Um, 386's were 32-bit. They were the first 32-bit Intel processors, actually. The 286 was the last 16-bit CPU Intel (well, general-purpose CPU; they still make 16-bit microcontrollers and the such). 386's went the way of the dodo quickly when 32-bit computing became the norm in the Windows world (it already was elsewhere) because the Windows world didn't go 32-bit until Windows 95 in 1995. This was NINE years after the 386 was released. Furthermore, Intel continued to produce 386's until LAST YEAR.
I agree that single-core processors are going to be out fairly soon, but to say that 386's went out of style when 32-bit computing became the norm is gross mischaracterization. From personal computing, 386's were long gone, and from the world of computing in general, 386's had an extremely long life.
Really, AC? While minor version upgrades of mysql are no doubt handled, major upgrades are probably a different story. This is because the database format likes to change between major versions. The process of upgrading requires full access to your database, which is something even root might not have, hence the reason Gentoo doesn't try to do the upgrade for you.
Most people have this crazy belief that Columbus was some revolutionary who thought that the earth was round and everyone else still thought the world was flat and were complete dumbasses. Those people are entirely mistaken. The Western world has been fully cognizant of the world being round since Plato figured it out 2000-some-odd years ago. Even during Columbus's time they were pretty sure how big the earth was and how far it was between the India and Europe by sea. The fact that they knew the distance between Europe and India was why everyone thought Columbus was a nutjob. At that time, no ship could carry enough rations to survive that distance. Columbus (not being able to correctly read maps (seriously)) thought that India was only half the distance from Europe as it really was. That's why everyone thought Columbus was a nutjob. In the end, Isabella only let him go because she thought that new route to India would be worth so much money that loosing a few ships was worth it. She didn't think he was right any more than he advisers did.
The only reason we have this impression that they thought thought the world was flat was due to a 18th American historian who couldn't read Latin. He mistranslated a few passages of some historical documents of the Court of Queen Isabella. He thought it spoke of criticism of Columbus's plan because the earth wasn't round. The criticism was really that the earth wasn't that small. (Something about how the object of the sentence was orbis (earth) and he thought is was some other word with orbis describing it's roundness.) Of course he published a book with the lie that this mistranslation brought, and everyone kept repeating it. It's kind of like how people still think there's debate on evolution in the scientific community because some writers still confuse the word theory with hypothesis. ((Peer-reviewed) Theories are accepted as testable fact (though still theoretically disprovable) whereas hypotheses are still being tested and debated. While theories may not be "proven," it is a misconception to think that there is still controversy about their status as fact.)
Concerning Vista: He acknowledged that Vista shipped in 2006 but gave himself credit because it was delayed TWICE during 2006. AND it wasn't released to retail until a few days ago (or is that a few days from now, well, who cares, no one's buying it anyway). Originally it was supposed to be released in like March and then, I think, August. Besides, according to Microsoft, the Official release is January 2007. Those CDs you saw were advance OEM copies.
Concerning WiMax and Sprint: Just because it's not Sprint's fault doesn't mean he was wrong in his prediction.
I'd defend his Sun thing, but from what I've seen Sun is doing just fine. Not spectacular, but not horrible either.
"A single drink would put an average male over the legal limit."
I call bullshit. It would take 2-3 drinks (that is, 12 oz beer, one glass wine, or 1.5 oz 80 proof liquor), to put the average American male (5'10" 175 lbs) over the usual limit of.08 BAC. For me (a big fat ass), it takes about 5 drinks (I got a friend who is a cop). If you're ripped and skinny, I could see one drink putting you over the limit, but then you'd be feeling it..08 BAC is definitely buzzed feeling.
Think about it this way. BAC raises nearly linearly (it goes up slightly faster at the beginning of a drinking session), that is by about the same amount per drink. At.30 BAC you would barely be able to stand, and certainly couldn't talk. At.25 BAC you are quite drunk (slurred speech, sucking dude's dicks). At.35 BAC you should be passed out or close to it (although you can easily pass out at lower BACs if you don't take precautions like standing, caffeine, not starting drinking while tired, etc)..35 is generally considered the beginning of alcohol poisoning. At.45, you should be dead, or damn close to it.
Now, how many drinks can you put away? I'd bet at least twenty. And at twenty drinks, how drunk are you? Even if you would be at a.40 with twenty beers, that would mean only a.02 raise per beer. Come on now. One beer is not going to put you at.08.
