Oh man, this is classic. You use your computer to pick up chicks? Hahahahha!
"You think my Powerbook is hot...wait until you see....my dual G5 tower!" "Oh...my god! It's so quiet! And look at the bling bling $2200 Cinema display!" "That's right baby, it's all about the money. Now let's download some love."
Another thing that may have not been considered yet is the high barrier-to-entry that is the price of a decent Macintosh. Buying a $2500+ laptop is no joke, and it's generally reserved for professionals (read: people making big salaries). Professionals with degrees are usually more educated than The Rest of Us, and I'd venture a guess that they read and write just a little better as well.
Then again, it's only speculation. My English skills are hand over fist above every college graduate I've met in person.
You also forgot..the XBox isn't technically impressive _at all_. You take a standard pc motherboard, some regular ram and an onboard nvidia chip..presto, Xbox console. Wow, now that's fucking amazing.
My nonexistant 10 year old cousin could make the same console in 15 minutes with off the shelf parts.
"In other words -- Japan has 2 huge titans gearing up for a *huge* battle for #1."
Where did I see this last? Oh yeah! Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Godzilla vs. Ghidra. Godzilla vs. Rodan. Man, it seems like every year they've got a pair of titans set to destroy the city.
Please Nintendo, make it stop. You're about to become the next Sega as far as home consoles go. Portables? The PSP may wipe the floor with you..but you'll come back on the basis of price yet again.
Gee, you did it a strange way. Should have gone something like this:
1. Plug in the printer, plug the printer cable into the machine. 2. Watch as Windows figures out you just connected something. If it's parallel it may not notice right away. 3. Pray that you have the driver CD handy for the printer; if not, dig around on the net. 4. Reboot (probably) and cross fingers.
Under Mandrake 10, I open Printerdrake, a nice little gui app. After it makes sure necessary utils are installed, it looks for new printers, or shows me printers it's configured before. It tries it's best to autodetect the right printer, and if it fails, it gives me the option of telling it what kind of printer I have. Chances are great that there is a Cups printer driver already installed. No reboot, nothing more to do but start printing.
You're right, things have changed on both sides for sure. XP got more stability, and also a shitload more worms and viruses due to hundreds of security holes. Oh and these holes are easy to exploit via ActiveX on web pages, macros buried in emails, and some exploit a computer that's just sitting on an internet connection doing nothing. Zero user interaction to get wormed is very bad.
Meanwhile, Linux has gotten alot better hardware support, a whole universe of software that is mostly free and comes on your CD sets or your local mirror, better desktops (Gnome and KDE are light years from where they were just 2 years ago) and better browsers than other platforms. Apple knew a good thing when they saw it and used Konqueror's rendering engine for Safari, and even gave the rendering improvements back to Konqueror developers.
Things have changed alot in both camps. I dare say that from a default, non-OEM install perspective, Linux has better hardware support than XP.
Extremely high. With a record export of $2.5bn expected this year, some farmers are rich beyond their wildest dreams. I read an article last night about an Afghan man and his brother making well over $5600 per month growing Opium. While they felt guilt over it since Islam prohibits growing or using drugs, they asked Allah for forgiveness since they have no other choice. They both support around 35 people, and I'm sure they aren't complaining. When a crop of wheat on that same land only nets you about $121 per month, and you have 35 babies sucking at your teats, the choice is clear. It's a purely economic choice and the consequences aren't considered (people in my country aren't hooked on this shit, why should I care).
A post above mine has some nice BBC links, but googling 'afghanistan opium' will land around 125,000 hits. Some of those articles may lead you to links between the CIA and bin Laden, drug lords, etc. Pretty fascinating stuff.
Yeah, all that's true, but you forgot to mention the huge cash crop of Opium that Afghans turn a mighty profit from. With the US bombings, there are alot of opium fields disappearing, and injured people have a hard time tending crops.
