I can't believe Slashdot has sunk to basically promoting illegal drug use. I thought this place was somewhere smart people gathered to get the latest news and gossip. You want to fry your mind - go ahead. This is not the forum to be pushing drugs on. There's enough pressure for people to take drugs without it appearing here. If Slashdot's coverage is going to include fucking drug pushers, shout it out on the front page so I can be forewarned that this is somewhere I don't want to be.
Economics is extremely complicated, and I assure you that it is more complicated than just the purchase price for a card at the store.
You sound like you want us to listen to you because economics is "extremely complicated", yet you provide absolutely no insight into how economics works. Are we supposed to just glaze over at this point and forget what the issue was? What's your point?
Everything is a control issue. Companies want to control their product.
Who better to control the company's product than the company?
Zealots want to control the companies.
Can you provide any more insight or is this just one of those "salt in the wound" generalizations? I've no idea what this is supposed to mean, unless you expect me to be cynical.
Users want to know that their investment will be safe in the future, that the company they are depending on won't close shop or turn their back on them. Completely understandable.
I find taskbar grouping useful sometimes, actually. However, I think it's mostly due to running applications which do not support a tabbed interface, forcing you to run multiple copies (eg. Internet Exploder, Notepad, command prompt).
Lots of programs behave differently the first time they are run (by launching a startup wizard for example).
Lots of programs that you must install intentionally behave differently the first time they are run. The difference here is that the software is installed without any user confirmation. This is underhanded, and almost certainly not according to Microsoft's guidelines.
Logging usage of the program doesn't constitute "spyware" unless the usage is communicated to the software maker (or a third party), IMHO.
Agreed. However, who's to say they won't broadcast it with a future Back Street Boyz "upgrade" someday, once the amount of data collected is worth sending? I don't know about you, but I'm not one to trust people who install software on my computer without asking. Something isn't right there.
The _original_ Mario game? I don't know if I've ever seen it, though it does ring a bell. Never heard of Balance of Power. You know what game I thought was above all others? Turrican. F-ck that game was cool. I'd still play it today, no problem. Huge bosses, lots of different and innovative weapons, great huge maps, good sound, it's great. hey, you can view a movie of the game if you're curious. Looks like there's a web ring and everything for it - well I'm off to check it out! Cheers.
Everything you listed is just a download away. I fail to see the problem.
None of these things are _included_ with Windows. Maybe now you see a problem. Out of the box experience, integration, convenience - everything you need is on the Linux install CDs. Be it word processing, graphic editing, software development, gaming, shell automation, web publishing, secure network connectivity, and on and on. Sure you can get these things for Windows, but there IS a difference between a comprehensive, off the shelf package (Linux Distro) and an operating system that you have to spend hours downloading and applying patches for, plus finding, downloading and purchasing additional software so you can get work done. There's not silver bullet for every problem, but you need to give credit where credit is due.
IIRC, when you hit a passenger in Space Taxi, all they said was "hey". It's been a *long* time, though! What about that chopper game where you had to dig underground and through oil and stuff... sort of like dig dug. That was a good game. Just remembered some more: BC's Quest for Tires, Winter Games, Summer Games. Friggen joystick wreckers, man!:) Speaking of which, Super Mario Bros. was a joystick wrecker just because it was so damn frustrating sometimes.
I think it's just an entrenched expectation people have. You don't expect people to be going out of their way to stare at you, especially stealthily. Just like you expect people to respect your buffer space in a supermarket line. However, times are changing and people are stretching old fashioned values right out of shape, probably just because they can and/or they come from a culture without such values and/or they have something to gain. Whatever.
Well you can still buy C64 stuff for cheap. Just check out the Commodore newsgroups to get URLs on where to go. Or instead, you can get an emulator for Linux or Windows and download programs from the net. Or finally, do what I did and just order a 3-CD set with tons of C64 games, music, applications and stuff on it.
Damn, those 5-1/4" floppies are tough. Most of my floppy disks still work! Some even have crap on them and they still work, LOL.