Of course, if a drink to you involves 3 shots of whisky and a splash of 7-Up for bubbles, then you have more problems with alcohol than I can solve by correcting you in a slashdot comment.
Do you exercise? Trust me, it's more important than you think. Since you're probably nerdy (reading Slashdot and all), try DDR. It's more fun than running. I lost 30 lbs on DDR, and now am going to attempt to lose another 70 with jogging. And, of course, diet.
Actually, Gates has generally been against software patents. Microsoft doesn't really benefit from the patents they hold since they've (almost) never bothered to enforce the few patents they have, and it's hard to get patents on shit when you're just dressing up copies of your competitor's work.
But, Microsoft does have a lot to lose by others having software patents. One person with a patent that Microsoft has infringed and an ambulance-chaser could be bad news for a multi-billion dollar company.
Two of those are quite unnecessary. First, memtest86, because it's included on the Knoppix CD (type memtest at the boot prompt). Second, SystemRescueCD, because Knoppix has a full recovery suite including the most recent partition editors and ntfsprogs, which, combined, can nearly replace PartitionMagic.
The rest of it I can see, except for the NT Password thing. BartPE can, I believe, do all that rescue and more, and it actually works on XP SP2.
Ordinarily, I don't respond to karma-whores (I earned my excellent karma the old-fashioned way.), but this time I will. Though, it is actually a response to TFA. Newspapers and magazines make enough from advertising to be completely free to the consumer. In fact, many magazines have tried going completely free. What they found was that if you give magazines and newspapers away, people think that they must suck because they're free and they won't read them. If you charge for them (it doesn't matter how much, so long as money comes out of the wallet), people think the publication must not suck because they are paying for it and will gladly read it. Why do think magazine subscriptions practically give themselves away? In fact, no magazine or newspaper will ever attempt to collect on a bill if you write back that you don't want to pay. It's just not worth it, since they made their money long before you read their articles.
That's like saying, "He didn't sponsor Let's-KILL-all-blacks legislation; he just sponsored non-lynching Jim Crow laws." You truly do fail it, homophobe.
Yes, it's just that A) People make Capitalization MistakEs ALl the tIme. B) Your numbers match this mistake. C) It's not possible to have such high numbers. I mean shit, the standard PCI bus can only handle 33MB/s, across all devices assuming an unrealistic 0% overhead. Yes, you can get much better transfer rates over PCI-e, and perhaps you have PCI-e devices but that doesn't mean you're getting 80MB/s speeds. I can give you screenshot after screenshot of hard data showing you that SATA devices tend to get around 8-20MB/s (depends on what bus they run on; I get around 20 on systems with PCI-e SATA controllers) and that PATA devices get around 4-5MB/s (new ones only; holy god are older drives slow; I just moved a 6yo 20GB HD to a different 20GB HD at 300kB/s; of course, the HD was going bad but still.). Think about it this way: If you really could read data at 80MB/s then you could do crazy things like move an 80GB (full) partition from hard drive to hard drive in 15 minutes; which generally takes more like 2.5hr (again, real world experience). Try it sometime.
You're thinking megabits per second (Mbps) rather than megabytes per second (MBps). Note the capitalization is the abbreviations. 80Mbps is 10MBps (well, sort of. Usually Mbps refers to the entire pipe, headers, metadata and all, whereas MBps refers to overall throughput, which is just the data. This is moot, however, when not talking about network transfers.). That's why I'm a fan of Mbit/s and MByte/s instead of Mbps and MBps.
I don't know about your, but I daydream about RAID-4. That's the really crazy one. It's great if you have, say, 4 slow and old yet sizable IDE drives, and one of about the same size fast, new, say, SATA drive. You get the same level of redundancy as RAID-5, with the same space loss, but the performance increase is much more sizable. While RAID-5 will give you a 20%-100% increase in speed over just the straight drives, a RAID-4 with sufficient numbers of data drives, will give you 20%-100% speed increase over the parity drive for the whole array, which for the case IDE data drives and a SATA parity drive, is very significant. A 5 disk RAID-5 of SATA disks which normally have a throughput of 8MB/s will give a you a nice read speed of 12MB/s. A 5 disk RAID-4 composed of 4 IDE drives which can do 4.5MB/s and a SATA parity disk will give you a nice read speed of 10MB/s. I know this from real-world testing. Now the RAID-4 might not be as fast as the RAID-5, but if you already have the IDE disks, it makes a lot of sense.
