I've got UT2K3 and UT2K4 gameservers running on a spare PC at the house. Its on the internet and myself and friends play on it rather than the publisher's.
Then again, they offer the dedicated servers for free, but they could always stop that.
...copy protection scanners and by-pass programs are for.
I've used a protection scanner/analyzer (can't remember the name) and bypass programs to make legit back ups of my games.
I'm no pirate, and think (like a lot of legitimate game owners) that we should be able to make back ups of our games in case the original disc gets scratched. I do recognize that this opens the door to piracy.
Then again, there are products such as D-skin that alledge to protect CDs and DVDs from becoming scratched. I've not tried these yet.
Convetional radio sucks. Especially the local stations. Moreso now that ClearChannel has a cookie-cutter KISS-FM here.
The wife likes listening to the 80s channel and I like listening to jazz and traditional irish folk/pop. The latter of which have no market or stations here in Austin, TX. YOU try to give culture to this place. It doesn't work for the most part.
It's basically the majority extorting the minority into voting for something they might not otherwise. In 18 months, 1/3rd of the Senate and all of Congress are up for election. In about half that time, campaigning is going to begin.
Yep. And I'll make damned sure to let my rep know that had he bothered to read the faxes myself and friends sent his office, he'd have seen that the people he represents were against this bill.
Time to vote every one of these fuckers out of office. All of them.
What a messsage that would send, eh? Too bad it'll never happen..
One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them.
Sounds like you need to take it in for a professional cleaning. Not sure that the DVD cleaning disc is seen as an actual, ISO-standard DVD (I've never seen/used a cleaning DVD, haven't had to yet).
Heaven forbid if it is an older or used DVD which have even more problems (some of my DVDs are approaching old age at an age of around 5 years). However, this is more about my computer's optical drives, including the CD readers. Both CD readers on two different computers have 'died' and are not able to read program disks. Am I specifically plagued by bad luck or do others go through CD/DVD drives so quickly?"
Nope. If memory serves me correctly, the average life cycle of optical drives is only about 10K hours before they're expected to die. That's why I typically have one writer and one non. 'Cept now. Writers are so cheap (I got my 52x24x52 for $48 from NewEgg) that I use it as a regular optical and have a DVD writer in to boot.
"My built-in DVD reader (Dell laptop) no longer reads DVD's, but can still read CD's. My external SCSI plextor has a hard time with music CD's, but can still read most program CD's. My iomega external won't recognize program CD's but can still seem to do DAE on audio CD's.
1. The laser used to read/write the CDs and DVDs are two completely different lasers, even in the same drive.
2. Are the music CDs and the program CDs using the same die (same color discs?)
3. Iomega drives are shit.
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
And they've all wracked up over 10,000 hours use I imagine.
My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable. Rental discs never get cleaned. Ever
Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable? Yes.
I'm no expert, I just used to work in a major PC manufacturer's hardware lab testing optical drives in their laptops. Take this with a grain of salt.
I was going to post the same, but did the rational thing and stopped to look to see if someone beat me to it. You did. You just didn't link to any. So here:
In the work place, these things should be mandatory. And mice should be issued new when you start, especially given the fact that a basic two-button PS/2-style mouse can be had for as little as $10 ea (less when purchased in bulk for sure). That, or let people do like I did and go out and purchase their own Trackball Opticals and bring 'em in.
Are you implying that a Gartner analyst may not know what they're talking about?
That would certainly be a first.
Hardly.
Just because analysts see how past trends have fallen doesn't mean they're 100% on mark 100% of the time. That'd be like saying O'Reilly isn't a lying, bigoted windbag because he's managed to get a few lucky hits when he's bullying his "guests" in his 'No Spin Zone'. All the while telling them to shut up or he'll kick they're asses and then later lying about it when confronted with the evidence.
To drag myself back on topic - this is completely stupid. OS/2? Uhm, it has an IP stack thats more compliant than MS' (read: follows the RFCs) and last I checked was capable of connecting to the internet just fine (I should know, I used to work L2 IP/MPTS support @ IBM).
Way to go Wells Fargo. I certainly hope your ATMs get hacked and you lose a shitload of customers over this.
I surely hope they ramp-up on their support staff. Has anyone ever had to call iRiver? I did. I honestly think that they've got maybe 4 people working there. This includes management.
And their support department's sucky-ness rivals LinkSys.
I only bought the cheap Bic pens because your mom was out peddling them outside my building to raise money for an abortion. Apparently the two of you are/very/ close.
..and since he lives off his nutcase wife's money, he can claim he's poor to appeal to the 'masses', despite the fact that they own mulitple homes and he gets to ski in the summer.
Yeah, a real 'man for the people'
And did anyone notice his fake & bake orange tan had mysteriously disappeared before the last debate?
And what the fuck was up with him pulling cheat notes out of his pocket when he got to the poduim at the first debate?