My favourite games were Test Drive (kicks the PC versions ass, I still think), Turrican (can't rave enough about this game!!), Destroyer (awesome ship to ship to submarine game), and lots of other cool games like Dig Dug, Space Taxi, Donald Duck's playground, Boulder Dash, Aztech Challenge, Great American Cross Country Road Race, WWF Wrestling, Bard's Tale, Classic Concentration, Skate or Die, etc... lots of the music was super catchy, too. And neat apps like Talking Sam (early speech synth), PrintShop (make banners with the ol' carriage printer), SpeedScript (simple but cool word processor), Geos (very cool but a little slow graphical application environment - RAM expander helps). Oh yeah, and the Super Snapshot cartridge! It was extremely awesome in that you could freeze the run of almost anything (unless disk drive code for copy protection or speed loading was used) and save a runnable memory image to disk or disassemble and edit active memory on the fly, then resume. Wish they had such a thing for PCs! Anyway, I'm rambling...
Speaking of memory, on their site they say 128MB can give you "hours and hours" of listening. Sure, at a low bitrate. Companies should have to have a little asterisk and say "*at 96 kbps" or whatever they did their measurement with. I'd guess that I get an hour of listening out of 128MB at 160kbps.
If credits are equivalent to money, then please publish a price.
Simple: one credit = one Club Z point. 800,000,000 Club Z points = one man made leather wallet. See also this conversion table:
1 credit = 1 Club Z point 1 credit = 50 Esso gas points 1 credit = 0.005 "The Bay" points 1 credit = 0.0001 Air Miles points 1 credit = 0.00000000001 blow jobs for a typical Slashdot reader
Those were the days! I remember probably 3 things most about C64: games, programming, and BBS's. Memories so fond that I still can't part with all the C64 stuff I've accumulated, not to mention probably a few hundred disks.
Plus "retro" is in these days. However, what age range are they targeting mainly, and is this age range going to think of Commodore as retro or as "WTF is Commodore?"
How many people remember the cool digitized music on the C64? A couple stick out in my head:
Bomb the base Flesh 4 fantasy
I'll have to find these now that the songs are stuck in my head once again!:)
I remember the demos coming into North America from Europe were fricken awesome. The screen would flash and stuff which looked really neat, but in hindsight I almost wonder if it was a slight timing difference due to different outlet voltages (?).
Commonly known as the 'Upgrade ROMs' sometimes referred to as 2.0 or 3.0 ROMs depending on who you ask. Occupy $C000-$FFFF
Most Original ROM bugs were squashed. Now includes a tiny ML monitor and IEEE-488 disk operability, also PEEKing to upper memory was permitted. Easter Egg - enter WAIT 6502,x to see 'MICROSOFT!' displayed on the screen x number of times.
Taking it to court would take longer than their current promise of december.
When is the election in the US finished?
You know the system's FUBAR'd when you can't tell someone to their face they're f--king lying through their teeth and instead you need to go to court and spend lots of money proving the obvious. Would it even be possible to drag such a case out over a long period of time?
"The dinosaurs would have had open sores from fighting, and rotting meat stuck in the gaps between their teeth.
"We needed all these features in the eventual odor," he said. ... Dale Air started life as an air-freshener firm. Then founder Fred Dale, who died earlier this year, found a lucrative sideline.
What, they threw him into the T-Rex's mouth?
<Aussie_accent> How's _that_ for authentic, ay mayt? </Aussie_accent>
It really is ridiculous. Americans are being slapped in the face with their own legal system every day. If the system was more common-sense based, this type of lawsuit would be laughed out of court. What a mess. If Windows is a hairball, what is the American legal system?
The biggest application incompatibility problem for me personally is games. I am a sucker for new FPS games, and I also have acloset addiction for on-line games like Planetside.
I'm not a big gamer so I can't comment much on this except that gaming doesn't apply to the business world, which Microsoft is trying hard to defend against Linux. Gaming titles made for Linux ought to run fine.
In a work environment, the applications are mostly MS office. Open office is nice, but it does not have 100% compatibility with MS formats.
I've also found the compatibility to be less than 100%, but that was the last time I tried (about a year ago). I remember noticing that it had improved a lot since the year before that. Try a recent copy of Open Office, or give StarOffice a try. Lots of people and businesses are using it. Anyone reading this who has used OO full time recently and can relay their experiences?
Active Directory is the other element. Yes, I know it's a hack of LDAP, Radius and so on, but it looks the same and works the same on every system.
