When I lived in central Texas (Ft Hood if you care) Just off base in Killean there was a burger joint named Grid Iron Burgers, and they made the single most greasy burger ever, it was called the pigskin burger.... here's the blueprint, half a pound of fatty ground of beef topped with count 'em 4 strips of bacon 3 slices of montery jack cheese mayo and picles and ketchup. this thing would soak through four layers of paper they wrapped it in and the paper bag it came in before they could hand it through the drive through window.
Over and over again I see these same commericails talking about AOL's ease of use, and since I didn't use it and I saw so many morons using it to some degree of succsess I assumed it was in fact easy to use.
This perception changed the other day when my father asked me to come over and show him how to send an attachment over email.
Simple.... not.
Simple in eudora, simple in outlook express, Simple using hotmail or yahoo or anything but AOLs interface.
I took me a good 20 minutes of searching through poorly laid out menus before I figured out how to attach a picture and send it.
The point is that AOL is not easy to use but we have been told so many times that it is that we believe it. This is the same reason that windoze is standard it is because everybody says so so it must be true.
/. has a groupthink that is miles away from the consumer groupthink, but until groupthink is less infuenced by marketing consumers will still by 'doze machines, drive SUVs in the city, eat a McD's grease ball, and wonder why their diet of the week doesn't work
I don't know thats actualy copyright it's more like trademark,but...
at any rate as of late I have noticed fewer and fewer cds being sold have this logo anymore
most markedly in the boy/girl band market
The degree to which spam sucks is open to debate. To be fair it does taste better than treat spams off brand competitor;-p
Now unsoliceted email that is worse.
Years ago I thought unsoliceted email was a passing fad and would go away when it proved unproffitable. I couldn't be more wrong on an email account that I set up to catch spam I average over 100 peices of crap a day.
What can we do about it?
Not much.
We set up clever filters and they bypass them with the skill of a 15 year old on a porn hunt.
We make laws, and they ignore them or make themselves very hard to find, not to mention the fact that many of these "businesses" would be illegal if they were exposed to the light of day.
What have I done, well I set up a reverse filter it blocks everything that does not have a specifc subject line, people who want to email me must use this line, it is a pain in the ass but it saves me time and I look at no spam on my urgent account, when I have time I will scan through my spam account for lost messages but I haven't had any in weeks.
I thought about, and it it hurts, but it points to an interesting thought, is solitare a good game on the PC.
It just isn't but for some stupid reason I keep playing it.
The interesting thing about the article is that it shows more than ever that graphics and speed are unimportant to the quality of the game. Right after the bundled games were and I quote
October 2001were (Electronic Arts) Maxis' The Sims, with 1.6 million users; Microsoft's Age of Empires, with 805,000 users; (Vivendi Universal) Blizzard's Diablo II with 624,000 users; and (Electronic Arts) Westwood's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun with 563,000 users. none of these are visualy very impressive, but they all share one common theme anyone can play them with ease.
conclusion gameplay over style every time
A short list of things that won't work right. (please prove me wrong)
Voice recogniton software (that works)
Good search engines
high speed internet access at home (no really)
flying cars (its 2001 where the heck is my flying car?)
cheap household robots
wet wired computer hardware
traveling by car faster than by bicycle (traffic issues)
and many many more wonderful items that Iam too wacked out on caffine to think of
....But this litle nugget would be the one part I believe is the bit about independence day
I saw this movie in several rental facilities in Kuwait (subtitled, dubed and censored) complete with new boxes with Airbic script all over the outside
Plus I read that same bit in my local paper
yes its a hoax but I would imagine you could rent Will Smith's movie in at least one store in Afganistan
The problem is not that six hours of film was taken the problem is that nobody ever takes the time to edit the footage. (how many hours of camra left on in a bag have you fast forwarded through). I don't think better editing tools would help, because that would involve sitting though the tape all over again.
This will not get AOLers to switch OS's. Most AOLer's are very paranoid about any change to their computer.
They fear that the change they make will kill their expensive toy and force them to go talk to a more computer literate friend who will once again berate them for using the most expensive ISP with the worst service.
What this will do. (maybe) is covered by point 8
8) Common Sense
Ok, most of you have probably stopped reading by now. But I need to make a point.
The only reason that the information above is not already widely available is because of the fear of abuse. Putting this information in immature hands is dangerous. Some people believe that if it gets out, the walls of the America Online service will come crashing down as things like faster mail bombers, spammers, IM bombers, and cloners begin to immerge. It may very well be impossible to enter a chat room without being so lagged by scrolling, IMs, and emails that you cannot even stay connected. I don't personally believe that though. Due to the complexity of these packets, it is far harder to use even copied source of this than to use copied source of the infamous "AOL Progs" that eventually died out. If you are learning from this document, I implore you to use common sense in your use of this information.