Now, where does this bring me in thought? Why not build a RAID-4 with several cheap SATA drives for data and a nice high-end SCSI drive for parity. That would give you all the benefits of RAID-5 with all the speed increase of SCSI for only a little bit more cost than a purely (and very cheap) SATA solution.
He comes from Holland, MI, a small, mainly Dutch community in West Michigan which is so ridiculously conservative, it makes Utah look liberal. Most of the schools in that area don't have Halloween parties because of the Christian right's pervasive presence. It's so bad that people have been shunned (yes, actual shunning) for mowing their lawns on Sunday. Honestly, Taco probably forgot that Halloween even happens anymore.
Nerds cleverly pull off distributed-denial-of-service attack against lame bulletin board with a fake chatlog of a kid trying to commit fraud who becomes a (very stupid) victim of the same fraud.
Why do non-Americans call a vacation a holiday? In my book a holiday is a celebration (or day a day of morning), whereas a vacation involves time off work.
True, but a lot of the best writers wrote whole series with the same characters. Those are widely considered original and lauded heavily, even by the most stuck up of literary geeks. Think Star Wars, Star Trek and Asimov. And also realize that Shakespear really was just rewriting older works from Greece and Rome in an updated, more modern (for the time) style.
If all Mario games looked about the same and just had slightly different graphics and different levels with exactly the same style of gameplay, then I would agree that Mario is unoriginal. But that's not the case. Mario 3 was significantly different from Mario 1. Super Mario World for SNES was completely different from Mario 3. The only thing each of the Mario games share is the (sparse) backstory and general look of the characters.
And, what do you think about Megaman. Personally, I think the Megaman series (all five of them) are about the best around. But are they original? I don't really think so. The gameplay is pretty much unchanged from the first one. The story lines are incremental and nearly the same from game to game. Megaman is definitely unoriginal. Does it really matter? I don't think it does.
Yeah, but what if they seeded them with 64k or 48k MP3s. While those do suck some ass, they would have the benefit of being legal, and really, really fast to download, even for dial up. One of these days, some ad execs are going to take their heads out of their asses and sell this form of advertising to the record execs. I'll be laughing my ass off when it happens.
Mario has been whored out into every possible genre that you can think of.
Exactly. Mario has been used in completely different ways with different storylines throught out his life (you know what I mean by his life). Mario is really a brand. Everytime he appears, it's in a new game with a different story and new style of gameplay. EA Sports games on the other hand are the same game with better graphics and updated rosters. Other than that the differences are incremental and unoriginal.
You can't say that Mario games are unoriginal just because they used the same set of characters over again. That'd be like saying Shakespear was unoriginal for writing with the Latin alphabet.
Ahh, work food. The bane of my existence. Work food is actually pretty easy to do whilst avoiding crap like HFCS and trans-fats. Try making things like soup from scratch. That's very quick and easy and quite cheap. If you buy one of those electric hotpots then you can do the actual adding water and cooking part at work, thus avoiding spillage. Of course, this limits the types of soup to the basics. Another good, simple, wookfood is sandwiches. While I don't seem to have any problems finding quality bread (get the "artisan" breads from your supermarket. They're usually made without preservatives or sugar. Especially the rye and pumpernickel. Labels, you know.), a breadmachine makes breadmaking ridiculously easy (and cheap) without cleanup or crap.
You may need to make your own mayo, to avoid trans-fats (to know if something has bad fat, look for hydrogenated and partially-hydrogenated oils.). It's easy. There are two ways, by hand and in a blender. If you do it by hand, put 1 egg yolk and 1 Tbsp in a glass bowl. Beat until the mixture is smooth. Slowly, five drops at a time, add 1/2 Cup oil, whilst beating quickly. Use whatever oil you like. Substitute vinegar if you want. Add seasonings, herbs, etc, at the end. Double the recipe and add in 1 egg white if you do it in a blender, and follow the same process. Do not use olive oil in a blender (you will NOT like what comes out). It lasts about a week.
