Here are the two different scenarios, keep in mind that in our current apartment we do not have broadband and we will have it in the house we are moving into...and stealing his computers wouldn't work, he's got at least two that this game would probably run on and could borrow one if he really wanted to...
Scenario 1 (the way I would like things to be): Hubby pitches in on packing, eagerly anticipating us being in our new house and having the basement set up to do his gaming (the basement is wired for surround sound). Hubby gets everything moved, and quickly unpacks everything before July 7 so he can game at our house, with our high-speed connection, without having the responsibility of unpacking still on his shoulders because it is ALL DONE.
Scenario 2 (what is really gonna happen): Hubby knows that game is coming out, and starts packing, but tells himself that he won't get sucked into playing the game. Game hits the shelves a few days before the last weekend we have before moving day (July 3). Hubby goes down to his friend's house who has mondo bandwidth 'just to check out the graphics' on the Friday night before moving day, comes home at 7 am Saturday (no exaggeration, this happened most recently with Jedi Knight 2, why would this game be different?). Hubby sleeps all day and gets started packing around 4 pm, realizes he left something essential at his friend's house, drives down there, reappears at 7 am Sunday, sleeps all day. Moving day comes, movers end up finishing up the packing, causing no end of havoc when trying to find things. Hubby does not spend a weekend at home for a month, because it is easier to go to friend's house to play NwN than to unpack and set up the basement.
P.S. this is NOT meant to be me complaining about my husband's gaming on weekends, it doesn't bother me when he stays out playing, it's just kinda like someone scheduling a funeral during the Super Bowl--damned inconvenient timing and a football party is a lot more fun than a wake...
(I'm really hoping the BioWare people will see this and delay shipping just for me...)
We have to move in three weeks, and I know my husband is gonna be just WORTHLESS he actually gets a copy of this...I wonder how much it would cost to get them to delay the in-store availability to July 7--whatever the cost, it would be worth it so that I wouldn't have to pack and move our apartment alone...
Girl meets boy. Girl lets boy put her on buddy list. Girl dates boy for a while, then realizes he is a bad boyfriend. Girl tries to gain a little freedom by not letting bad boyfriend spy on her whereabouts. Bad boyfriend flips out and accuses her of (fill in the blank). Girl not only can't dump bad boyfriend, he now knows her every move. Girl joins convent to get away from bad boyfriend.
Next time youse guys are wondering where all the geek girls went, you'll know they're all hiding in convents because they played a little fast and loose with their PDA permissions and will be paying for it forever...
I really thought when I read the blurb for this article that they were referring to EQ addicts not going to class, people spending all their time in front of their computers, etc.
Now all the slashdot readers at UCMP, Northeastern, and SUNY know to quit cyberstalking those co-eds...
Seriously, what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think have been on the receiving end of cyberstalking, hacking, etc., and would go to a committee or an office like this to get their problem solved?
We have quite a stock of old Compaqs (several thousand) and a couple of guys that scour E-bay and some other used-computer-parts auctions to find extras. We rent out the equipment, we don't sell it (sites don't need it past the length of the drug study) unless a site really wants to buy it, and then we charge them quite a bit for the system (they usually don't bite, we sell them a Windows system for not too much more and then they can actually do something else on the computer, like, say, a spreadsheet).
We're being forced to move everything to our Windows platform, though, which makes me no end of unhappy (I've been trying to get it moved to Linux for security reasons, but I don't think upper management is going to go for it until we have a REALLY big problem). Two reasons we are having to move away from DOS: We can't buy the batteries for the Compaqs anymore (the company that makes them apparently went out of business recently) and we can't buy inkjet printers that work with the old DOS software anymore. Once we run out of those, we're stuck (upper mgmt is not interested in just finding drivers for newer printers).
You must not live somewhere Qwest services or you would expect this behavior...they provide awful customer service and are all about saving a buck. When we moved into our apartment, we were assured by Qwest that DSL would be available by January. Still no DSL. They are in serious financial trouble, have recently had to post bonds to pay their taxes, one of their branches is filing bankruptcy, and Moody's and S&P have downgraded their stock to junk bond status. For them to do something that would actually MAKE them money is contrary to their business paradigm.
We ship DOS based and Windows based medical data collection software out of our shop, and we've had WAY fewer problems (one, to be exact, compared with over a dozen) with people hacking into our DOS stuff vs our Windows stuff, despite the fact that we have 50 times more DOS units in the field than Windows.
