Re:delightful.....yes, it is(?)
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1
i seem to remember one of their [Apple's] big problems being that some of the vendors had planned Mac/PC hybrid systems.. *shrug* i may be wrong.. anyone?
i was looking at monsanto's website and came across this interesting tidbit:
it's the 1990 Monsanto Pledge! though i'm tempted to forward the link to the parent article to them i'm sure they'd just ignore me.
Re:delightful.....yes, it is(?)
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
you're right.. i've never used an iPod. but, judging by my experiences with other Mac hardware within the last 12 months (selling apple hardware) i can say this:
Apple was, is, and by all appearances will continue going about everything the wrong way. making sure that all Apple hardware works togeather flawlessly is great for the less than 5% of you who are die-hard apple fanatics.. problem is, in order to survive, they NEED to be concentrating on at least taking a stab at making their shit work with everyone else's.
jobs is not THE silver bullet that Apple needs to maintain or improve their little toehold of the market share. while his iMac was a great rollout, it's taken hits for being (yep!) overpriced and underpowered..
the idea to license their tech to 3rd party vendors was the best move that apple ever (almost) made. too bad that bullheaded Mac-centric reasoning killed that idea before it could start to steer them in the right direction..
Apple will probably continue to make very cute computers for 14-year-old girls and graphic artists who just can't be bothered until they're run into the ground by tiny profit margins and alarmingly fanatical incompatibility.
i've recommended, sold, serviced, and used Macs of all types for 8 years. i'm not a PC junkie who's so mired that i can's see a lot of the great features of some Macs for what they are. i would have even bought a cube just for the geek chic factor if they weren't so rediculously overpriced and worthless for my purposes.
give me something off-white, comparable, and endlessly upgradeable for 60% of the price, thanks.. =)
hah.. no. that's not what it looks like at all. the 'iWalk' pictured in another story from the same source looks like a palm Vx that's had the case stripped off, painted some metallic color and brushed for effect.. the picture you submitted depicts a totally different animal.
way to go guys!:(|)
delightful..
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
apple churns out more glorified toys! man.. they're right up there with nintendo now in my book.
let's see some specs on this thing.. which overpriced/underpowered cpu are they using this time? this thing is slated to be more expensive that comparable units by how many orders of magnitude? oh, and it's running MacOS LE (or some crap) making sure that all your compatibility needs are attended to.
it's not spot on true, but i've seen pleanty of figures like that in print and it makes total sense.. who are the richest people in our country? the people chairing the major corporations.. there.. at least 80% of the wealth is accounted for. dipshit.. =)
once again, i'm surprised that so many of you are surprised! even though i'm sure this one will never make it to the top of my list i'm really in my element now so please pay attention.
this is nothing new! monsanto has been up to this kind of no-good for years. the company was founded near the turn of the century to bring saccharin to our country. saccharin, for those of you with your heads stuck perilously far up your asses, is the first artificial sweetener. oh yeah, it's been positively linked with lukemia and numerous other types of cancer and for some reason they still put it in EVERYTING sugar-free.. hmmm?
let's see... monsanto.. monsanto.. what else have they manufactured that causes cancer? how about agent orange? guilty.. it was their product and they've paid hundreds of millions to former employees stricken with rare forms of cancer and other strange diseases. rBGH is theirs too.. you know, the stuff that the uninitiated end up drinking in their milk because it's forcibly injected into our livestock. it's been shown to cause the production of a hormonal by-product called IGF-1 (proven to cause cancer in human cells) as well as udder infections and other disturbances in livestock. for this reason and others rBGH is banned in canada and europe.
this is outrageous! how can they get away with this!?! 1st, they have a legal department that rivals phillip-morris.. they're yet another sue-happy american corporation bent on manipulating information and political agenda for their own financial gain. 2nd, we live in a society where so many people bend to that kind of bullshit that you never get a chance to hear what's really going on (unless it's too late and someone else is serving the lawsuit).