Every system - what do you mean by that? I'm not sure compatibility is as smooth as you think. Read here for example.
Why do we have to pick just one? Linux is a hands-down winner in some areas, Windows does better at others. If I'm buying 100 laptops for sales guys who need to run Siebel and Outlook, gimme Win2k. If I'm building a group of machines as the back-end of a big network, gimme a handful of generic rackmount machines and the latest solid release of Fedora.
Exactly! Why just pick one? However, some people's or company's criteria might drive the use of a single solution for all areas (ie. freedom to modify the source code might be important, or Microsoft compatibility might be critical).
* People will keep buying microsoft products because they like the products.
People will keep using open source because they like the price, features, freedom, and quality.
* Slashdotters will continue to rant about the evils of microsoft (or whatever company happens to be doing well at the time)
Irrelevant. IBM is doing well and I don't hear too many rants around here. You seem to forget that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. They have essentially been convicted of being evil.
* Linux will continue being a useful and robust platform...
It will continually improve and and add true innovation, filling the need of what people want....that's too complex for the average consumer and incompatible with popular applications.
You didn't specify which task is too complex. For the end user, using Linux is mostly seamless. Name the popular applications Linux [distros] are incompatible with. Also, state how Microsoft has remained compatible or incompatible with these applications and versions.
With language you can say things so general and abstract. You can also be very, very specific if you take greater care. IMO, one of the big downfalls of language (English, anyway) is that it is much too easy to be imprecise and ambiguous. Even legal text which strives to be precise can be interpreted in different ways. This is a huge problem because years down the road after text is written and meant to capture a certain meaning, it can be re-interpreted years later to mean something else. Is this a problem with every language? It seems like more of a problem these days, maybe just because I am noticing it more, but what can be done? Better education? English 2.0?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe Slashdot has sunk to basically promoting illegal drug use. I thought this place was somewhere smart people gathered to get the latest news and gossip. You want to fry your mind - go ahead. This is not the forum to be pushing drugs on. There's enough pressure for people to take drugs without it appearing here. If Slashdot's coverage is going to include fucking drug pushers, shout it out on the front page so I can be forewarned that this is somewhere I don't want to be.
Economics is extremely complicated, and I assure you that it is more complicated than just the purchase price for a card at the store.
You sound like you want us to listen to you because economics is "extremely complicated", yet you provide absolutely no insight into how economics works. Are we supposed to just glaze over at this point and forget what the issue was? What's your point?
Everything is a control issue. Companies want to control their product.
Who better to control the company's product than the company?
Zealots want to control the companies.
Can you provide any more insight or is this just one of those "salt in the wound" generalizations? I've no idea what this is supposed to mean, unless you expect me to be cynical.
Users want to know that their investment will be safe in the future, that the company they are depending on won't close shop or turn their back on them. Completely understandable.
Now, do you have anything valuable to say?
I find taskbar grouping useful sometimes, actually. However, I think it's mostly due to running applications which do not support a tabbed interface, forcing you to run multiple copies (eg. Internet Exploder, Notepad, command prompt).
Lots of programs behave differently the first time they are run (by launching a startup wizard for example).
Lots of programs that you must install intentionally behave differently the first time they are run. The difference here is that the software is installed without any user confirmation. This is underhanded, and almost certainly not according to Microsoft's guidelines.
Logging usage of the program doesn't constitute "spyware" unless the usage is communicated to the software maker (or a third party), IMHO.
Agreed. However, who's to say they won't broadcast it with a future Back Street Boyz "upgrade" someday, once the amount of data collected is worth sending? I don't know about you, but I'm not one to trust people who install software on my computer without asking. Something isn't right there.
The _original_ Mario game? I don't know if I've ever seen it, though it does ring a bell.
Never heard of Balance of Power. You know what game I thought was above all others? Turrican. F-ck that game was cool. I'd still play it today, no problem. Huge bosses, lots of different and innovative weapons, great huge maps, good sound, it's great. hey, you can view a movie of the game if you're curious. Looks like there's a web ring and everything for it - well I'm off to check it out! Cheers.
Everything you listed is just a download away. I fail to see the problem.
