a way to exploit weaknesses.
As for #2, Windows is certainly full of security holes, but is any common OS totally secure? Unix isn't, MacOS isn't. Maybe most are much more secure than Windows, but maybe that's because they haven't been targeted as much. Windows is picked on because so many people run it. Microsoft is trying to make software easy for people to use, but the world isn't perfect and all their features tend to backfire when used for evil. Outlook, ActiveX, and VBScript are perfect examples. There a are a lot of things MS could change to make things much more secure.
And finally, whether Windows is secure or not, it still takes someone ignorant enough to click on an attachment to get infected. How will that problem ever be fixed? Take away the ability to receive attachments completely? That's the only way I can think of. Drive the virii back to floppy disk distribution!
Why is this flagged Flamebait? It's a not-very-practical but cool idea...
The file sharing programs should fight back
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RIAA to DoS Pirates?
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· Score: 1
If the RIAA really starts doing this, the file sharing clients should be updated to send a packet to the RIAA for every 100 packets downloaded. Just imagine the power of millions of file sharing programs sending packets to the RIAA 24 hours a day.
I never said my ISP was the problem, I've asked them if they use MAPS and they responded with an emphatic "NO". That's why I'm still with them. I'll filter my own e-mail, thank you.
What I am saying is your average user shouldn't have the hassle of finding an ISP that doesn't censor his e-mail for him.
And finally, Hotmail does use MAPS if you enable it. They started early this year. Why don't you figure out the facts before you post?
I never said my ISP was the problem, I've asked them if they use MAPS and they responded with an emphatic "NO". That's why I'm still with them. I'll filter my own e-mail, thank you.
What I am saying is your average user shouldn't have the hassle of finding an ISP that doesn't censor his e-mail for him.
MAPS has no real right to block commerce on the Internet. Yes, I know that sysadmins choose to use MAPS, but all their users don't. The collateral damage is substantial.
I don't think Experian is the type to send those fly-by-night "Make Money Fast" or "Lose 4 pounds in 2 hours" e-mails. Experian has paying clients and has the right to send e-mail to people who have indicated interest. I'm sure the e-mails they send don't have forged headers like most spam.
I'm glad MAPS got shot down. First the people behind MAPS work to build the Internet (with things like BIND and sendmail), then they change their mind and punch it full of holes. Something needs to be done about spam, but MAPS isn't the right solution.
Are you suggesting that we do without world-wide music & movie exposure? There's a LOT of good stuff out there that you would have to travel around forever to hear. Sure a lot of the movie and music corporations are huge and greedy and bite off their nose to spite their face, but they DO have a decent distribution framework for all that entertainment. I for one wouldn't be happy with only local entertainment.
The "big guns" do need to respect their consumers more, but let's not hurt them too badly!
As a space adventure story, I liked the premeire of Enterprise a lot, but the plot didn't make much sense from what I've seen of the Star Trek universe:
Why does the ship look better than Voyager, which was built hundreds of years later? I realize that people don't want 1960's special effects, but how about a compromise? And why are they wearing Voyager-era uniforms? How about updating the old 60's style of uniforms? Well I guess it's too late for that.
When they landed on that planet to find out who the Klingon had met, why weren't they amazed and standing around slack-jawed because of all the alien cultures?
Why didn't we lose any red shirt guys? Wait a minute, where were the red shirt guys?
Why did Archer have to stay behind when he set off that mag-bomb thing? That was just a cheap plot device to put the captain in close personal danger.
Another ongoing logic vs. emotion conflict? Come on, that was already done to death with Spock, Data, and 7 of 9. Except now the logical person is hot and there's the possibility of sex? I can see they're going to drag that out forever. I sort of doubt Vulcans are a lot of fun to make love to. 7 of 9 was a much better prospect.
Even though I did like Enterprise, how about giving us something different than we've seen before on the other series? I was hoping to see more wonder and discovery instead of Enterprise jumping right away into a routine life-or-death mission ala TNG or Voyager. At least there is the promise of more action than we saw on those shows.