Everyone seems to be forgetting basic weight distribution as well. If you have a 500lb car with 4 tires, then you have 4 places for the weight to be distributed across. HOWEVER it's not equal distribution.
With a midengined car, the majority of the weight is near or over the rear axle. Thus, the front tires of the car are bearing less load than the rears. Add a standard Afghan passenger at around 150lbs or so on the driver's side and the balance shifts somewhat.
Taking all of this into consideration, the best place to run over your foot is the passenger side front tire, which supports the least weight as long as there's only the driver in the car and no luggage. Even the driver's side front tire doesn't exert as much weight as either of the rear tires.
Regardless, the article said he doesn't want the car using batteries to power the wheels, only the solar panels. That makes it a little more challenging.
Fragmented AND dying..as if the two were inexorably linked. On the contrary, one of the strengths of open source software is its diversity. The more strong distros you see people getting behind, the stronger the whole 'linux movement' becomes. Critical mass consists of users first and developers second. If enough people are running linux in 5 years, you can bet that Adobe and Macromedia will see dollar signs there and have boxed sets of Photoshop 25 ready.
If there was a single distro, with a single browser, etc. it'd be the same damn monoculture that makes Windows so weak. Vive la difference or something like that.
Like I said, bad trips are little more than a bad state of mind. It's all in the tripper's head. It will blow over as the brain's chemicals begin to stabilize, maybe in minutes, maybe in hours, but inevitably it settles down. I never said it wasn't a big deal. People in bad states of mind shoot each other or jump from bridges, but ultimately, it's in their heads as well. That's why I suggested that people be responsible and experiment in a controlled environment.
Speaking of traumatized for life, I have never read a single case of someone who had permanent mental damage as a result of LSD usage. It doesn't directly affect the brain like other drugs; it inhibits serotonin re-uptake. Your brain makes serotonin constantly so your trip will always end and eventually you'll be back to normal.
Sounds to me like you rely on quite a bit of anecdotal evidence from friends and 'a guy that knows a guy'. I speak from personal experience and from reading many books on the subject. At one point in my life I found it fascinating enough to spend hours in the college library learning more about it.
Since you probably won't be happy with trusting that I know something, here are some links for you.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=flashback+myth &h l=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=330B659C.59E4%40gte.com&rnu m=1 http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_info3 .shtm l
Information like this is hard to come by on the internet but there are literally dozens of books from the 50's onward that discuss LSD and how it works.
If you want a tad bit more explanation of 'why' to your questions, here you go.
Serotonin is responsible for regulating emotion and other reactions in the brain. It's a nice little enzyme that plugs into neuroreceptors and prevents absorption of other chemicals. LSD and it's friends fit into the same plug as serotonin does and therefore causes elevated serotonin levels. By proxy, other chemical levels rise and the result is chemical chaos.
The perceptual confusion that results, like typical reports of seeing sound and hearing light, is due to parts of the brain that handle channeling information from point A to point B getting crossed up. Nearly the whole brain is affected, which in turn affects the CNS (central nervous system). People have often reported being 'faster' or 'stronger' under the influence of LSD, and it's a direct result of the CNS stimulation. Sweating and delayed fatigue is common as well.
I know way too much about this subject so I'll bore you with any more details. Suffice it to say, the patterns people see are the direct result of chemical processes that are out of whack. Not enough sleep will cause you to hallucinate after a few days...serotonin is to blame for that as well. Without a regulator chemical, other chemicals cause trouble.
(as a sidenote, for those of you who want to experience LSD visual patterns without the drugs, go build a Dream Machine. Good times with your brain's alpha waves).
Flashbacks are a myth. Between a large control group that had never taken LSD and a group that had, both had equal occurences of "flashback" symptoms. Some good research has been done on the subject already.
I encourage everyone to try LSD at least once. Just do it in a safe place with people you honestly like and trust. Things can feel like they're going wrong but others can help you through the troughs. I've been that someone more than once, and it's always easier to help a person out of a bad trip if they know and trust you. After all, a bad trip is little more than a state of mind.