Not to mention that the laptops we ship the DOS software on gets stolen a lot less frequently, since our DOS software will run on 286s...
your brother's school's computers are almost as good as the computers I use at home and at work...
I can see (not that I agree with it) where school administrators may feel that there is no need for higher-end computers in the classroom, especially in elementary and middle schools. There aren't too many games that are designed solely for educational purposes that are huge resource hogs, and P1s can still run older word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Plus, it doesn't take much of a computer at all to surf (unless you have mod points here, but that's another story).
As for gaming on the older machines, I can still play RollerCoasterTycoon, Civ 3, and SC3K on my Pentium 300 with 128 megs of RAM and a non-3d video card, and I can run word processors, databases, and compilers on it (as long as I'm not trying to, say, play MP3s on it at the same time).
Periodically we will put a message toward the back of a manual to call a specific extension at our office and leave a message to get a prize (usually consisting of a stuffed toy mascot). Since the manuals are study-specific (we do drug study software) we usually only print them in a run of about 100 at a time, which makes it easy to control how many of the little beasties we are giving out.
I'm afraid to put any actual jokes in our documentation, we have left the occasional joke in our software (i.e. re-entering your password with significantly fewer characters than the first entry gives a smart remark) and gotten some very upset sites calling us ("My, you have some sassy software, I should report this to the sponsor"). By the time the sites actually get around to reading the documentation, they're usually pretty frustrated with whatever they can't figure out and might see jokes as snide comments directed at them (respiratory therapists are a paranoid bunch).
Instead of having the 'parental guidance' warning on the games, the Xbox just has something similar to the 'You must be this tall to ride this ride', but it's 'Your hands must be this big to play this game'. Sort of a safeguard against 3-year-olds seeing aliens getting shot up playing Halo.
Our company's business is shipping medical software on laptops for drug studies. We had to start complying with 21CFR Part 11 for all studies done in the US (has to do with electronic signatures and record-keeping). Fully half of the sites that we have visited for training or orientation on a study have post-it notes with user IDs and passwords either on their screens or on the underside of the laptops...and this is when they KNOW we're coming to train them on this and they KNOW we're gonna holler at them for the violation, because the FDA will do more than holler at them when they show up for an audit and the FDA doesn't have to announce their visit before they show up.
I would be less surprised at this if we forced strong passwords, but we don't. 21CFR Part 11 doesn't specify how strong passwords have to be, so we use fairly weak rules--four to ten characters, not case sensitive, symbols allowed, expire after a year. (And the only reason we went with four characters was because the user ID is three characters and we didn't want the password to match the user ID). Then we had one of our trainers going around suggesting to users that they use their year of birth as their password...nobody knows anyone else's year of birth, right? We actually had a user at one site write THAT one down on a post-it note, too...
We actually had to fight administration here on development of our next software package because the PHBs wanted passwords to be a minimum of one character. I finally convinced them by having the vice-president change his screen-saver password to a one character password and manually hacked it while he was sitting there, but then he just wanted to change it to two characters! We finally got them up to five characters, but it took some doing...and forget about trying to get them to approve case-sensitive or forcing numeric entries too...
At the last MS Tech Ed (in New Orleans about a month ago), the badges had the user ID and password used to register for Tech Ed printed on the back of the badge. That's right, not encoded into the magnetic strip, printed on the back. In plain text.
Actually, I don't know anyone who has ridden the Twister II at Elitch Gardens more than once...I am a roller coaster junkie but I found it extremely painful, not because of high Gs but because it is extremely bumpy and whiplash-y (yes I made up that word). Everyone I have asked about it says the same thing--I keep waiting to meet the one person who thinks it is an awesome ride. It looks really tame when you first look at it, too--I made the mistake of taking my husband (he doesn't like coasters) on it, thinking, "Oh, it's just a step above a kiddie ride"--and now I can't get him to go on another coaster. If that had been my first coaster experience in a long time, there's a good chance I would never get on another coaster, either.
The good news is, if you want to try it, there's never a line.
I don't see why anyone would want to sell Linux as being like Windows, regardless of how they feel the OSes compare. Using the same name doesn't give me a reason to buy a different product, it makes me more likely to buy the original product because, well, they must have SOMETHING there if other companies wanna jump on the bandwagon and be just like them.
The best way to sell Linux products to Joe Sixpack is to show him the advantages to making a change, rather than trying to sell him a cheap knockoff--which is what it will seem like if Linux products start going out with the Windows name on it.