For the quick and easy work soup: First, find yourself a 32-ounce electric hotpot. I got mine at a Walgreens for $10. This makes a meal-sized bowl of soup that should provide enough for lunch, pre-lunch snack and afternoon snack. Anywho, first cook up 4-8 oz of meat if you want meat in your soup. Sausage, meatballs and chicken are good choices. Put the meat, drained of grease, into your hotpot. Then fill the pot with nicely chopped vegetables compatible with soup. Cabbage, turnips, onions, carrots, mushrooms (which are also a good substitute for meat), parsnips (diced very fine), celery, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, fennel (trust me), garlic cloves (when cooked like this garlic is very mild), and potatoes are good choices. Vegetables that disintegrate in water like squash and sweet potatoes are bad choices (trust me). Now add in your favorite base, a good amount of salt, and pepper. Herbs, and spices are also quite good. "What is base?" you ask. Base is very similar to boullion except that it's wet, thick and gooey, and doesn't have very much salt. It's much better than boullion, flavor-wise, and not too difficult to find. Add enough for 24-oz of stock or so.
Now, if you want the soup to be thicker (which really isn't necessary, I think) you really have three choices. First, if you cooked up meat, you cook make a roux out of the leftover grease and bits of cooked meat. To do this dump out the excess grease until there's just enough to barely coat the bottom of the pan. Turn on the heat and add 2-3 Tbsp of flour to the grease. Whisk it around until it is fully coated and you've picked up the bits of meat left in the pan. When it's the color you want, dump it over the vegetables. If you do this, use less (or no) base.
A second choice for thickening is to add okra. If it's frozen, don't rinse it. If it's fresh, rinse it before chopping. Those slimy juices surrounding the seeds are a natural thickening agent. A third option is to precook some vegetables and puree them. All you need to do is cook up some veggies and toss them in a food processor. I like to use oven-baked squash (either acorn or butternut). Then pour the puree over the vegetables. If you do this, use less base. You could also get away with fewer vegetables. I don't really recommend this method, though, as it's hard to get right for this small amount of soup.
Now, cooking at work. Since you haven't added any water yet to the soup (though you may have added some with a puree or roux), it didn't splash around in the car on the way in. All you need to do is fill the hotpot to the fill line with water and plug it in. Technically, as soon
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Thank you. I quit pop a month ago, and took it out on you. So now I'm going to say something you'll never again hear on /. :
I'm sorry
Um, 386's were 32-bit. They were the first 32-bit Intel processors, actually. The 286 was the last 16-bit CPU Intel (well, general-purpose CPU; they still make 16-bit microcontrollers and the such). 386's went the way of the dodo quickly when 32-bit computing became the norm in the Windows world (it already was elsewhere) because the Windows world didn't go 32-bit until Windows 95 in 1995. This was NINE years after the 386 was released. Furthermore, Intel continued to produce 386's until LAST YEAR.
I agree that single-core processors are going to be out fairly soon, but to say that 386's went out of style when 32-bit computing became the norm is gross mischaracterization. From personal computing, 386's were long gone, and from the world of computing in general, 386's had an extremely long life.
Really, AC? While minor version upgrades of mysql are no doubt handled, major upgrades are probably a different story. This is because the database format likes to change between major versions. The process of upgrading requires full access to your database, which is something even root might not have, hence the reason Gentoo doesn't try to do the upgrade for you.
Most people have this crazy belief that Columbus was some revolutionary who thought that the earth was round and everyone else still thought the world was flat and were complete dumbasses. Those people are entirely mistaken. The Western world has been fully cognizant of the world being round since Plato figured it out 2000-some-odd years ago. Even during Columbus's time they were pretty sure how big the earth was and how far it was between the India and Europe by sea. The fact that they knew the distance between Europe and India was why everyone thought Columbus was a nutjob. At that time, no ship could carry enough rations to survive that distance. Columbus (not being able to correctly read maps (seriously)) thought that India was only half the distance from Europe as it really was. That's why everyone thought Columbus was a nutjob. In the end, Isabella only let him go because she thought that new route to India would be worth so much money that loosing a few ships was worth it. She didn't think he was right any more than he advisers did.
The only reason we have this impression that they thought thought the world was flat was due to a 18th American historian who couldn't read Latin. He mistranslated a few passages of some historical documents of the Court of Queen Isabella. He thought it spoke of criticism of Columbus's plan because the earth wasn't round. The criticism was really that the earth wasn't that small. (Something about how the object of the sentence was orbis (earth) and he thought is was some other word with orbis describing it's roundness.) Of course he published a book with the lie that this mistranslation brought, and everyone kept repeating it. It's kind of like how people still think there's debate on evolution in the scientific community because some writers still confuse the word theory with hypothesis. ((Peer-reviewed) Theories are accepted as testable fact (though still theoretically disprovable) whereas hypotheses are still being tested and debated. While theories may not be "proven," it is a misconception to think that there is still controversy about their status as fact.)