There is magic in their drivers, and it is explained EVERY SINGLE TIME NVIDIA GETS MENTIONED HERE. It's called a special OpenGL license from SGI and it's also some special in-house code.
Try to remember it this time, it's only the 400 millionth time it's been mentioned.
CDs are dead as far as I'm concerned..at least for day to day usage. Once I bought an mp3 cd player for my car, I used grip to convert my entire cd collection to mp3 and burned a few cds full of all of my music.
No more fishing around while driving looking for that song that I want to hear, or asking passengers to dig for me. It's on one of 3 discs..and they all have so many songs it's easy to take them anywhere.
I highly recommend the San Jose MP3 player from Blaupunkt. Cheap, cool looking and loud.:)
I totally agree as well. It's when the public, average joe user finds out about something and it becomes ubiquitous that it gets corporations' attentions.
Take mp3 and movie trading for instance. Some of you have been doing it for years before Napster ever existed through IRC or other means. Napster just made it easy enough for the average jerk that it spread like wildfire. IRC swapping channels will live on, but most of the Napster users have either switched clients or accepted the outrageous fees that record companies charge for a CD.
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Oh man, this is classic. You use your computer to pick up chicks? Hahahahha!
"You think my Powerbook is hot...wait until you see....my dual G5 tower!" "Oh...my god! It's so quiet! And look at the bling bling $2200 Cinema display!" "That's right baby, it's all about the money. Now let's download some love."
Another thing that may have not been considered yet is the high barrier-to-entry that is the price of a decent Macintosh. Buying a $2500+ laptop is no joke, and it's generally reserved for professionals (read: people making big salaries). Professionals with degrees are usually more educated than The Rest of Us, and I'd venture a guess that they read and write just a little better as well.
Then again, it's only speculation. My English skills are hand over fist above every college graduate I've met in person.
Social skills? Dude, welcome to Slashdot, where you can leave social skills and hygiene behind.
In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream..with a +2 filter on Slashdot.
You also forgot..the XBox isn't technically impressive _at all_. You take a standard pc motherboard, some regular ram and an onboard nvidia chip..presto, Xbox console. Wow, now that's fucking amazing.
My nonexistant 10 year old cousin could make the same console in 15 minutes with off the shelf parts.
"In other words -- Japan has 2 huge titans gearing up for a *huge* battle for #1."
Where did I see this last? Oh yeah! Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Godzilla vs. Ghidra. Godzilla vs. Rodan. Man, it seems like every year they've got a pair of titans set to destroy the city.
Please Nintendo, make it stop. You're about to become the next Sega as far as home consoles go. Portables? The PSP may wipe the floor with you..but you'll come back on the basis of price yet again.
How about pong with two TP rolls instead of paddles and a long brown ball? There! Now you have Crap Pong! The worst of both worlds.
I can see how this would be a frequent mistake..you know, confusing the word Shit with Shoot, probably happens all the time.
Wait, that's just here in Texas. Aw, shoot.
Leave it to a coder to play a game like Rogue Spear without sound or a sound card. :p
You're one of those guys that plays Quake with the aalib output aren't you?
Gee, you did it a strange way. Should have gone something like this:
1. Plug in the printer, plug the printer cable into the machine.
2. Watch as Windows figures out you just connected something. If it's parallel it may not notice right away.
3. Pray that you have the driver CD handy for the printer; if not, dig around on the net.
4. Reboot (probably) and cross fingers.
Under Mandrake 10, I open Printerdrake, a nice little gui app. After it makes sure necessary utils are installed, it looks for new printers, or shows me printers it's configured before. It tries it's best to autodetect the right printer, and if it fails, it gives me the option of telling it what kind of printer I have. Chances are great that there is a Cups printer driver already installed. No reboot, nothing more to do but start printing.