You're only interested in GEEKS. There's no breaking out of or into the subculture. No wide acceptance of geeks as humans, let alone attractive, desirable humans, same as you are not interested in someone who doesn't have and cherish the qualities you hold dear. You wouldn't give them the time of day and vice versa.
Sure, go ahead and proudly proclaim yourself a geek loudly while you go ask that girl in the grocery store for a date--and I'm not talking about the girl with no social skills and glasses thicker than yours. Let me know if she runs screaming or kicks you in the balls.
Unless you are saying that 50% of MasterCard's business is going to go down the tubes because people will have a harder time buying porn on their MasterCard...
Here's what I think will happen...Joe Schmo goes to buy something (porn or not) and his MasterCard gets declined, not because there's a limit on the card but because MasterCard won't let that company bill to it. Maybe this even happens two or three times. Joe Schmo gets tired of the embarrassment (remember those old Amex ads?) and starts putting everything on his Visa, American Express, and Discover cards. MasterCard loses business. Visa, American Express, and Discover gain business.
This isn't going to just cut out porn. For instance, I bought my fiance's wedding band from a company that used a third party to bill (it was the dentist next door, who also owned a share in the jeweler, but the businesses were completely separate).
I thought MasterCard and Visa had some sort of agreement where, if a company had a merchant account, the other company automatically serviced that merchant account too? Does anyone have more information about that? Am I recalling incorrectly?
What do you do when your broadband is down? How the heck are you going to call your ISP to complain, especially if you have forsaken your cell phone for this? I'm not crazy about the idea of having to walk or drive to a pay phone at 3 a.m. because I have NO phone service and NO internet capability, probably because some drunken lunatic has crashed his car into the building where the service comes into the apartment complex. I'm not kidding, this happened at my last apartment (but not at 3am), and it took almost a week to get the service back. No ordering pizza for a week would really suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are the two different scenarios, keep in mind that in our current apartment we do not have broadband and we will have it in the house we are moving into...and stealing his computers wouldn't work, he's got at least two that this game would probably run on and could borrow one if he really wanted to...
Scenario 1 (the way I would like things to be):
Hubby pitches in on packing, eagerly anticipating us being in our new house and having the basement set up to do his gaming (the basement is wired for surround sound). Hubby gets everything moved, and quickly unpacks everything before July 7 so he can game at our house, with our high-speed connection, without having the responsibility of unpacking still on his shoulders because it is ALL DONE.
Scenario 2 (what is really gonna happen):
Hubby knows that game is coming out, and starts packing, but tells himself that he won't get sucked into playing the game. Game hits the shelves a few days before the last weekend we have before moving day (July 3). Hubby goes down to his friend's house who has mondo bandwidth 'just to check out the graphics' on the Friday night before moving day, comes home at 7 am Saturday (no exaggeration, this happened most recently with Jedi Knight 2, why would this game be different?). Hubby sleeps all day and gets started packing around 4 pm, realizes he left something essential at his friend's house, drives down there, reappears at 7 am Sunday, sleeps all day. Moving day comes, movers end up finishing up the packing, causing no end of havoc when trying to find things. Hubby does not spend a weekend at home for a month, because it is easier to go to friend's house to play NwN than to unpack and set up the basement.
P.S. this is NOT meant to be me complaining about my husband's gaming on weekends, it doesn't bother me when he stays out playing, it's just kinda like someone scheduling a funeral during the Super Bowl--damned inconvenient timing and a football party is a lot more fun than a wake...
(I'm really hoping the BioWare people will see this and delay shipping just for me...)
We have to move in three weeks, and I know my husband is gonna be just WORTHLESS he actually gets a copy of this...I wonder how much it would cost to get them to delay the in-store availability to July 7--whatever the cost, it would be worth it so that I wouldn't have to pack and move our apartment alone...
Thanks, BioWare, for making my life miserable...
They probably have a PR department that speaks very good Engrish.
Girl meets boy.
Girl lets boy put her on buddy list.
Girl dates boy for a while, then realizes he is a bad boyfriend.
Girl tries to gain a little freedom by not letting bad boyfriend spy on her whereabouts.
Bad boyfriend flips out and accuses her of (fill in the blank).
Girl not only can't dump bad boyfriend, he now knows her every move.
Girl joins convent to get away from bad boyfriend.
