I can't think I'm the only one getting tired of the subscription model for everything. I remember thinking at one point that I'm going to need to start figuring out what I can afford to have and not, simply because everything seems to be moving in that direction.
Cable, phone, utilities all seems standard to us at this point, but now we have music subscriptions (stop paying, lose your music), radio subscriptions (love that satellite radio), game subscriptions (WoW addicts unite), and now more and more software subscriptions (I'm sorry, licensing).
I can perhaps forgive it for something like antivirus software where you are constantly downloading updates (glad my Mac doesn't need that yet), but Office? When do they slip Windows into that model? Would you like to boot today? Your subscription has expired, please enter a valid credit card.
I always find the idea of the time/distance involved to be amazing, and it really kinds of gives you a good perspective on how big things are (small you are). Like a friend who pointed out that the half moon you could see in the sky was because of the shadow _of the earth_. That's just crazy talk, and even more interesting as it sinks in.
This type of thing though is interesting in how it may have already reignited. Maybe just this morning, maybe 20000 years ago. We have no idea, it's not as easy as just looking out a telescope to know. Perhaps massive waves of radiation or solar flares or cosmic rays have been headed to the earth for thousands of years and we could all die tonight, or maybe it'll happen tomorrow and our great^10 grandchildren will be the ones to see it happen. I'm rambling, sorry about that. Too much afternoon coffee.
It's simply his opinion, so there's not much to say about it. Certainly someone can say Hawking did such and such, to provide evidence to the contrary, but really I think it comes down to looking into the past and seeing icons and titans that we don't have today. Perhaps it's those rosy colored glasses we wear when reminiscing, or maybe things really were grander back then. In either case, he was looking for something nice to say about a man he admired, and there's not much else to read into it.
It was last year, but I was able to choose which I wanted in the store (they had both in stock), and they had both on display so you could see the difference. I still recall the salesperson seemed startled when I could tell him immediately which I wanted (matte). I don't know if it was because a) I had an opinion instead of being clueless or b) I picked matte instead of glossy.
Regardless I think matte looks good and has no glare, which I think would drive me nuts. Anyways, as people have stated it sort of comes down to personal preference. (I also have a T61 as mentioned up top, and it's a nice matte display as well.)
I didn't read the article (this is/. after all), but if it's made of graphite spread really thin (one atom thick), isn't it still just graphite? Just really thin? It sounds more like they discovered special properties in application of the material, as opposed to what it does when sitting in my pencil.
W2K didn't do that for me. I liked XP when it came out and still don't mind it, but Vista pushed me to OS X. And a lot of other people are certainly agreeing with your/my choice now that distros like Ubuntu make it almost a non-pain point to install Linux and Apple is growing in mind share.
The only reason I didn't jump to Linux full time were still some of those standard user problems people gripe about and get bantered around on here.
So how soon after this will we see a lawsuit from an adult that was detected as a child, and now is seeking damages for mental anguish or low self esteem or whatever.
Stupid software patents leading to stupid lawsuits. Gotta love our patent and legal system.
I think Mr. Cruise was ranting about post partum depression specifically. As I understand it, he actually had some details right (no one is certain why mothers get it), but you can't go busting on a new mom on national TV and come out as anything but an ass. And really, he was one.
This is true, but I didn't notice any reference to anyone claiming this was a perpetual motion machine. It's simply powered by gravity, or I suppose potential energy, which is supplied by you lifting up the weights.
I understand what you are saying, but I think they were going for more of a mix of things. Not just a show about mysterious time travel, but also a drama with interesting characters. I know the Quantum Leap comparison gets made a lot, but it was sort of a mix of Quantum Leap (time travel, each episode can usually stand on it's own, drama) but also Lost or X-Files (mysterious reasons why they jump, slowly revealing why/what/how). In QL, right from the beginning you knew why he was hopping around time (oops, computer go boom), but that didn't make the episodes less compelling.