You're right, things have changed on both sides for sure. XP got more stability, and also a shitload more worms and viruses due to hundreds of security holes. Oh and these holes are easy to exploit via ActiveX on web pages, macros buried in emails, and some exploit a computer that's just sitting on an internet connection doing nothing. Zero user interaction to get wormed is very bad.
Meanwhile, Linux has gotten alot better hardware support, a whole universe of software that is mostly free and comes on your CD sets or your local mirror, better desktops (Gnome and KDE are light years from where they were just 2 years ago) and better browsers than other platforms. Apple knew a good thing when they saw it and used Konqueror's rendering engine for Safari, and even gave the rendering improvements back to Konqueror developers.
Things have changed alot in both camps. I dare say that from a default, non-OEM install perspective, Linux has better hardware support than XP.
Bah, you're not new here, why are you feeding the trolls?
Half of the trolls like the one a few posts up about the printer are people that tried Debian or Slackware back in 1997. Things have changed.
Extremely high. With a record export of $2.5bn expected this year, some farmers are rich beyond their wildest dreams. I read an article last night about an Afghan man and his brother making well over $5600 per month growing Opium. While they felt guilt over it since Islam prohibits growing or using drugs, they asked Allah for forgiveness since they have no other choice. They both support around 35 people, and I'm sure they aren't complaining. When a crop of wheat on that same land only nets you about $121 per month, and you have 35 babies sucking at your teats, the choice is clear. It's a purely economic choice and the consequences aren't considered (people in my country aren't hooked on this shit, why should I care).
A post above mine has some nice BBC links, but googling 'afghanistan opium' will land around 125,000 hits. Some of those articles may lead you to links between the CIA and bin Laden, drug lords, etc. Pretty fascinating stuff.
Yeah, all that's true, but you forgot to mention the huge cash crop of Opium that Afghans turn a mighty profit from. With the US bombings, there are alot of opium fields disappearing, and injured people have a hard time tending crops.
Well, that answers the question 'Are SUV drivers as stupid as they appear in traffic'. Answer? Unequivocally, yes. ;)
Everyone seems to be forgetting basic weight distribution as well. If you have a 500lb car with 4 tires, then you have 4 places for the weight to be distributed across. HOWEVER it's not equal distribution.
With a midengined car, the majority of the weight is near or over the rear axle. Thus, the front tires of the car are bearing less load than the rears. Add a standard Afghan passenger at around 150lbs or so on the driver's side and the balance shifts somewhat.
Taking all of this into consideration, the best place to run over your foot is the passenger side front tire, which supports the least weight as long as there's only the driver in the car and no luggage. Even the driver's side front tire doesn't exert as much weight as either of the rear tires.
Regardless, the article said he doesn't want the car using batteries to power the wheels, only the solar panels. That makes it a little more challenging.
Fragmented AND dying..as if the two were inexorably linked. On the contrary, one of the strengths of open source software is its diversity. The more strong distros you see people getting behind, the stronger the whole 'linux movement' becomes. Critical mass consists of users first and developers second. If enough people are running linux in 5 years, you can bet that Adobe and Macromedia will see dollar signs there and have boxed sets of Photoshop 25 ready.
If there was a single distro, with a single browser, etc. it'd be the same damn monoculture that makes Windows so weak. Vive la difference or something like that.
Like I said, bad trips are little more than a bad state of mind. It's all in the tripper's head. It will blow over as the brain's chemicals begin to stabilize, maybe in minutes, maybe in hours, but inevitably it settles down. I never said it wasn't a big deal. People in bad states of mind shoot each other or jump from bridges, but ultimately, it's in their heads as well. That's why I suggested that people be responsible and experiment in a controlled environment.
h &h l=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=330B659C.59E4%40gte.com&rnu m=13 .shtm l
Speaking of traumatized for life, I have never read a single case of someone who had permanent mental damage as a result of LSD usage. It doesn't directly affect the brain like other drugs; it inhibits serotonin re-uptake. Your brain makes serotonin constantly so your trip will always end and eventually you'll be back to normal.