..and monsanto is small potatoes..
if you're upset or interested enough to do some more reasearch on your own try this: go to google.com and type in 'CNMI' (commonwealth of the northern marianas islands).. okay.. great.. now type in 'CNMI abuses' and hit search again. whoa! all of this stuff happening on 'american soil', right under our noses!? yeah..
also, there's a great book called 'If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates' by Jim Hightower.. those of you familiar with his work know that he can get a little far left in his rantings, but the book is packed with information and is a great read. (so great that i could only set it down when i became so disgusted that i was forced to)
i leave you with a quote from a previous rant of mine posted to a different site:
"In this country, literally 90% of the wealth is controlled by the richest
1% of the population. These are the people and organizations that finance
our political campaigns.. the people and organizations that own our
country. The United States frequently dispenses propaganda, domestically
and abroad, to justify 'military action' in wars that are waged to protect
the financial interests of American corporations. We covet our neighbors'
goods enough to kill innocents to prevent increases in our oil prices.
It's painfully obvious to me that the almighty U.S. dollar, which has
ensconced us in the position of the last world 'super-power', has perverted
our political processes and twisted our country into a monstrous entity.
Much of the world has good reason to fear and even hate us.
To say that the 1,400-some people dead of a heinous and cowardly act of
terrorism ought to be dead would be insane. However, I hope people can see
that the attacks on our nation's sanctity were not unprovoked."
maybe i'm the idiot here.. i thought that when a mfg. reduced the price of a product by 70% and started blowing them out like crazy it meant that they were failing at it. sure, perhaps it's because sega lost to sony but that's neither here nor there. no matter where the financial problems came from the fact is that they failed.
and, on the original topic of networking your consoles for multiplayer purposes, it would seem that even the 'fantastic!' multiplayer features and top-selling multiplayer titles couldn't save the dreamcast or sega.
now that the new generation of consoles are being churned out full blast we'll have to see. but sony is the only company that seems to do exceedingly well at anything console-based.
so now, with sony's announced intention to sell a 40GB HDD peripheral, it looks like they're seriously going head-to-head with M$ (maker of the best next-gen console imho)..
with sega out of the picture and nintendo pushing their usual glorified duplo blocks we'll see who the real winner is. and i can assure you it's not going to be based on multiplayer capabilities because, that's right, NOBODY PLAYS CONSOLE GAMES ONLINE!!!
this had occurred to me some time ago when i saw the ramping-up of these things. i think it kinda started with best buy and spread from there. now every major retailer has them.
one previous respondent had said something to the effect of, "..this is just like digging in a cash drawer.." this isn't just any kind of theft.. it's the ultimate kind! a better imperfect analogy would be: "..the store leaves $20, $50, and $100 dollar bills hanging from displays at the counter.."
if you walk into a store with the intention of stealing, what's the best thing to steal? small, high-cost items. and these items, while never as good as cash, are virtually untraceable if you use the common sense method described in the article.
also, i'm sure you'd be hassled by security if they noticed you jotting gift card numbers in your daytimer, but you don't technically have to shoplift to do this.
the shrink numbers on these things must be fantastic!
definitely.. there's something to be said for sea exploration also. sci-fi sometimes skims the surface of the possibilities therein, but almost never ignoring the depth/pressure problem..
thanks for correcting my typos too.:)
OPS: Slash needs a spell check for people like me!!
how many people actually play multiplayer games on a console machine via the internet? when i pick up a game for the multiplayer experience i want to have a variety of possible scenarios, as well as updatable maps and skin packs. i want the ability to customize the game once it gets tired.
the only system that could really do something like this is the Xbox... given the hard drive. and even still.. if they have to make patches or addons that are large (and most certainly would cost) how good is an 8gig HDD really?
i like the idea of being able to put 120gigs in a PC for $209..
PSO is all well and good.. but how many ppl are playing Q3A online right now? or RTCW? think about it.
consoles are getting close, but they're just not there. sorry for the GBA price error.. they were more expensive at least initially and just went completely off my radar after i played one.
show me a console that can push max payne 1600x1200x32bpp at 70fps:)
.. and also worked for a company (a dial-up provider) where we had to deal with this kind of crap and just turn a blind eye.
i was one of only two admins for what was then the 3rd largest dial-up provider in that state.