Next time youse guys are wondering where all the geek girls went, you'll know they're all hiding in convents because they played a little fast and loose with their PDA permissions and will be paying for it forever...
What, NOW you choose to use something the Bush administration said as a reliable scientific source?
I really thought when I read the blurb for this article that they were referring to EQ addicts not going to class, people spending all their time in front of their computers, etc.
Now all the slashdot readers at UCMP, Northeastern, and SUNY know to quit cyberstalking those co-eds...
Seriously, what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think have been on the receiving end of cyberstalking, hacking, etc., and would go to a committee or an office like this to get their problem solved?
We have quite a stock of old Compaqs (several thousand) and a couple of guys that scour E-bay and some other used-computer-parts auctions to find extras. We rent out the equipment, we don't sell it (sites don't need it past the length of the drug study) unless a site really wants to buy it, and then we charge them quite a bit for the system (they usually don't bite, we sell them a Windows system for not too much more and then they can actually do something else on the computer, like, say, a spreadsheet).
We're being forced to move everything to our Windows platform, though, which makes me no end of unhappy (I've been trying to get it moved to Linux for security reasons, but I don't think upper management is going to go for it until we have a REALLY big problem). Two reasons we are having to move away from DOS: We can't buy the batteries for the Compaqs anymore (the company that makes them apparently went out of business recently) and we can't buy inkjet printers that work with the old DOS software anymore. Once we run out of those, we're stuck (upper mgmt is not interested in just finding drivers for newer printers).
You must not live somewhere Qwest services or you would expect this behavior...they provide awful customer service and are all about saving a buck. When we moved into our apartment, we were assured by Qwest that DSL would be available by January. Still no DSL. They are in serious financial trouble, have recently had to post bonds to pay their taxes, one of their branches is filing bankruptcy, and Moody's and S&P have downgraded their stock to junk bond status. For them to do something that would actually MAKE them money is contrary to their business paradigm.
We ship DOS based and Windows based medical data collection software out of our shop, and we've had WAY fewer problems (one, to be exact, compared with over a dozen) with people hacking into our DOS stuff vs our Windows stuff, despite the fact that we have 50 times more DOS units in the field than Windows.
Not to mention that the laptops we ship the DOS software on gets stolen a lot less frequently, since our DOS software will run on 286s...
your brother's school's computers are almost as good as the computers I use at home and at work...
I can see (not that I agree with it) where school administrators may feel that there is no need for higher-end computers in the classroom, especially in elementary and middle schools. There aren't too many games that are designed solely for educational purposes that are huge resource hogs, and P1s can still run older word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Plus, it doesn't take much of a computer at all to surf (unless you have mod points here, but that's another story).
As for gaming on the older machines, I can still play RollerCoasterTycoon, Civ 3, and SC3K on my Pentium 300 with 128 megs of RAM and a non-3d video card, and I can run word processors, databases, and compilers on it (as long as I'm not trying to, say, play MP3s on it at the same time).
Periodically we will put a message toward the back of a manual to call a specific extension at our office and leave a message to get a prize (usually consisting of a stuffed toy mascot). Since the manuals are study-specific (we do drug study software) we usually only print them in a run of about 100 at a time, which makes it easy to control how many of the little beasties we are giving out.
I'm afraid to put any actual jokes in our documentation, we have left the occasional joke in our software (i.e. re-entering your password with significantly fewer characters than the first entry gives a smart remark) and gotten some very upset sites calling us ("My, you have some sassy software, I should report this to the sponsor"). By the time the sites actually get around to reading the documentation, they're usually pretty frustrated with whatever they can't figure out and might see jokes as snide comments directed at them (respiratory therapists are a paranoid bunch).
They don't ask because there just aren't enough Victoria's Secret and SI swimsuit issue ads to go around...
The agent probably realized the captured e-mail included the graphic messages he was sending to his co-worker he was shtupping...
Instead of having the 'parental guidance' warning on the games, the Xbox just has something similar to the 'You must be this tall to ride this ride', but it's 'Your hands must be this big to play this game'. Sort of a safeguard against 3-year-olds seeing aliens getting shot up playing Halo.
(Gasping for air after I blew the water I was drinking out through my nose because I was laughing so hard) Thank you I needed that today :)
Our company's business is shipping medical software on laptops for drug studies. We had to start complying with 21CFR Part 11 for all studies done in the US (has to do with electronic signatures and record-keeping). Fully half of the sites that we have visited for training or orientation on a study have post-it notes with user IDs and passwords either on their screens or on the underside of the laptops...and this is when they KNOW we're coming to train them on this and they KNOW we're gonna holler at them for the violation, because the FDA will do more than holler at them when they show up for an audit and the FDA doesn't have to announce their visit before they show up.