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. I enjoyed Journeyman, and was disappointed that they decided to not even give it a full season, although they were blaming that on the writer's strike. There were some hopeful glimmers that if the writer's strike lasted through the spring pilot season, in the fall they'd have a good chance of getting at least part of a season again. Instead, they felt that having Deal or No Deal on extra nights somehow was a better choice. Thanks NBC for once again dropping a good show that has a chance to grow into something amazing, and instead substituting in more reality trash.
It seems to me that you'd have to have software installed or part of any system you wanted to access that USB/removable media on. Otherwise the system won't recognize that it's encrypted and see gibberish, or won't know how to decrypt it at best. I know that some USB drives (at least the thumb drives) come with small applications for just that purpose, but you have to install it on each system you want to run it, and I don't know how secure it is as I've never used it myself.
Yes, it's terrible to think that someone may consider ethical problems in a business situation. That perhaps he wants to do the right thing, needs some clarification, and doesn't want to get the company or himself in trouble.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this. Some people seem to think that all we (nerds, geeks, whatever you call yourself) can possibly be interested in is science news. This is news for nerds, not science news for nerds, not space news for nerds, but all news. Certainly science and related fields are what we primarily expect to see, but I get tired of the !news tags accompanying all sorts of stories just because someone wasn't interested in it. I agree that some are very fluff-a-licious or are more advertising than news, but just like most news outlets have fluff pieces to break up the monotony, I don't mind a change of pace.
According to a news report I saw this morning, the toys originally used a glue that was then replaced by the Chinese manufacturing company at some point with the current GHB creating chemical.
This is exactly what happened to me. I had to send my first back in because of the Red Ring of Death, and now the DVD drive died about a month ago. I have yet to call them about it, but this is the type of problem that will keep them from their hope of being like the PS2. The only thing that will keep me from replacing it with a PS3 is the number of games I already own for the 360. Otherwise I'd be moving on to other consoles.
While I also think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt, my wife worked in retail as a store manager for a well known mall store. They had a policy in place that they're not allowed to stop anyone who they see shoplifting. They can see stand there and watch someone put it into a bag or a pocket, and corporate flat-out refuses to allow store employees to do anything because it can potentially create negative feelings or negative publicity or some such shit. They are told straight-out that corporate won't support them in any way should they attempt to call security or the police, and most likely will have negative job repercussion. And of course, then somehow they are responsible then for those missing items come inventory or what have you.
So I can completely believe that corporate policies dictate bizarre policies, and that they aren't going to receive 20 copies of every possible new game that comes out. If you haven't seen a mall store's storage area, then you clearly can't understand the very limited space they generally have to deal with.
I like the mini-game, and have pretty much used it every time to get the discounts. I think what you mean to say is that the pipe theme has no relation to hacking, not that it served no purpose in the game (which it did, discounts, more items, etc as you mentioned). That may be true, but they need a simple to grasp, quick to understand mini-game that in some distant way resembles hacking around internal components in some random device (water in the mini-game instead of electricity or data streams or whatever).
Everyone would want something different there, so like the article says, they knew that not everyone would like it and introduced several ways around not having to play it.
AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHH..... The end is near! Nuclear winter! Ozone depletion! Greenhouse effect! BUZZ WORD! BUZZ WORD! That is all.
On a side note I find it interesting that people keep track of this sort of thing. Sunspots and such. And I thought some of the databases _I_ parse through all day were boring.
I find it interesting (and funny?) that all these years I've had a PC (built myself, not from Dell or such) and never once purchased a copy of Windows or felt bad about it. Now that I've had a Macbook Pro for 5 months, and have been so happy with it, I'm eagerly awaiting Leopard so that I can actually buy it.
I'm trying to avoid the whole fanboy thing, but it's hard to not like it. I mean, the pricing of the hardware is certainly high, but once you dive it it's quite nice.
This will come out harshly but, 'So what?'. I bought some as well. This is how competition and markets should work. Come out with something 'new' that people want and you can charge more for it. Then later on you can bring the price down as competition demands. This is good for us in the future when we go to buy more DRM-less music. All prices come down eventually, so there's no reason to complain, or act surprised about it.