To me Star Trek's secret is an interesting universe, a set of "good guy rules of conduct" (the Prime Directive), and a mostly great set of characters, depending on the series.
Then of course the writers come in, screw with the framework (like violating the Prime Directive every other episode), and either make every episode a desperate final fight for survival or a soap opera. And sprinkle in a lot of convenient technology capabilities/liabilites and too much luck. But every once in a while (for Voyager) there was a really interesting episode that was as good or better than many big-budget movies. X-Files is like that too, although 3-4 years ago every episode was very good.
Every computer-saavy person I know has bought one or more AMD CPU's in the last year or so. They've been getting very good reviews compared to the Pentiums, the prices are reasonable, and their performance is great. So what's the problem? Are they selling them too cheap?
Sorry AMD, if you're not making it now it's not going to get any better while the Pentium prices keep falling and our gigahertz AMD CPUs start going up in smoke when the cooling fan eventually fails.:(
WHY would you want to run Linux in a GBA? How about porting Linux to my toaster? I waste lots of time waiting for toast when I could be writing shell scripts in binary with the toaster lever.
It's probably because of all the people that died last week and are on the "Stairway to Heaven". Quite a reach if you ask me.
That song list is totally idiotic, I thought we weren't supposed to let the terrorism affect us, that we were supposed to get on with our daily lives? Now I'm seeing movies, games, and now songs being censored or not released at all because of it? I'm so sick of big business trying not to offend anyone.
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb" , "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning" - Nostradamus 1654
Will people stop it with the Nostradamus posts already? I can't imagine that NYC would be considered the City of God, and who exactly are the two brothers? There will be no world war unless we find out this attack was sanctioned by a specific country, which I consider very unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
The games are from $5 to $25 on Ebay.
Um, no thanks, I'm not giving PayPal my checking account #. All I want to do is pay others by credit card, my checking account doesn't need to be involved at all. After they get your checking account #, the money you send via PayPal comes from your checking account by default. They claim you can still have the money come from your credit card if you pick a certain option each time you pay. Once again, no thanks, something doesn't sound right here.
I've only got around $150 of PayPal use left before they cut me off. Oh well, their loss, if their cut of the credit card transactions wasn't enough then too bad.
If you don't want your citizens to be offended, don't let them on the Internet.
If your country wants to make laws that forbid certain content, then don't let your citizens communicate outside your country because your laws don't apply to other countries.
Day of Defeat is a Half-Life mod, and Half-Life is based on a heavily modded Quake (maybe you could call it Quake 1.5) engine. So both are basically Quake mods.
I love Day of Defeat, but I also think RTCW has potential, partly because of the newer engine and larger outdoor environments.
I'm also eagerly awaiting Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. And Ghost Recon. And Soldier of Fortune 2. And Team Fortress 2 if they really are making it (I wonder sometimes). The list goes on.
Would you have a hard time if you bought a TV just to play Playstation games on and/or watch DVDs?
Perhaps if you're writing code for a small portion of a much larger project you could get by with a locked-down machine.
But if you are responsible for making sure the program installs and runs on a standard Windows computer, there's no way that you could do that on a locked-down machine. You need to test on a machine that's just like the end user's.
If your company decides to do this I hope they can take a productivity hit.
1. Someone who wants to wreak havoc.
2. An OS with security holes.
3. Users who either don't secure their machine or allow it to become infected.
The root of the whole virus problem is #1. Of course that's just the way the world works, you've always got assholes trying to wreak some havoc. No matter how secure the OS is, people will find a way to exploit weaknesses.
As for #2, Windows is certainly full of security holes, but is any common OS totally secure? Unix isn't, MacOS isn't. Maybe most are much more secure than Windows, but maybe that's because they haven't been targeted as much. Windows is picked on because so many people run it. Microsoft is trying to make software easy for people to use, but the world isn't perfect and all their features tend to backfire when used for evil. Outlook, ActiveX, and VBScript are perfect examples. There a are a lot of things MS could change to make things much more secure.