Concerning Vista: He acknowledged that Vista shipped in 2006 but gave himself credit because it was delayed TWICE during 2006. AND it wasn't released to retail until a few days ago (or is that a few days from now, well, who cares, no one's buying it anyway). Originally it was supposed to be released in like March and then, I think, August. Besides, according to Microsoft, the Official release is January 2007. Those CDs you saw were advance OEM copies.
Concerning WiMax and Sprint: Just because it's not Sprint's fault doesn't mean he was wrong in his prediction.
I'd defend his Sun thing, but from what I've seen Sun is doing just fine. Not spectacular, but not horrible either.
I'd give him 8/15 or 53.33%
"A single drink would put an average male over the legal limit."
.08 BAC. For me (a big fat ass), it takes about 5 drinks (I got a friend who is a cop). If you're ripped and skinny, I could see one drink putting you over the limit, but then you'd be feeling it. .08 BAC is definitely buzzed feeling.
.30 BAC you would barely be able to stand, and certainly couldn't talk. At .25 BAC you are quite drunk (slurred speech, sucking dude's dicks). At .35 BAC you should be passed out or close to it (although you can easily pass out at lower BACs if you don't take precautions like standing, caffeine, not starting drinking while tired, etc). .35 is generally considered the beginning of alcohol poisoning. At .45, you should be dead, or damn close to it.
.40 with twenty beers, that would mean only a .02 raise per beer. Come on now. One beer is not going to put you at .08.
I call bullshit. It would take 2-3 drinks (that is, 12 oz beer, one glass wine, or 1.5 oz 80 proof liquor), to put the average American male (5'10" 175 lbs) over the usual limit of
Think about it this way. BAC raises nearly linearly (it goes up slightly faster at the beginning of a drinking session), that is by about the same amount per drink. At
Now, how many drinks can you put away? I'd bet at least twenty. And at twenty drinks, how drunk are you? Even if you would be at a
Of course, if a drink to you involves 3 shots of whisky and a splash of 7-Up for bubbles, then you have more problems with alcohol than I can solve by correcting you in a slashdot comment.
Do you exercise? Trust me, it's more important than you think. Since you're probably nerdy (reading Slashdot and all), try DDR. It's more fun than running. I lost 30 lbs on DDR, and now am going to attempt to lose another 70 with jogging. And, of course, diet.
Use VLC. Come on now.
Actually, Gates has generally been against software patents. Microsoft doesn't really benefit from the patents they hold since they've (almost) never bothered to enforce the few patents they have, and it's hard to get patents on shit when you're just dressing up copies of your competitor's work.
But, Microsoft does have a lot to lose by others having software patents. One person with a patent that Microsoft has infringed and an ambulance-chaser could be bad news for a multi-billion dollar company.
Two of those are quite unnecessary. First, memtest86, because it's included on the Knoppix CD (type memtest at the boot prompt). Second, SystemRescueCD, because Knoppix has a full recovery suite including the most recent partition editors and ntfsprogs, which, combined, can nearly replace PartitionMagic.
The rest of it I can see, except for the NT Password thing. BartPE can, I believe, do all that rescue and more, and it actually works on XP SP2.
You probably also think he's a Republican who likes Bill O'Reilly (however his name is spelled).
Ordinarily, I don't respond to karma-whores (I earned my excellent karma the old-fashioned way.), but this time I will. Though, it is actually a response to TFA. Newspapers and magazines make enough from advertising to be completely free to the consumer. In fact, many magazines have tried going completely free. What they found was that if you give magazines and newspapers away, people think that they must suck because they're free and they won't read them. If you charge for them (it doesn't matter how much, so long as money comes out of the wallet), people think the publication must not suck because they are paying for it and will gladly read it. Why do think magazine subscriptions practically give themselves away? In fact, no magazine or newspaper will ever attempt to collect on a bill if you write back that you don't want to pay. It's just not worth it, since they made their money long before you read their articles.
That's like saying, "He didn't sponsor Let's-KILL-all-blacks legislation; he just sponsored non-lynching Jim Crow laws." You truly do fail it, homophobe.