None of these things are _included_ with Windows. Maybe now you see a problem. Out of the box experience, integration, convenience - everything you need is on the Linux install CDs. Be it word processing, graphic editing, software development, gaming, shell automation, web publishing, secure network connectivity, and on and on. Sure you can get these things for Windows, but there IS a difference between a comprehensive, off the shelf package (Linux Distro) and an operating system that you have to spend hours downloading and applying patches for, plus finding, downloading and purchasing additional software so you can get work done.
There's not silver bullet for every problem, but you need to give credit where credit is due.
If you're not much into lawyer speak, try this link n' shit.
Before it got slashdotted I mirrored it here. ;)
IIRC, when you hit a passenger in Space Taxi, all they said was "hey". It's been a *long* time, though! :) Speaking of which, Super Mario Bros. was a joystick wrecker just because it was so damn frustrating sometimes.
What about that chopper game where you had to dig underground and through oil and stuff... sort of like dig dug. That was a good game.
Just remembered some more: BC's Quest for Tires, Winter Games, Summer Games. Friggen joystick wreckers, man!
I think it's just an entrenched expectation people have. You don't expect people to be going out of their way to stare at you, especially stealthily. Just like you expect people to respect your buffer space in a supermarket line.
However, times are changing and people are stretching old fashioned values right out of shape, probably just because they can and/or they come from a culture without such values and/or they have something to gain. Whatever.
Well you can still buy C64 stuff for cheap. Just check out the Commodore newsgroups to get URLs on where to go. Or instead, you can get an emulator for Linux or Windows and download programs from the net. Or finally, do what I did and just order a 3-CD set with tons of C64 games, music, applications and stuff on it.
Damn, those 5-1/4" floppies are tough. Most of my floppy disks still work! Some even have crap on them and they still work, LOL.
My favourite games were Test Drive (kicks the PC versions ass, I still think), Turrican (can't rave enough about this game!!), Destroyer (awesome ship to ship to submarine game), and lots of other cool games like Dig Dug, Space Taxi, Donald Duck's playground, Boulder Dash, Aztech Challenge, Great American Cross Country Road Race, WWF Wrestling, Bard's Tale, Classic Concentration, Skate or Die, etc... lots of the music was super catchy, too. And neat apps like Talking Sam (early speech synth), PrintShop (make banners with the ol' carriage printer), SpeedScript (simple but cool word processor), Geos (very cool but a little slow graphical application environment - RAM expander helps). Oh yeah, and the Super Snapshot cartridge! It was extremely awesome in that you could freeze the run of almost anything (unless disk drive code for copy protection or speed loading was used) and save a runnable memory image to disk or disassemble and edit active memory on the fly, then resume. Wish they had such a thing for PCs!
Anyway, I'm rambling...
Speaking of memory, on their site they say 128MB can give you "hours and hours" of listening. Sure, at a low bitrate. Companies should have to have a little asterisk and say "*at 96 kbps" or whatever they did their measurement with. I'd guess that I get an hour of listening out of 128MB at 160kbps.
If credits are equivalent to money, then please publish a price.
Simple: one credit = one Club Z point. 800,000,000 Club Z points = one man made leather wallet.
See also this conversion table:
1 credit = 1 Club Z point
1 credit = 50 Esso gas points
1 credit = 0.005 "The Bay" points
1 credit = 0.0001 Air Miles points
1 credit = 0.00000000001 blow jobs for a typical Slashdot reader
Those were the days! I remember probably 3 things most about C64: games, programming, and BBS's. Memories so fond that I still can't part with all the C64 stuff I've accumulated, not to mention probably a few hundred disks.
Plus "retro" is in these days. However, what age range are they targeting mainly, and is this age range going to think of Commodore as retro or as "WTF is Commodore?"
How many people remember the cool digitized music on the C64? A couple stick out in my head:
:)
Bomb the base
Flesh 4 fantasy
I'll have to find these now that the songs are stuck in my head once again!
I remember the demos coming into North America from Europe were fricken awesome. The screen would flash and stuff which looked really neat, but in hindsight I almost wonder if it was a slight timing difference due to different outlet voltages (?).