Heck, I'd go out and buy 5 tomorrow. Right now I don't buy any, just once in a blue moon because the whole stinking CD better be friggin great if I'm going to spend $17 for it new.
You, me, and 2/3rds of the rest of/. would do the same. However, corporate greed and short-sightedness won't allow this to happen. Ever.
If new CDs were $5, their sales would indeed skyrocket. Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
I'm going to have to agree with you on this. I've got a similar situation, and I simply tuck away all the shit into some 40gal bins and shove them in the closet of my "office" at home. The stuff that may break (cards, HDDs) are in separate boxes in my filing cabinet next to my main PC.
Whatever's not in there that I need, I simply go to our local Goodwill Computer Store, and roll the dice in hopes of finding something that works for they have no systems to test with an a NO RETURN policy - the bastards. Fortunately, their stuff is uber-cheap (picked up a working 4+1 USB 2.0 PCI card there last week for $5) so if you get crap, you chalk it up under "at least my money's going to GoodWill). But I digress, I'm wandering off-topic.
*Sigh* If the OP needs a database, just use friggin' Excel (or whatever equivalent comes in Open Office) and make a spreadsheet.
Slashdot Mirror
Now they won't be able to afford to hire any additional developers to improve their crappy products.
'Nuff said.
What if you don't play on their gameservers?
I've got UT2K3 and UT2K4 gameservers running on a spare PC at the house. Its on the internet and myself and friends play on it rather than the publisher's.
Then again, they offer the dedicated servers for free, but they could always stop that.
...copy protection scanners and by-pass programs are for.
I've used a protection scanner/analyzer (can't remember the name) and bypass programs to make legit back ups of my games.
I'm no pirate, and think (like a lot of legitimate game owners) that we should be able to make back ups of our games in case the original disc gets scratched. I do recognize that this opens the door to piracy.
Then again, there are products such as D-skin that alledge to protect CDs and DVDs from becoming scratched. I've not tried these yet.
I was going to ask about this; Whether or not one could simply destroy the RFID using a magnet or something. Surely there's a way to kill an RFID.
I can see some special interest group getting a congress critter to pen a bill making it a crime to do such a thing, however.
Sith is available on BT and still made a metric ton of money.
I read that it broke all boxoffice records for single-day earnings.
Something like $50 MILLION on Thursday alone. Beating the next closest movie by something like $20 million(?)
Fuck you MPAA. No one's buying your arguement.
But we're going to get one of these for the home stereo:
Roku Soundbridge. Thank the gods it works with my router.
Convetional radio sucks. Especially the local stations. Moreso now that ClearChannel has a cookie-cutter KISS-FM here.
The wife likes listening to the 80s channel and I like listening to jazz and traditional irish folk/pop. The latter of which have no market or stations here in Austin, TX. YOU try to give culture to this place. It doesn't work for the most part.
It's basically the majority extorting the minority into voting for something they might not otherwise. In 18 months, 1/3rd of the Senate and all of Congress are up for election. In about half that time, campaigning is going to begin.
Yep. And I'll make damned sure to let my rep know that had he bothered to read the faxes myself and friends sent his office, he'd have seen that the people he represents were against this bill.
Time to vote every one of these fuckers out of office. All of them.
What a messsage that would send, eh? Too bad it'll never happen..
One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them.
Sounds like you need to take it in for a professional cleaning. Not sure that the DVD cleaning disc is seen as an actual, ISO-standard DVD (I've never seen/used a cleaning DVD, haven't had to yet).
Heaven forbid if it is an older or used DVD which have even more problems (some of my DVDs are approaching old age at an age of around 5 years). However, this is more about my computer's optical drives, including the CD readers. Both CD readers on two different computers have 'died' and are not able to read program disks. Am I specifically plagued by bad luck or do others go through CD/DVD drives so quickly?"
Nope. If memory serves me correctly, the average life cycle of optical drives is only about 10K hours before they're expected to die. That's why I typically have one writer and one non. 'Cept now. Writers are so cheap (I got my 52x24x52 for $48 from NewEgg) that I use it as a regular optical and have a DVD writer in to boot.
"My built-in DVD reader (Dell laptop) no longer reads DVD's, but can still read CD's. My external SCSI plextor has a hard time with music CD's, but can still read most program CD's. My iomega external won't recognize program CD's but can still seem to do DAE on audio CD's.
1. The laser used to read/write the CDs and DVDs are two completely different lasers, even in the same drive.
2. Are the music CDs and the program CDs using the same die (same color discs?)
3. Iomega drives are shit.
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
And they've all wracked up over 10,000 hours use I imagine.
My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable.
Rental discs never get cleaned. Ever
Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable?
Yes.
I'm no expert, I just used to work in a major PC manufacturer's hardware lab testing optical drives in their laptops. Take this with a grain of salt.