Yes, it's just that A) People make Capitalization MistakEs ALl the tIme. B) Your numbers match this mistake. C) It's not possible to have such high numbers. I mean shit, the standard PCI bus can only handle 33MB/s, across all devices assuming an unrealistic 0% overhead. Yes, you can get much better transfer rates over PCI-e, and perhaps you have PCI-e devices but that doesn't mean you're getting 80MB/s speeds. I can give you screenshot after screenshot of hard data showing you that SATA devices tend to get around 8-20MB/s (depends on what bus they run on; I get around 20 on systems with PCI-e SATA controllers) and that PATA devices get around 4-5MB/s (new ones only; holy god are older drives slow; I just moved a 6yo 20GB HD to a different 20GB HD at 300kB/s; of course, the HD was going bad but still.). Think about it this way: If you really could read data at 80MB/s then you could do crazy things like move an 80GB (full) partition from hard drive to hard drive in 15 minutes; which generally takes more like 2.5hr (again, real world experience). Try it sometime.
You're thinking megabits per second (Mbps) rather than megabytes per second (MBps). Note the capitalization is the abbreviations. 80Mbps is 10MBps (well, sort of. Usually Mbps refers to the entire pipe, headers, metadata and all, whereas MBps refers to overall throughput, which is just the data. This is moot, however, when not talking about network transfers.). That's why I'm a fan of Mbit/s and MByte/s instead of Mbps and MBps.
I don't know about your, but I daydream about RAID-4. That's the really crazy one. It's great if you have, say, 4 slow and old yet sizable IDE drives, and one of about the same size fast, new, say, SATA drive. You get the same level of redundancy as RAID-5, with the same space loss, but the performance increase is much more sizable. While RAID-5 will give you a 20%-100% increase in speed over just the straight drives, a RAID-4 with sufficient numbers of data drives, will give you 20%-100% speed increase over the parity drive for the whole array, which for the case IDE data drives and a SATA parity drive, is very significant. A 5 disk RAID-5 of SATA disks which normally have a throughput of 8MB/s will give a you a nice read speed of 12MB/s. A 5 disk RAID-4 composed of 4 IDE drives which can do 4.5MB/s and a SATA parity disk will give you a nice read speed of 10MB/s. I know this from real-world testing. Now the RAID-4 might not be as fast as the RAID-5, but if you already have the IDE disks, it makes a lot of sense.
Now, where does this bring me in thought? Why not build a RAID-4 with several cheap SATA drives for data and a nice high-end SCSI drive for parity. That would give you all the benefits of RAID-5 with all the speed increase of SCSI for only a little bit more cost than a purely (and very cheap) SATA solution.
He comes from Holland, MI, a small, mainly Dutch community in West Michigan which is so ridiculously conservative, it makes Utah look liberal. Most of the schools in that area don't have Halloween parties because of the Christian right's pervasive presence. It's so bad that people have been shunned (yes, actual shunning) for mowing their lawns on Sunday. Honestly, Taco probably forgot that Halloween even happens anymore.
Oops, I missed a 'u' (and added an "a day"). My bad. You knew what I meant. At least my teeth are good looking.
Nerds cleverly pull off distributed-denial-of-service attack against lame bulletin board with a fake chatlog of a kid trying to commit fraud who becomes a (very stupid) victim of the same fraud.
This is probably the best troll and DDOS ever.
Why do non-Americans call a vacation a holiday? In my book a holiday is a celebration (or day a day of morning), whereas a vacation involves time off work.
Yeah, but my F-150 has 300 HP and is 'rated' for 10000 lbs too. But I didn't pay $100,000 for it.
True, but a lot of the best writers wrote whole series with the same characters. Those are widely considered original and lauded heavily, even by the most stuck up of literary geeks. Think Star Wars, Star Trek and Asimov. And also realize that Shakespear really was just rewriting older works from Greece and Rome in an updated, more modern (for the time) style.
If all Mario games looked about the same and just had slightly different graphics and different levels with exactly the same style of gameplay, then I would agree that Mario is unoriginal. But that's not the case. Mario 3 was significantly different from Mario 1. Super Mario World for SNES was completely different from Mario 3. The only thing each of the Mario games share is the (sparse) backstory and general look of the characters.
And, what do you think about Megaman. Personally, I think the Megaman series (all five of them) are about the best around. But are they original? I don't really think so. The gameplay is pretty much unchanged from the first one. The story lines are incremental and nearly the same from game to game. Megaman is definitely unoriginal. Does it really matter? I don't think it does.