first of all, their network infrastructure was a mess. they didn't even bother using their lovely switches with segmentable backplanes to set up different suubnets for the internal network. i mean, a lot of good this would have done, considering that the owner was FAR to cheap to shell out money for even a cheap firewall. we actually had very smart and network-savy techs printing warnings about network security to the printer on the owner's desk (while connected with other ISPs no less!) and the idiot still didn't get the message. this is made more rediculous by the fact that the man built the company from the ground up, he was supposed to know what he was talking about! (quote: "do we even know if that shit works? why do we need that?" - owner, when asked if we should use RAID in the SQL server i was building)
second, the main admin and 'webmaster' was too cozy in his M$ bubble to venture into the world of open source software. granted, the two of us often had more work than four more of us could have handled, but in the interest of job security he should have at least tried listening to all the people (more security-conscious than he) who were telling him that our setup was crap. he, the operations manager for the company, and the owner (my three immediate bosses, in that order) didn't seem comfortable with the idea of me, a newer constituant to the department, tightening security.
so, when it came to setting up and securing machines i was left to dabble on shell boxes hidden under my desk. (which i did from under my workstation at the other end of the building even before i worked in the department or had access to the zone files. the network room was unlocked, so it was simply a matter of noting a jack number and moving your connection to a switch that wasn't managed by novell.) the owner was actually more afraid of his employees in the building using the hi-cap lines for d/ling MP3s on his dime than he was about paying an army of trained monkeys to manually re-enter 17,000 accounts when some 15-year-old decided to kill the user database from his AOL connection.
so rediculous was his thinking that he paid all the money he could have spent on securing the entire network and more on some overpriced Intel server and the (fucking) NOVELL software necessary to control network access from INSIDE the building.
so lax was the security and so cheap the owner, that it actually took two incidents of having production monkeys switch our servers off (for the hell of it) in mid-operation (first the SQL/RadiusNT server, then the Mailsite server) before we managed to get locks for the network room doors.
for the world's most overpriced useless POS handheld game system comes what is possibly the most overpriced and worthless accessory for any system period.
another poster had stated that he'd rather use his computer for online gaming. the same is true for me, and for all the obvious reasons:
1. after investing $2,000 in a kickass gaming system that blows all three next generation consoles combined out of the water i'll be damned if i'm going to pay M$ or anyone a subscription fee to be subjected to endless advertising for the honor of playing games with people i don't know.
2. there is no GBA(or Xbox, or PS2) docking station that lets me plug in a nice monitor, keyboard, and mouse for my FPSs.
3. as sega learned w/ the dreamcast.. nobody fucking plays console games online. they probably sold one dreamcast modem. if nobody buys the bluetooth adapter for the GBA didn't you just waste your money?
the only reason for handheld game systems is the ability to play when you're not at home and not near an arcade. anyone who could have spent $100 more on a PS2 and decided to huddle under their crusty touch lamp squinting into a screen the size of my thumbnail is a moron.
i think it's great how space exploration was and continues to be such a huge tennant of sci-fi.. i've heard from a number of people who grew up in the era in question that their love affair with sci-fi ended when they freaked out over the realization of how closely science-fact tails science fiction.
now, if you're one of those bone-headed types who believes everything they see on FOX, you may even think that the trips to the moon never actually happened.
in reality, the logistics of space travel have been a frequent oversight in science fiction since it's inception. in 'The Physics of Star Trek', when asked how the Heisenberg Compensator works, the engineering officer replies, "Very well, thank you!" for fear of sounding like a commercial for IBM i'm almost afraid to ask where my flying car is..
now, in the 21st century, technology that usually starts as military-grade is fed to the populace like an iv drip. if the governments of the world poured half the money into space travel and other future tech that they do into $900,000 bombs and stealth planes that are obsolete before they ever leave the tarmac we might actually be realizing a lot more sci-FACT than we have been..
it looks like these projections are for 2002 and beyond. some of them aren't even due until 2006 or later according to this story.
also, the release of some of the technology they're talking about is dependant on where you live in the world. for instance, in the US,the petrol corps have such a lobbying stranglehold on our govt. that we'll probably be among the last in the world to see any form of usable fuel cell technology.
i think a lot of this is optimistic at best and utter drivel at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
i seem to remember one of their [Apple's] big problems being that some of the vendors had planned Mac/PC hybrid systems.. *shrug* i may be wrong.. anyone?
i was looking at monsanto's website and came across this interesting tidbit:
it's the 1990 Monsanto Pledge! though i'm tempted to forward the link to the parent article to them i'm sure they'd just ignore me.