And finally, whether Windows is secure or not, it still takes someone ignorant enough to click on an attachment to get infected. How will that problem ever be fixed? Take away the ability to receive attachments completely? That's the only way I can think of. Drive the virii back to floppy disk distribution!
Why is this flagged Flamebait? It's a not-very-practical but cool idea...
I'm assuming converting to Unicode would double the size and we would have to introduce some sort of compression to fit it on a CD-ROM?
I don't think sysadmins should blindly trust the MAPS list. Yes it works, but at what cost?
What I am saying is your average user shouldn't have the hassle of finding an ISP that doesn't censor his e-mail for him.
And finally, Hotmail does use MAPS if you enable it. They started early this year. Why don't you figure out the facts before you post?
What I am saying is your average user shouldn't have the hassle of finding an ISP that doesn't censor his e-mail for him.
I don't think Experian is the type to send those fly-by-night "Make Money Fast" or "Lose 4 pounds in 2 hours" e-mails. Experian has paying clients and has the right to send e-mail to people who have indicated interest. I'm sure the e-mails they send don't have forged headers like most spam.
I'm glad MAPS got shot down. First the people behind MAPS work to build the Internet (with things like BIND and sendmail), then they change their mind and punch it full of holes. Something needs to be done about spam, but MAPS isn't the right solution.
The "big guns" do need to respect their consumers more, but let's not hurt them too badly!
Why does the ship look better than Voyager, which was built hundreds of years later? I realize that people don't want 1960's special effects, but how about a compromise? And why are they wearing Voyager-era uniforms? How about updating the old 60's style of uniforms? Well I guess it's too late for that.
When they landed on that planet to find out who the Klingon had met, why weren't they amazed and standing around slack-jawed because of all the alien cultures?
Why didn't we lose any red shirt guys? Wait a minute, where were the red shirt guys?
Why did Archer have to stay behind when he set off that mag-bomb thing? That was just a cheap plot device to put the captain in close personal danger.
Another ongoing logic vs. emotion conflict? Come on, that was already done to death with Spock, Data, and 7 of 9. Except now the logical person is hot and there's the possibility of sex? I can see they're going to drag that out forever. I sort of doubt Vulcans are a lot of fun to make love to. 7 of 9 was a much better prospect.
Even though I did like Enterprise, how about giving us something different than we've seen before on the other series? I was hoping to see more wonder and discovery instead of Enterprise jumping right away into a routine life-or-death mission ala TNG or Voyager. At least there is the promise of more action than we saw on those shows.
Then of course the writers come in, screw with the framework (like violating the Prime Directive every other episode), and either make every episode a desperate final fight for survival or a soap opera. And sprinkle in a lot of convenient technology capabilities/liabilites and too much luck. But every once in a while (for Voyager) there was a really interesting episode that was as good or better than many big-budget movies. X-Files is like that too, although 3-4 years ago every episode was very good.
..but those blue guys piss me off!
Sorry AMD, if you're not making it now it's not going to get any better while the Pentium prices keep falling and our gigahertz AMD CPUs start going up in smoke when the cooling fan eventually fails. :(
WHY would you want to run Linux in a GBA? How about porting Linux to my toaster? I waste lots of time waiting for toast when I could be writing shell scripts in binary with the toaster lever.
That song list is totally idiotic, I thought we weren't supposed to let the terrorism affect us, that we were supposed to get on with our daily lives? Now I'm seeing movies, games, and now songs being censored or not released at all because of it? I'm so sick of big business trying not to offend anyone.
That was my rant for today.
Will people stop it with the Nostradamus posts already? I can't imagine that NYC would be considered the City of God, and who exactly are the two brothers? There will be no world war unless we find out this attack was sanctioned by a specific country, which I consider very unlikely.