It's like the whole iPhone thing. People went out and bought it at a known, advertised, given price. They sell so many that they can drop the price (or whatever their reasoning), and suddenly people freak out as it they've been wronged for buying one at the higher price. It's not like it happened in that first weekend, or that they attempted some bait-and-switch. It's not even a monopoly where you needed a phone/music/product and HAD to buy that one, you had many choices and chose that one.
I submitted this to our own pastor and some of the others involved with youth and fellowship in our church. And I suppose being a gamer myself it just makes sense to me. The fellowship committee in our church is there to create activities that are not necessarily 'church' related, but help bring us together as a community, to get to know each other, and just to have fun. The youth groups do the same things. I don't see why it seems like such an alien concept that one or the other should use video games for that purpose. I mean, come on I'm a geek and 31 (and still thinking he's in college at times). Do I look like bingo or knitting are activities that I'm going to sign up for?
And I agree with the summary that it only seems strange to those who don't know about gaming, and while I can understand their initial confusion, I'd hope that after an explanation and (at most) a demonstration, that they'd see that. For the most part, I've run into very little concern about these type of things from anyone (and yes I'm going to stereotype) who was not under 65 or so in our church. But I think it's our part as gamers/geeks/fill-in-your-term-here to explain away the FUD that some people seem to spread.
That may be true in some respects, but all of my clients have Windows servers to some extent, and most have only Windows servers. To suggest that people would have to pay extra to set this up is a little silly. IIS is a component of Windows, so you get that for 'free' when you purchase whichever flavor of Windows server you choose. And yes, you are paying for the cost of IIS development somewhere in that Windows price, but when someone has the option of just turning on IIS on an underutilized box, or finding/buying a box to install linux and Apache on, the idea of price is a non-issue.
They already have IIS, and it takes 5 minutes to set it up. The cost of time alone on setting up a new box to run something else almost immediately negates the benefit in most IT manager's eyes when all they are seeing is consulting time to setup, manage, and maintain a linux box they know almost nothing about.
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I can't think I'm the only one getting tired of the subscription model for everything. I remember thinking at one point that I'm going to need to start figuring out what I can afford to have and not, simply because everything seems to be moving in that direction.
Cable, phone, utilities all seems standard to us at this point, but now we have music subscriptions (stop paying, lose your music), radio subscriptions (love that satellite radio), game subscriptions (WoW addicts unite), and now more and more software subscriptions (I'm sorry, licensing).
I can perhaps forgive it for something like antivirus software where you are constantly downloading updates (glad my Mac doesn't need that yet), but Office? When do they slip Windows into that model? Would you like to boot today? Your subscription has expired, please enter a valid credit card.
I always find the idea of the time/distance involved to be amazing, and it really kinds of gives you a good perspective on how big things are (small you are). Like a friend who pointed out that the half moon you could see in the sky was because of the shadow _of the earth_. That's just crazy talk, and even more interesting as it sinks in.
This type of thing though is interesting in how it may have already reignited. Maybe just this morning, maybe 20000 years ago. We have no idea, it's not as easy as just looking out a telescope to know. Perhaps massive waves of radiation or solar flares or cosmic rays have been headed to the earth for thousands of years and we could all die tonight, or maybe it'll happen tomorrow and our great^10 grandchildren will be the ones to see it happen. I'm rambling, sorry about that. Too much afternoon coffee.
It's simply his opinion, so there's not much to say about it. Certainly someone can say Hawking did such and such, to provide evidence to the contrary, but really I think it comes down to looking into the past and seeing icons and titans that we don't have today. Perhaps it's those rosy colored glasses we wear when reminiscing, or maybe things really were grander back then. In either case, he was looking for something nice to say about a man he admired, and there's not much else to read into it.
It was last year, but I was able to choose which I wanted in the store (they had both in stock), and they had both on display so you could see the difference. I still recall the salesperson seemed startled when I could tell him immediately which I wanted (matte). I don't know if it was because a) I had an opinion instead of being clueless or b) I picked matte instead of glossy.