you're right.. i've never used an iPod. but, judging by my experiences with other Mac hardware within the last 12 months (selling apple hardware) i can say this:
Apple was, is, and by all appearances will continue going about everything the wrong way. making sure that all Apple hardware works togeather flawlessly is great for the less than 5% of you who are die-hard apple fanatics.. problem is, in order to survive, they NEED to be concentrating on at least taking a stab at making their shit work with everyone else's.
jobs is not THE silver bullet that Apple needs to maintain or improve their little toehold of the market share. while his iMac was a great rollout, it's taken hits for being (yep!) overpriced and underpowered..
the idea to license their tech to 3rd party vendors was the best move that apple ever (almost) made. too bad that bullheaded Mac-centric reasoning killed that idea before it could start to steer them in the right direction..
Apple will probably continue to make very cute computers for 14-year-old girls and graphic artists who just can't be bothered until they're run into the ground by tiny profit margins and alarmingly fanatical incompatibility.
i've recommended, sold, serviced, and used Macs of all types for 8 years. i'm not a PC junkie who's so mired that i can's see a lot of the great features of some Macs for what they are. i would have even bought a cube just for the geek chic factor if they weren't so rediculously overpriced and worthless for my purposes.
give me something off-white, comparable, and endlessly upgradeable for 60% of the price, thanks.. =)
hah.. no. that's not what it looks like at all. the 'iWalk' pictured in another story from the same source looks like a palm Vx that's had the case stripped off, painted some metallic color and brushed for effect.. the picture you submitted depicts a totally different animal.
:(|)
way to go guys!
apple churns out more glorified toys! man.. they're right up there with nintendo now in my book.
:\
let's see some specs on this thing.. which overpriced/underpowered cpu are they using this time? this thing is slated to be more expensive that comparable units by how many orders of magnitude? oh, and it's running MacOS LE (or some crap) making sure that all your compatibility needs are attended to.
yawn..
-j0nah
it's not spot on true, but i've seen pleanty of figures like that in print and it makes total sense.. who are the richest people in our country? the people chairing the major corporations.. there.. at least 80% of the wealth is accounted for. dipshit.. =)
once again, i'm surprised that so many of you are surprised! even though i'm sure this one will never make it to the top of my list i'm really in my element now so please pay attention.
.. okay.. great.. now type in 'CNMI abuses' and hit search again. whoa! all of this stuff happening on 'american soil', right under our noses!? yeah..
this is nothing new! monsanto has been up to this kind of no-good for years. the company was founded near the turn of the century to bring saccharin to our country. saccharin, for those of you with your heads stuck perilously far up your asses, is the first artificial sweetener. oh yeah, it's been positively linked with lukemia and numerous other types of cancer and for some reason they still put it in EVERYTING sugar-free.. hmmm?
let's see... monsanto.. monsanto.. what else have they manufactured that causes cancer? how about agent orange? guilty.. it was their product and they've paid hundreds of millions to former employees stricken with rare forms of cancer and other strange diseases. rBGH is theirs too.. you know, the stuff that the uninitiated end up drinking in their milk because it's forcibly injected into our livestock. it's been shown to cause the production of a hormonal by-product called IGF-1 (proven to cause cancer in human cells) as well as udder infections and other disturbances in livestock. for this reason and others rBGH is banned in canada and europe.
this is outrageous! how can they get away with this!?! 1st, they have a legal department that rivals phillip-morris.. they're yet another sue-happy american corporation bent on manipulating information and political agenda for their own financial gain. 2nd, we live in a society where so many people bend to that kind of bullshit that you never get a chance to hear what's really going on (unless it's too late and someone else is serving the lawsuit).
..and monsanto is small potatoes..
if you're upset or interested enough to do some more reasearch on your own try this: go to google.com and type in 'CNMI' (commonwealth of the northern marianas islands)
also, there's a great book called 'If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates' by Jim Hightower.. those of you familiar with his work know that he can get a little far left in his rantings, but the book is packed with information and is a great read. (so great that i could only set it down when i became so disgusted that i was forced to)
i leave you with a quote from a previous rant of mine posted to a different site:
"In this country, literally 90% of the wealth is controlled by the richest
1% of the population. These are the people and organizations that finance
our political campaigns.. the people and organizations that own our
country. The United States frequently dispenses propaganda, domestically
and abroad, to justify 'military action' in wars that are waged to protect
the financial interests of American corporations. We covet our neighbors'
goods enough to kill innocents to prevent increases in our oil prices.