Yeah, but what if they seeded them with 64k or 48k MP3s. While those do suck some ass, they would have the benefit of being legal, and really, really fast to download, even for dial up. One of these days, some ad execs are going to take their heads out of their asses and sell this form of advertising to the record execs. I'll be laughing my ass off when it happens.
Mario has been whored out into every possible genre that you can think of.
Exactly. Mario has been used in completely different ways with different storylines throught out his life (you know what I mean by his life). Mario is really a brand. Everytime he appears, it's in a new game with a different story and new style of gameplay. EA Sports games on the other hand are the same game with better graphics and updated rosters. Other than that the differences are incremental and unoriginal.
You can't say that Mario games are unoriginal just because they used the same set of characters over again. That'd be like saying Shakespear was unoriginal for writing with the Latin alphabet.
Ahh, work food. The bane of my existence. Work food is actually pretty easy to do whilst avoiding crap like HFCS and trans-fats. Try making things like soup from scratch. That's very quick and easy and quite cheap. If you buy one of those electric hotpots then you can do the actual adding water and cooking part at work, thus avoiding spillage. Of course, this limits the types of soup to the basics. Another good, simple, wookfood is sandwiches. While I don't seem to have any problems finding quality bread (get the "artisan" breads from your supermarket. They're usually made without preservatives or sugar. Especially the rye and pumpernickel. Labels, you know.), a breadmachine makes breadmaking ridiculously easy (and cheap) without cleanup or crap.
You may need to make your own mayo, to avoid trans-fats (to know if something has bad fat, look for hydrogenated and partially-hydrogenated oils.). It's easy. There are two ways, by hand and in a blender. If you do it by hand, put 1 egg yolk and 1 Tbsp in a glass bowl. Beat until the mixture is smooth. Slowly, five drops at a time, add 1/2 Cup oil, whilst beating quickly. Use whatever oil you like. Substitute vinegar if you want. Add seasonings, herbs, etc, at the end. Double the recipe and add in 1 egg white if you do it in a blender, and follow the same process. Do not use olive oil in a blender (you will NOT like what comes out). It lasts about a week.
For the quick and easy work soup: First, find yourself a 32-ounce electric hotpot. I got mine at a Walgreens for $10. This makes a meal-sized bowl of soup that should provide enough for lunch, pre-lunch snack and afternoon snack. Anywho, first cook up 4-8 oz of meat if you want meat in your soup. Sausage, meatballs and chicken are good choices. Put the meat, drained of grease, into your hotpot. Then fill the pot with nicely chopped vegetables compatible with soup. Cabbage, turnips, onions, carrots, mushrooms (which are also a good substitute for meat), parsnips (diced very fine), celery, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, fennel (trust me), garlic cloves (when cooked like this garlic is very mild), and potatoes are good choices. Vegetables that disintegrate in water like squash and sweet potatoes are bad choices (trust me). Now add in your favorite base, a good amount of salt, and pepper. Herbs, and spices are also quite good. "What is base?" you ask. Base is very similar to boullion except that it's wet, thick and gooey, and doesn't have very much salt. It's much better than boullion, flavor-wise, and not too difficult to find. Add enough for 24-oz of stock or so.
Now, if you want the soup to be thicker (which really isn't necessary, I think) you really have three choices. First, if you cooked up meat, you cook make a roux out of the leftover grease and bits of cooked meat. To do this dump out the excess grease until there's just enough to barely coat the bottom of the pan. Turn on the heat and add 2-3 Tbsp of flour to the grease. Whisk it around until it is fully coated and you've picked up the bits of meat left in the pan. When it's the color you want, dump it over the vegetables. If you do this, use less (or no) base.
A second choice for thickening is to add okra. If it's frozen, don't rinse it. If it's fresh, rinse it before chopping. Those slimy juices surrounding the seeds are a natural thickening agent. A third option is to precook some vegetables and puree them. All you need to do is cook up some veggies and toss them in a food processor. I like to use oven-baked squash (either acorn or butternut). Then pour the puree over the vegetables. If you do this, use less base. You could also get away with fewer vegetables. I don't really recommend this method, though, as it's hard to get right for this small amount of soup.
Now, cooking at work. Since you haven't added any water yet to the soup (though you may have added some with a puree or roux), it didn't splash around in the car on the way in. All you need to do is fill the hotpot to the fill line with water and plug it in. Technically, as soon