Regardless I think matte looks good and has no glare, which I think would drive me nuts. Anyways, as people have stated it sort of comes down to personal preference. (I also have a T61 as mentioned up top, and it's a nice matte display as well.)
I didn't read the article (this is /. after all), but if it's made of graphite spread really thin (one atom thick), isn't it still just graphite? Just really thin? It sounds more like they discovered special properties in application of the material, as opposed to what it does when sitting in my pencil.
W2K didn't do that for me. I liked XP when it came out and still don't mind it, but Vista pushed me to OS X. And a lot of other people are certainly agreeing with your/my choice now that distros like Ubuntu make it almost a non-pain point to install Linux and Apple is growing in mind share.
The only reason I didn't jump to Linux full time were still some of those standard user problems people gripe about and get bantered around on here.
So how soon after this will we see a lawsuit from an adult that was detected as a child, and now is seeking damages for mental anguish or low self esteem or whatever.
Stupid software patents leading to stupid lawsuits. Gotta love our patent and legal system.
I think Mr. Cruise was ranting about post partum depression specifically. As I understand it, he actually had some details right (no one is certain why mothers get it), but you can't go busting on a new mom on national TV and come out as anything but an ass. And really, he was one.
This is true, but I didn't notice any reference to anyone claiming this was a perpetual motion machine. It's simply powered by gravity, or I suppose potential energy, which is supplied by you lifting up the weights.
I understand what you are saying, but I think they were going for more of a mix of things. Not just a show about mysterious time travel, but also a drama with interesting characters. I know the Quantum Leap comparison gets made a lot, but it was sort of a mix of Quantum Leap (time travel, each episode can usually stand on it's own, drama) but also Lost or X-Files (mysterious reasons why they jump, slowly revealing why/what/how). In QL, right from the beginning you knew why he was hopping around time (oops, computer go boom), but that didn't make the episodes less compelling.
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. I enjoyed Journeyman, and was disappointed that they decided to not even give it a full season, although they were blaming that on the writer's strike. There were some hopeful glimmers that if the writer's strike lasted through the spring pilot season, in the fall they'd have a good chance of getting at least part of a season again. Instead, they felt that having Deal or No Deal on extra nights somehow was a better choice. Thanks NBC for once again dropping a good show that has a chance to grow into something amazing, and instead substituting in more reality trash.
It seems to me that you'd have to have software installed or part of any system you wanted to access that USB/removable media on. Otherwise the system won't recognize that it's encrypted and see gibberish, or won't know how to decrypt it at best. I know that some USB drives (at least the thumb drives) come with small applications for just that purpose, but you have to install it on each system you want to run it, and I don't know how secure it is as I've never used it myself.
For anyone else that also has to look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
Yes, it's terrible to think that someone may consider ethical problems in a business situation. That perhaps he wants to do the right thing, needs some clarification, and doesn't want to get the company or himself in trouble.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this. Some people seem to think that all we (nerds, geeks, whatever you call yourself) can possibly be interested in is science news. This is news for nerds, not science news for nerds, not space news for nerds, but all news. Certainly science and related fields are what we primarily expect to see, but I get tired of the !news tags accompanying all sorts of stories just because someone wasn't interested in it. I agree that some are very fluff-a-licious or are more advertising than news, but just like most news outlets have fluff pieces to break up the monotony, I don't mind a change of pace.
According to a news report I saw this morning, the toys originally used a glue that was then replaced by the Chinese manufacturing company at some point with the current GHB creating chemical.
This is exactly what happened to me. I had to send my first back in because of the Red Ring of Death, and now the DVD drive died about a month ago. I have yet to call them about it, but this is the type of problem that will keep them from their hope of being like the PS2. The only thing that will keep me from replacing it with a PS3 is the number of games I already own for the 360. Otherwise I'd be moving on to other consoles.