Sounds to me like you rely on quite a bit of anecdotal evidence from friends and 'a guy that knows a guy'. I speak from personal experience and from reading many books on the subject. At one point in my life I found it fascinating enough to spend hours in the college library learning more about it.
Since you probably won't be happy with trusting that I know something, here are some links for you.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=flashback+myt
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_info
Information like this is hard to come by on the internet but there are literally dozens of books from the 50's onward that discuss LSD and how it works.
If you want a tad bit more explanation of 'why' to your questions, here you go.
Serotonin is responsible for regulating emotion and other reactions in the brain. It's a nice little enzyme that plugs into neuroreceptors and prevents absorption of other chemicals. LSD and it's friends fit into the same plug as serotonin does and therefore causes elevated serotonin levels. By proxy, other chemical levels rise and the result is chemical chaos.
The perceptual confusion that results, like typical reports of seeing sound and hearing light, is due to parts of the brain that handle channeling information from point A to point B getting crossed up. Nearly the whole brain is affected, which in turn affects the CNS (central nervous system). People have often reported being 'faster' or 'stronger' under the influence of LSD, and it's a direct result of the CNS stimulation. Sweating and delayed fatigue is common as well.
I know way too much about this subject so I'll bore you with any more details. Suffice it to say, the patterns people see are the direct result of chemical processes that are out of whack. Not enough sleep will cause you to hallucinate after a few days...serotonin is to blame for that as well. Without a regulator chemical, other chemicals cause trouble.
(as a sidenote, for those of you who want to experience LSD visual patterns without the drugs, go build a Dream Machine. Good times with your brain's alpha waves).
Flashbacks are a myth. Between a large control group that had never taken LSD and a group that had, both had equal occurences of "flashback" symptoms. Some good research has been done on the subject already.
I encourage everyone to try LSD at least once. Just do it in a safe place with people you honestly like and trust. Things can feel like they're going wrong but others can help you through the troughs. I've been that someone more than once, and it's always easier to help a person out of a bad trip if they know and trust you. After all, a bad trip is little more than a state of mind.
There is magic in their drivers, and it is explained EVERY SINGLE TIME NVIDIA GETS MENTIONED HERE. It's called a special OpenGL license from SGI and it's also some special in-house code.
Try to remember it this time, it's only the 400 millionth time it's been mentioned.
Too bad your post was late, that was some funny shit.
For you youngsters out there, it's a parody of the old SpiderMan cartoon's theme song, which goes like this:
Spiderman, spiderman
Does whatever a spider can
Spins a web, any size,
Catches thieves, just like flies
Hey there, there goes the Spiderman
In the chill of night,
at the scene of a crime
Like a streak of light,
he arrives just in time
Anyway if you really want to hear it you know where to look.
"...who do a far better job of creating characters that Indian language readers relate to."
My favorite character is Outsource Man! He can do any job any American can, but cheaper!
CDs are dead as far as I'm concerned..at least for day to day usage. Once I bought an mp3 cd player for my car, I used grip to convert my entire cd collection to mp3 and burned a few cds full of all of my music.
:)
No more fishing around while driving looking for that song that I want to hear, or asking passengers to dig for me. It's on one of 3 discs..and they all have so many songs it's easy to take them anywhere.
I highly recommend the San Jose MP3 player from Blaupunkt. Cheap, cool looking and loud.
I totally agree as well. It's when the public, average joe user finds out about something and it becomes ubiquitous that it gets corporations' attentions.
Take mp3 and movie trading for instance. Some of you have been doing it for years before Napster ever existed through IRC or other means. Napster just made it easy enough for the average jerk that it spread like wildfire. IRC swapping channels will live on, but most of the Napster users have either switched clients or accepted the outrageous fees that record companies charge for a CD.