I suspect that this doocument will be the source from which nasty new AOL hacks will be based. And now that it is out it is in very immature hands.
And you saw that on 60 minutes, I saw it too. many of the Maintance figures (12 man hours per flight hour) come from figureing in the time requred to comlete a major overhaul or in the lingo "phase" maintinace these take several monthes of labor and waiting for parts that are in the system but not released (the parts are in War stock and can't be used in time of peace this has to do with th supply system in combat areas the supply system works and you get what you need, when you are training in Texas you can't get anything. I know from experiance). when the aircraft is down waiting for parts you do silly stuff to it like spot painting the blades or polishing the the main rotor mast it is time consuming and pointless but this time does get logged.
As a former Apache Mechanic I can say that the airframe is fairly reliable when it is flown frequently the problems with this helicopter really start when you let them sit.
If you keep them flying the seals last longer and since they upgraded the Air conditioner from water based to freon based the electronics last much longer (the AC was piped to the computers first and the pilots got what was left over)
In a operational setting the AH-64 frequently achieves a 90% up time, in garison settings this drops to 65-70%
In short when needed the Apache is ready, reliable and when needed lethal.
I feel like I am replying to a troll here, but iwill go ahead anyways.
I forsee that in the next few weeks we will have eliminated most of the decent military targets that the Taliban have, and to be fair there aren't that many.
once that is done the only tech edge we will have left is in intelligance. It is important to monitor radio traffic (and triangulate positions of the transmitters) watch troop movements etc. What it sounds like the game planfrom there is from theree is to continue to seed destablization in the country (read: Fund northern alliance).
the fallicy here is will deposing the Taliban give us Osama, hard to say but it should make other rogue states think twice before harbouring a known terrorist
Once upon a time I used to use usenet a decent bit and after abscent mindedly posting to alt.drunken.bastards with my real email address and no anonymity at all, I was hit with the most god-awful flood of spam you could possibly imagine.
After that I started to use anonomizers whenever I posted or at least a throw away email address
Besides music and talk programming, XM will also carry radio channels or live audio simulcasts from CNBC, CNN Headline News, USA Today and C-SPAN among others.
Of the music channels, 30 of 71 will be commercial-free. The rest, along with 29 news, talks and sports channels will carry commercial blocks of varying lengths.
The service will cost $9.95 a month, with new radios to upgrade older cars to make them compatible starting at $225.
so if I understand this right for ten bucks a month I only get 30 stations that are comercial free and 100 + that arn't any any different than what I already have.
The new TLDs won't take off 'till we get at least some of the following
.XXX (duh)
.AOL (when this comes then AOLers will be truley locked out of the web) .news (It just sounds good) .KIDS ( For kid safe sites only) .M$ (you will need to use this for your site to be usable under future explorer) .ETC (for folks more creative than me)
Perhaps M$ is right in removing the buildings from its flight simulator. not to be crass but the buildings are not there any more, and including them in future editions of the simulator would be inaccurate, but we should not remove all old referances to the great buildings.
I read somewhere a while back about a website that after a tornado collected loose photos from the surrounding area and then posted them online so the proper owners could claim them
I would imagine that something similar would be helpful in the NY area to help with the healing
Slashdot Mirror
When I lived in central Texas (Ft Hood if you care) Just off base in Killean there was a burger joint named Grid Iron Burgers, and they made the single most greasy burger ever, it was called the pigskin burger.... here's the blueprint, half a pound of fatty ground of beef topped with count 'em 4 strips of bacon 3 slices of montery jack cheese mayo and picles and ketchup. this thing would soak through four layers of paper they wrapped it in and the paper bag it came in before they could hand it through the drive through window.
They were Awesome
Over and over again I see these same commericails talking about AOL's ease of use, and since I didn't use it and I saw so many morons using it to some degree of succsess I assumed it was in fact easy to use.
This perception changed the other day when my father asked me to come over and show him how to send an attachment over email.
Simple.... not.
Simple in eudora, simple in outlook express, Simple using hotmail or yahoo or anything but AOLs interface.
I took me a good 20 minutes of searching through poorly laid out menus before I figured out how to attach a picture and send it.
The point is that AOL is not easy to use but we have been told so many times that it is that we believe it. This is the same reason that windoze is standard it is because everybody says so so it must be true.
/. has a groupthink that is miles away from the consumer groupthink, but until groupthink is less infuenced by marketing consumers will still by 'doze machines, drive SUVs in the city, eat a McD's grease ball, and wonder why their diet of the week doesn't work
Without a Giant orbiting lasers with this much power how will they stop the next Godzilla attack on Tokyo.
could be helpful if other genetic experiments go awry (akira anyone)
I don't know thats actualy copyright it's more like trademark,but...
at any rate as of late I have noticed fewer and fewer cds being sold have this logo anymore
most markedly in the boy/girl band market
We all know that Spam sucks.