..would love to see a mix of 'Enterprise' and SCTV's 'Bob & Doug McKenzie' (Hey! They're puttin' some out on DVD!).
'The Great White North' and 'Farm Film Report' were probably the only funny things on SCTV.
Ahhh. Funny Canadians.
Take off, hosers.
I was going to post the same, but did the rational thing and stopped to look to see if someone beat me to it. You did. You just didn't link to any. So here:
m ber=82&sbcolor=%23FF9966&option=&subcategory=&CatT xt=&optiontxt=Keyboard
:
e =UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=keyboard+sk in
http://www.infogrip.com/product_view.asp?RecordNu
And the google search
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i
In the work place, these things should be mandatory. And mice should be issued new when you start, especially given the fact that a basic two-button PS/2-style mouse can be had for as little as $10 ea (less when purchased in bulk for sure). That, or let people do like I did and go out and purchase their own Trackball Opticals and bring 'em in.
Are you implying that a Gartner analyst may not know what they're talking about?
That would certainly be a first.
Hardly.
Just because analysts see how past trends have fallen doesn't mean they're 100% on mark 100% of the time. That'd be like saying O'Reilly isn't a lying, bigoted windbag because he's managed to get a few lucky hits when he's bullying his "guests" in his 'No Spin Zone'. All the while telling them to shut up or he'll kick they're asses and then later lying about it when confronted with the evidence.
To drag myself back on topic - this is completely stupid. OS/2? Uhm, it has an IP stack thats more compliant than MS' (read: follows the RFCs) and last I checked was capable of connecting to the internet just fine (I should know, I used to work L2 IP/MPTS support @ IBM).
Way to go Wells Fargo. I certainly hope your ATMs get hacked and you lose a shitload of customers over this.
I surely hope they ramp-up on their support staff. Has anyone ever had to call iRiver? I did. I honestly think that they've got maybe 4 people working there. This includes management.
And their support department's sucky-ness rivals LinkSys.
I only bought the cheap Bic pens because your mom was out peddling them outside my building to raise money for an abortion. Apparently the two of you are /very/ close.
Sure, its not that clear. But Kerry's camp is saying it was a pen.
Since when do you have to unfold a pen?
Go back and watch it a few more times. Don't let your hatred for Bush cloud your common sense.
..and since he lives off his nutcase wife's money, he can claim he's poor to appeal to the 'masses', despite the fact that they own mulitple homes and he gets to ski in the summer.
Yeah, a real 'man for the people'
And did anyone notice his fake & bake orange tan had mysteriously disappeared before the last debate?
And what the fuck was up with him pulling cheat notes out of his pocket when he got to the poduim at the first debate?
FOUR MORE YEARS!
WTF? Demo *after* the game hits the shelves?
See GameSpy article on this.
Who the fuck buys a game without first playing the demo?
Heck, I'd go out and buy 5 tomorrow. Right now I don't buy any, just once in a blue moon because the whole stinking CD better be friggin great if I'm going to spend $17 for it new.
/. would do the same. However, corporate greed and short-sightedness won't allow this to happen. Ever.
You, me, and 2/3rds of the rest of
If new CDs were $5, their sales would indeed skyrocket. Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
*Sigh*
I'm going to have to agree with you on this. I've got a similar situation, and I simply tuck away all the shit into some 40gal bins and shove them in the closet of my "office" at home. The stuff that may break (cards, HDDs) are in separate boxes in my filing cabinet next to my main PC.
Whatever's not in there that I need, I simply go to our local Goodwill Computer Store, and roll the dice in hopes of finding something that works for they have no systems to test with an a NO RETURN policy - the bastards. Fortunately, their stuff is uber-cheap (picked up a working 4+1 USB 2.0 PCI card there last week for $5) so if you get crap, you chalk it up under "at least my money's going to GoodWill). But I digress, I'm wandering off-topic.
*Sigh* If the OP needs a database, just use friggin' Excel (or whatever equivalent comes in Open Office) and make a spreadsheet.
apparently you have not read 1984 or you would not have made such a foolish statement.
And apparently you can't read a threaded discussion, or you would've directed that reply to the correct message.
umm...excuse me, but it has to be a party in the conversation.
Which is what I was saying.
MSN Messenger doesn't do that by default, I don't believe.
Regardless, there's an option under Tools > Options > Messages to disable this by de-selecting the checkbox.
In Texas, as long as one party knows the conversation is being recorded, it's legal.
As long as you're not keylogging someone else's conversation, doing what the article mentions is legal.
But one question: Why is this under the Science category and not under Privacy?
...a lesser-known sign of the apocalypse?
I mean, another has already come true -- We've got the little-known 5th Horseman roaming the earth, and has its own variety show.
What? You didn't know she was the Horsman of Stupidity?
Oops. Link is wrong -- Sorry 'bout that. Was replying to a myth with an article from snopes.
The actual link to the optical trakcball is here.