It's painfully obvious to me that the almighty U.S. dollar, which has
ensconced us in the position of the last world 'super-power', has perverted
our political processes and twisted our country into a monstrous entity.
Much of the world has good reason to fear and even hate us.
To say that the 1,400-some people dead of a heinous and cowardly act of
terrorism ought to be dead would be insane. However, I hope people can see
that the attacks on our nation's sanctity were not unprovoked."
-j0nah
i'll grant you this may be counterfeit.. but even if it's real why are any of you surprised?
when it comes to the server market m$ should be very afraid of linux. if they DIDN'T have internal email like this i'd be concerned for their future..
-j0nah
> The Dreamcast didn't fail in the US or Europe
maybe i'm the idiot here.. i thought that when a mfg. reduced the price of a product by 70% and started blowing them out like crazy it meant that they were failing at it. sure, perhaps it's because sega lost to sony but that's neither here nor there. no matter where the financial problems came from the fact is that they failed.
and, on the original topic of networking your consoles for multiplayer purposes, it would seem that even the 'fantastic!' multiplayer features and top-selling multiplayer titles couldn't save the dreamcast or sega.
now that the new generation of consoles are being churned out full blast we'll have to see. but sony is the only company that seems to do exceedingly well at anything console-based.
so now, with sony's announced intention to sell a 40GB HDD peripheral, it looks like they're seriously going head-to-head with M$ (maker of the best next-gen console imho)..
with sega out of the picture and nintendo pushing their usual glorified duplo blocks we'll see who the real winner is. and i can assure you it's not going to be based on multiplayer capabilities because, that's right, NOBODY PLAYS CONSOLE GAMES ONLINE!!!
>a better imperfect analogy would be:
again.. i realize this is different.
this had occurred to me some time ago when i saw the ramping-up of these things. i think it kinda started with best buy and spread from there. now every major retailer has them.
one previous respondent had said something to the effect of, "..this is just like digging in a cash drawer.." this isn't just any kind of theft.. it's the ultimate kind! a better imperfect analogy would be: "..the store leaves $20, $50, and $100 dollar bills hanging from displays at the counter.."
if you walk into a store with the intention of stealing, what's the best thing to steal? small, high-cost items. and these items, while never as good as cash, are virtually untraceable if you use the common sense method described in the article.
also, i'm sure you'd be hassled by security if they noticed you jotting gift card numbers in your daytimer, but you don't technically have to shoplift to do this.
the shrink numbers on these things must be fantastic!
so how's sega doing with the dreamcast now anyway? oh? *cough* hmm..
definitely.. there's something to be said for sea exploration also. sci-fi sometimes skims the surface of the possibilities therein, but almost never ignoring the depth/pressure problem..
:)
thanks for correcting my typos too.
OPS: Slash needs a spell check for people like me!!
how many people actually play multiplayer games on a console machine via the internet? when i pick up a game for the multiplayer experience i want to have a variety of possible scenarios, as well as updatable maps and skin packs. i want the ability to customize the game once it gets tired.
:)
the only system that could really do something like this is the Xbox... given the hard drive. and even still.. if they have to make patches or addons that are large (and most certainly would cost) how good is an 8gig HDD really?
i like the idea of being able to put 120gigs in a PC for $209..
PSO is all well and good.. but how many ppl are playing Q3A online right now? or RTCW? think about it.
consoles are getting close, but they're just not there. sorry for the GBA price error.. they were more expensive at least initially and just went completely off my radar after i played one.
show me a console that can push max payne 1600x1200x32bpp at 70fps
.. and also worked for a company (a dial-up provider) where we had to deal with this kind of crap and just turn a blind eye.
i was one of only two admins for what was then the 3rd largest dial-up provider in that state.