;-p
The degree to which spam sucks is open to debate. To be fair it does taste better than treat spams off brand competitor
Now unsoliceted email that is worse.
Years ago I thought unsoliceted email was a passing fad and would go away when it proved unproffitable. I couldn't be more wrong on an email account that I set up to catch spam I average over 100 peices of crap a day.
What can we do about it?
Not much.
We set up clever filters and they bypass them with the skill of a 15 year old on a porn hunt.
We make laws, and they ignore them or make themselves very hard to find, not to mention the fact that many of these "businesses" would be illegal if they were exposed to the light of day.
What have I done, well I set up a reverse filter it blocks everything that does not have a specifc subject line, people who want to email me must use this line, it is a pain in the ass but it saves me time and I look at no spam on my urgent account, when I have time I will scan through my spam account for lost messages but I haven't had any in weeks.
I thought about, and it it hurts, but it points to an interesting thought, is solitare a good game on the PC.
It just isn't but for some stupid reason I keep playing it.
The interesting thing about the article is that it shows more than ever that graphics and speed are unimportant to the quality of the game. Right after the bundled games were and I quote
October 2001were (Electronic Arts) Maxis' The Sims, with 1.6 million users; Microsoft's Age of Empires, with 805,000 users; (Vivendi Universal) Blizzard's Diablo II with 624,000 users; and (Electronic Arts) Westwood's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun with 563,000 users.
none of these are visualy very impressive, but they all share one common theme anyone can play them with ease.
conclusion gameplay over style every time
A short list of things that won't work right. (please prove me wrong)
Voice recogniton software (that works)
Good search engines
high speed internet access at home (no really)
flying cars (its 2001 where the heck is my flying car?)
cheap household robots
wet wired computer hardware
traveling by car faster than by bicycle (traffic issues)
and many many more wonderful items that Iam too wacked out on caffine to think of
Instead they are trying to pawn off copies of software (that cost them next to nothing) while:
They should think of doing this anyways, but this is not a penalty for the laws that they broke.
....But this litle nugget would be the one part I believe is the bit about independence day
I saw this movie in several rental facilities in Kuwait (subtitled, dubed and censored) complete with new boxes with Airbic script all over the outside
Plus I read that same bit in my local paper
yes its a hoax but I would imagine you could rent Will Smith's movie in at least one store in Afganistan
GT3; Grand Turisimo 3 masterpiece in racing simulation (even if you can't put a scratch in the purty cars)
GTA4; Grand Theft Auto 3 super violent thug simulator also very fun for that reptile part of your brain. and worth the price of the PS2
Repeat after me
Methanol != ethanol
Methanol != ethanol
oh wait ,maybe you are right.
You seem to have left out the bit about disconnecting at random intervals I belive it sits just after the increase fee section :-P
They fear that the change they make will kill their expensive toy and force them to go talk to a more computer literate friend who will once again berate them for using the most expensive ISP with the worst service.
I suspect that this doocument will be the source from which nasty new AOL hacks will be based. And now that it is out it is in very immature hands.What this will do. (maybe) is covered by point 8
Not that it matters to me because I don't use AOL
As a former Apache Mechanic I can say that the airframe is fairly reliable when it is flown frequently the problems with this helicopter really start when you let them sit.
If you keep them flying the seals last longer and since they upgraded the Air conditioner from water based to freon based the electronics last much longer (the AC was piped to the computers first and the pilots got what was left over)
In a operational setting the AH-64 frequently achieves a 90% up time, in garison settings this drops to 65-70%
In short when needed the Apache is ready, reliable and when needed lethal.
I forsee that in the next few weeks we will have eliminated most of the decent military targets that the Taliban have, and to be fair there aren't that many.
once that is done the only tech edge we will have left is in intelligance. It is important to monitor radio traffic (and triangulate positions of the transmitters) watch troop movements etc. What it sounds like the game planfrom there is from theree is to continue to seed destablization in the country (read: Fund northern alliance).
the fallicy here is will deposing the Taliban give us Osama, hard to say but it should make other rogue states think twice before harbouring a known terrorist
After that I started to use anonomizers whenever I posted or at least a throw away email address
... but then again at least there are exceptions
,still my $300 and $10 a month would most likley be better spent on a decent car MP3/CD player and a metric assload of blank cds
so if I understand this right for ten bucks a month I only get 30 stations that are comercial free and 100 + that arn't any any different than what I already have.
excuse me if I don't run out grab one.
Perhaps M$ is right in removing the buildings from its flight simulator. not to be crass but the buildings are not there any more, and including them in future editions of the simulator would be inaccurate, but we should not remove all old referances to the great buildings.
(ran into them twice in my surfing today)
I would imagine that something similar would be helpful in the NY area to help with the healing