Eeek! Well, at least it was before they were really evil. LOL
/ roms.html)
Apparently there was an Easter Egg in Pet BASIC:
(from http://www.portcommodore.com/commodore/pet/petfaq
### COMMODORE BASIC ### - Upgrade ROMs
Commonly known as the 'Upgrade ROMs' sometimes referred to as 2.0 or 3.0 ROMs depending on who you ask. Occupy $C000-$FFFF
Most Original ROM bugs were squashed. Now includes a tiny ML monitor and IEEE-488 disk operability, also PEEKing to upper memory was permitted. Easter Egg - enter WAIT 6502,x to see 'MICROSOFT!' displayed on the screen x number of times.
Taking it to court would take longer than their current promise of december.
When is the election in the US finished?
You know the system's FUBAR'd when you can't tell someone to their face they're f--king lying through their teeth and instead you need to go to court and spend lots of money proving the obvious. Would it even be possible to drag such a case out over a long period of time?
Yes, it's the all-new Heisenberg Data Store 2000 from Uncertain Storage Inc.
Don't you mean the Hindenburg Data Store 2000 from RubYourFeetOnCarpet Storage Inc.?
From the article:
...
"The dinosaurs would have had open sores from fighting, and rotting meat stuck in the gaps between their teeth.
"We needed all these features in the eventual odor," he said.
Dale Air started life as an air-freshener firm. Then founder Fred Dale, who died earlier this year, found a lucrative sideline.
What, they threw him into the T-Rex's mouth?
<Aussie_accent>
How's _that_ for authentic, ay mayt?
</Aussie_accent>
It really is ridiculous. Americans are being slapped in the face with their own legal system every day. If the system was more common-sense based, this type of lawsuit would be laughed out of court. What a mess. If Windows is a hairball, what is the American legal system?
The biggest application incompatibility problem for me personally is games. I am a sucker for new FPS games, and I also have acloset addiction for on-line games like Planetside.
I'm not a big gamer so I can't comment much on this except that gaming doesn't apply to the business world, which Microsoft is trying hard to defend against Linux. Gaming titles made for Linux ought to run fine.
In a work environment, the applications are mostly MS office. Open office is nice, but it does not have 100% compatibility with MS formats.
I've also found the compatibility to be less than 100%, but that was the last time I tried (about a year ago). I remember noticing that it had improved a lot since the year before that. Try a recent copy of Open Office, or give StarOffice a try. Lots of people and businesses are using it. Anyone reading this who has used OO full time recently and can relay their experiences?
Active Directory is the other element. Yes, I know it's a hack of LDAP, Radius and so on, but it looks the same and works the same on every system.
Every system - what do you mean by that? I'm not sure compatibility is as smooth as you think. Read here for example.
Why do we have to pick just one? Linux is a hands-down winner in some areas, Windows does better at others. If I'm buying 100 laptops for sales guys who need to run Siebel and Outlook, gimme Win2k. If I'm building a group of machines as the back-end of a big network, gimme a handful of generic rackmount machines and the latest solid release of Fedora.
Exactly! Why just pick one? However, some people's or company's criteria might drive the use of a single solution for all areas (ie. freedom to modify the source code might be important, or Microsoft compatibility might be critical).
* People will keep buying microsoft products because they like the products.
...that's too complex for the average consumer and incompatible with popular applications.
People will keep using open source because they like the price, features, freedom, and quality.
* Slashdotters will continue to rant about the evils of microsoft (or whatever company happens to be doing well at the time)
Irrelevant. IBM is doing well and I don't hear too many rants around here. You seem to forget that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. They have essentially been convicted of being evil.
* Linux will continue being a useful and robust platform...
It will continually improve and and add true innovation, filling the need of what people want.
You didn't specify which task is too complex. For the end user, using Linux is mostly seamless.
Name the popular applications Linux [distros] are incompatible with. Also, state how Microsoft has remained compatible or incompatible with these applications and versions.
With language you can say things so general and abstract. You can also be very, very specific if you take greater care.
IMO, one of the big downfalls of language (English, anyway) is that it is much too easy to be imprecise and ambiguous. Even legal text which strives to be precise can be interpreted in different ways. This is a huge problem because years down the road after text is written and meant to capture a certain meaning, it can be re-interpreted years later to mean something else.
Is this a problem with every language? It seems like more of a problem these days, maybe just because I am noticing it more, but what can be done? Better education? English 2.0?