I would be less surprised at this if we forced strong passwords, but we don't. 21CFR Part 11 doesn't specify how strong passwords have to be, so we use fairly weak rules--four to ten characters, not case sensitive, symbols allowed, expire after a year. (And the only reason we went with four characters was because the user ID is three characters and we didn't want the password to match the user ID). Then we had one of our trainers going around suggesting to users that they use their year of birth as their password...nobody knows anyone else's year of birth, right? We actually had a user at one site write THAT one down on a post-it note, too...
We actually had to fight administration here on development of our next software package because the PHBs wanted passwords to be a minimum of one character. I finally convinced them by having the vice-president change his screen-saver password to a one character password and manually hacked it while he was sitting there, but then he just wanted to change it to two characters! We finally got them up to five characters, but it took some doing...and forget about trying to get them to approve case-sensitive or forcing numeric entries too...
At the last MS Tech Ed (in New Orleans about a month ago), the badges had the user ID and password used to register for Tech Ed printed on the back of the badge. That's right, not encoded into the magnetic strip, printed on the back. In plain text.
Actually, I don't know anyone who has ridden the Twister II at Elitch Gardens more than once...I am a roller coaster junkie but I found it extremely painful, not because of high Gs but because it is extremely bumpy and whiplash-y (yes I made up that word). Everyone I have asked about it says the same thing--I keep waiting to meet the one person who thinks it is an awesome ride. It looks really tame when you first look at it, too--I made the mistake of taking my husband (he doesn't like coasters) on it, thinking, "Oh, it's just a step above a kiddie ride"--and now I can't get him to go on another coaster. If that had been my first coaster experience in a long time, there's a good chance I would never get on another coaster, either.
The good news is, if you want to try it, there's never a line.
I don't see why anyone would want to sell Linux as being like Windows, regardless of how they feel the OSes compare. Using the same name doesn't give me a reason to buy a different product, it makes me more likely to buy the original product because, well, they must have SOMETHING there if other companies wanna jump on the bandwagon and be just like them.
The best way to sell Linux products to Joe Sixpack is to show him the advantages to making a change, rather than trying to sell him a cheap knockoff--which is what it will seem like if Linux products start going out with the Windows name on it.
You're only interested in GEEKS. There's no breaking out of or into the subculture. No wide acceptance of geeks as humans, let alone attractive, desirable humans, same as you are not interested in someone who doesn't have and cherish the qualities you hold dear. You wouldn't give them the time of day and vice versa.
Sure, go ahead and proudly proclaim yourself a geek loudly while you go ask that girl in the grocery store for a date--and I'm not talking about the girl with no social skills and glasses thicker than yours. Let me know if she runs screaming or kicks you in the balls.
Unless you are saying that 50% of MasterCard's business is going to go down the tubes because people will have a harder time buying porn on their MasterCard...
Here's what I think will happen...Joe Schmo goes to buy something (porn or not) and his MasterCard gets declined, not because there's a limit on the card but because MasterCard won't let that company bill to it. Maybe this even happens two or three times. Joe Schmo gets tired of the embarrassment (remember those old Amex ads?) and starts putting everything on his Visa, American Express, and Discover cards. MasterCard loses business. Visa, American Express, and Discover gain business.
This isn't going to just cut out porn. For instance, I bought my fiance's wedding band from a company that used a third party to bill (it was the dentist next door, who also owned a share in the jeweler, but the businesses were completely separate).
I thought MasterCard and Visa had some sort of agreement where, if a company had a merchant account, the other company automatically serviced that merchant account too? Does anyone have more information about that? Am I recalling incorrectly?
If you clicked the link to read the article, you can't hit the 'back' button to return to slashdot...
What do you do when your broadband is down? How the heck are you going to call your ISP to complain, especially if you have forsaken your cell phone for this? I'm not crazy about the idea of having to walk or drive to a pay phone at 3 a.m. because I have NO phone service and NO internet capability, probably because some drunken lunatic has crashed his car into the building where the service comes into the apartment complex. I'm not kidding, this happened at my last apartment (but not at 3am), and it took almost a week to get the service back. No ordering pizza for a week would really suck.