first of all, their network infrastructure was a mess. they didn't even bother using their lovely switches with segmentable backplanes to set up different suubnets for the internal network. i mean, a lot of good this would have done, considering that the owner was FAR to cheap to shell out money for even a cheap firewall. we actually had very smart and network-savy techs printing warnings about network security to the printer on the owner's desk (while connected with other ISPs no less!) and the idiot still didn't get the message. this is made more rediculous by the fact that the man built the company from the ground up, he was supposed to know what he was talking about! (quote: "do we even know if that shit works? why do we need that?" - owner, when asked if we should use RAID in the SQL server i was building)
second, the main admin and 'webmaster' was too cozy in his M$ bubble to venture into the world of open source software. granted, the two of us often had more work than four more of us could have handled, but in the interest of job security he should have at least tried listening to all the people (more security-conscious than he) who were telling him that our setup was crap. he, the operations manager for the company, and the owner (my three immediate bosses, in that order) didn't seem comfortable with the idea of me, a newer constituant to the department, tightening security.
so, when it came to setting up and securing machines i was left to dabble on shell boxes hidden under my desk. (which i did from under my workstation at the other end of the building even before i worked in the department or had access to the zone files. the network room was unlocked, so it was simply a matter of noting a jack number and moving your connection to a switch that wasn't managed by novell.) the owner was actually more afraid of his employees in the building using the hi-cap lines for d/ling MP3s on his dime than he was about paying an army of trained monkeys to manually re-enter 17,000 accounts when some 15-year-old decided to kill the user database from his AOL connection.
so rediculous was his thinking that he paid all the money he could have spent on securing the entire network and more on some overpriced Intel server and the (fucking) NOVELL software necessary to control network access from INSIDE the building.
so lax was the security and so cheap the owner, that it actually took two incidents of having production monkeys switch our servers off (for the hell of it) in mid-operation (first the SQL/RadiusNT server, then the Mailsite server) before we managed to get locks for the network room doors.
anyways.. i'm finished.
-j0nah
for the world's most overpriced useless POS handheld game system comes what is possibly the most overpriced and worthless accessory for any system period.
another poster had stated that he'd rather use his computer for online gaming. the same is true for me, and for all the obvious reasons:
1. after investing $2,000 in a kickass gaming system that blows all three next generation consoles combined out of the water i'll be damned if i'm going to pay M$ or anyone a subscription fee to be subjected to endless advertising for the honor of playing games with people i don't know.
2. there is no GBA(or Xbox, or PS2) docking station that lets me plug in a nice monitor, keyboard, and mouse for my FPSs.
3. as sega learned w/ the dreamcast.. nobody fucking plays console games online. they probably sold one dreamcast modem. if nobody buys the bluetooth adapter for the GBA didn't you just waste your money?
the only reason for handheld game systems is the ability to play when you're not at home and not near an arcade. anyone who could have spent $100 more on a PS2 and decided to huddle under their crusty touch lamp squinting into a screen the size of my thumbnail is a moron.
okay.. i'm done.
-j0nah
what's up with all these people advertising for goatse.cx?
how come i can't get no Tang 'round here!?
-j0nah
i think it's great how space exploration was and continues to be such a huge tennant of sci-fi.. i've heard from a number of people who grew up in the era in question that their love affair with sci-fi ended when they freaked out over the realization of how closely science-fact tails science fiction.
now, if you're one of those bone-headed types who believes everything they see on FOX, you may even think that the trips to the moon never actually happened.
in reality, the logistics of space travel have been a frequent oversight in science fiction since it's inception. in 'The Physics of Star Trek', when asked how the Heisenberg Compensator works, the engineering officer replies, "Very well, thank you!" for fear of sounding like a commercial for IBM i'm almost afraid to ask where my flying car is..
now, in the 21st century, technology that usually starts as military-grade is fed to the populace like an iv drip. if the governments of the world poured half the money into space travel and other future tech that they do into $900,000 bombs and stealth planes that are obsolete before they ever leave the tarmac we might actually be realizing a lot more sci-FACT than we have been..
wow, that was pretty incoherent..
-j0nah
it looks like these projections are for 2002 and beyond. some of them aren't even due until 2006 or later according to this story.
also, the release of some of the technology they're talking about is dependant on where you live in the world. for instance, in the US,the petrol corps have such a lobbying stranglehold on our govt. that we'll probably be among the last in the world to see any form of usable fuel cell technology.
i think a lot of this is optimistic at best and utter drivel at worst.