While I also think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt, my wife worked in retail as a store manager for a well known mall store. They had a policy in place that they're not allowed to stop anyone who they see shoplifting. They can see stand there and watch someone put it into a bag or a pocket, and corporate flat-out refuses to allow store employees to do anything because it can potentially create negative feelings or negative publicity or some such shit. They are told straight-out that corporate won't support them in any way should they attempt to call security or the police, and most likely will have negative job repercussion. And of course, then somehow they are responsible then for those missing items come inventory or what have you.
So I can completely believe that corporate policies dictate bizarre policies, and that they aren't going to receive 20 copies of every possible new game that comes out. If you haven't seen a mall store's storage area, then you clearly can't understand the very limited space they generally have to deal with.
I like the mini-game, and have pretty much used it every time to get the discounts. I think what you mean to say is that the pipe theme has no relation to hacking, not that it served no purpose in the game (which it did, discounts, more items, etc as you mentioned). That may be true, but they need a simple to grasp, quick to understand mini-game that in some distant way resembles hacking around internal components in some random device (water in the mini-game instead of electricity or data streams or whatever).
Everyone would want something different there, so like the article says, they knew that not everyone would like it and introduced several ways around not having to play it.
AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHH..... The end is near! Nuclear winter! Ozone depletion! Greenhouse effect! BUZZ WORD! BUZZ WORD! That is all. On a side note I find it interesting that people keep track of this sort of thing. Sunspots and such. And I thought some of the databases _I_ parse through all day were boring.
I find it interesting (and funny?) that all these years I've had a PC (built myself, not from Dell or such) and never once purchased a copy of Windows or felt bad about it. Now that I've had a Macbook Pro for 5 months, and have been so happy with it, I'm eagerly awaiting Leopard so that I can actually buy it.
I'm trying to avoid the whole fanboy thing, but it's hard to not like it. I mean, the pricing of the hardware is certainly high, but once you dive it it's quite nice.
This will come out harshly but, 'So what?'. I bought some as well. This is how competition and markets should work. Come out with something 'new' that people want and you can charge more for it. Then later on you can bring the price down as competition demands. This is good for us in the future when we go to buy more DRM-less music. All prices come down eventually, so there's no reason to complain, or act surprised about it.
It's like the whole iPhone thing. People went out and bought it at a known, advertised, given price. They sell so many that they can drop the price (or whatever their reasoning), and suddenly people freak out as it they've been wronged for buying one at the higher price. It's not like it happened in that first weekend, or that they attempted some bait-and-switch. It's not even a monopoly where you needed a phone/music/product and HAD to buy that one, you had many choices and chose that one.
I submitted this to our own pastor and some of the others involved with youth and fellowship in our church. And I suppose being a gamer myself it just makes sense to me. The fellowship committee in our church is there to create activities that are not necessarily 'church' related, but help bring us together as a community, to get to know each other, and just to have fun. The youth groups do the same things. I don't see why it seems like such an alien concept that one or the other should use video games for that purpose. I mean, come on I'm a geek and 31 (and still thinking he's in college at times). Do I look like bingo or knitting are activities that I'm going to sign up for?
And I agree with the summary that it only seems strange to those who don't know about gaming, and while I can understand their initial confusion, I'd hope that after an explanation and (at most) a demonstration, that they'd see that. For the most part, I've run into very little concern about these type of things from anyone (and yes I'm going to stereotype) who was not under 65 or so in our church. But I think it's our part as gamers/geeks/fill-in-your-term-here to explain away the FUD that some people seem to spread.
That may be true in some respects, but all of my clients have Windows servers to some extent, and most have only Windows servers. To suggest that people would have to pay extra to set this up is a little silly. IIS is a component of Windows, so you get that for 'free' when you purchase whichever flavor of Windows server you choose. And yes, you are paying for the cost of IIS development somewhere in that Windows price, but when someone has the option of just turning on IIS on an underutilized box, or finding/buying a box to install linux and Apache on, the idea of price is a non-issue.
They already have IIS, and it takes 5 minutes to set it up. The cost of time alone on setting up a new box to run something else almost immediately negates the benefit in most IT manager's eyes when all they are seeing is consulting time to setup, manage, and maintain a linux box they know almost nothing about.