I was at Wal-Mart getting an oil change (for the record never go there for that) in 1999 while in the waiting area a conversation was struck up between myself and another person waiting on a vehicle. It came out that I worked for an ISP and had done all kinds of other computer/networking work. The person wanted to know my thoughts on Y2K.
I answered "I think there's going to be a few hiccups and glitches. I don't think they're going to be all that big, we've done a pretty good job of preparing, and many things may fail over to a wrong date, but will continue to work anyways. All in all whatever problems come of it a majority will be fixed in the first couple of days and a few may take longer, but I don't think there will be much impact."
The person became visibly annoyed at my answer. We stopped talking very quickly after that. I had many other conversations with people along these lines, a couple of them even sited Art Bell and how his show was talking about the doom and gloom to come. I listened to Art Bell. He must have made a fortune selling crank radios, flash lights, and other survival gear in preparations for Y2K, not to mention his business model relies on crazies and they were coming out of the woodwork for this.
I was working the night shift during the roll over. I wasn't worried about our equipment failing. I went to work armed, I was worried about crazies who might decide our company was going to be the cause of the downfall of civilization.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario. It gave me insight into the human condition, I'll say that for sure.
I agree with you on most things, but I'm going to cut the Gamecube some slack. I love my Gamecube, but mostly because I actually like platformers and I think the control was absolutely perfect for RPGs. The ported from Dreamcast Skies of Arcadia Legends completely rocked, I actually enjoyed Luigi's Mansion, in my opinion Mario Kart Double Dash is the best version of Mario Kart, and I say that even with the incredibly awesome SNES version in mind. When you have kids you learn to look at Mario Party through a whole different set of eyes. Granted - the Gamecube was not for hardcore gamers who want FPS type games or the absolute best graphics, it was the predecessor to the Wii - more for casual gaming and the younger crowd, or in my case the platformer still likes Mario and Zelda crowd. Personally, I'm not too excited about the Wii, oh, I'll probably get one eventually, but the Gamecube is to me exactly what the Wii is to others, a great casual gaming machine, only the Gamecube isn't based around a gimmick controller. As a matter of fact it introduced the Wavebird Wireless, the first wireless game control on any console that didn't suck.
On the XBox360 controller, I think you meant the original XBox.
PSP actually does have region locking but they don't use it on anything but movies and it's easily defeated - at least on 1000's and 2000's.
My guess based on most surveys I've participated in, each person gets one vote, so the same machine breaking a dozen times or a dozen machines breaking once but all owned by the same person would count as 1 vote. The answer is 1 vote for broken. I didn't see the actual survey in question, I'm just answering based on what I've seen.
The Slashdotters will prove to you that we can come up with WAY more than 87 - you just watch. So many of them neck and neck it's hard to narrow it down.
The 360 for its inexcusable failure rate, then in the wake of Microsofts competitors constantly revising their models and offering updates Microsoft declares they will not create a version two or revise their hardware.
Then - while XBox 360's were new and failing in droves, Microsoft not only decides the old model will no longer be supported with new products they recall as much existing stock of the old model as they can and do their best to make it got away. Sort of like they wanted to do with XP when Vista came out.
Something all the game consoles need: Older laptop style optical drives that can be changed by release a lever. Can anyone say failure rate?
Right, but they're working on obtaining the same level of freedom as North Korea in the eyes of the world. As far as I'm concerned they're working on that goal pretty hard.
You can't censor in secret anymore. Either you can pull a China/North Korea/Cuba/Most of the Middle East and just outright limit, filter and forbid in the open and go full tilt enforcement while not hiding the fact you're being a douche about it, or you can go hands off and only enforce your countries top level domain. Few people in the US use a.us top level domain, though the popularity is increasing..com is for the world and can be hosted anywhere nearly transparently. It's time Australia figures that out.
I have heard a minimum amount about this, mostly because I was excited when the work on a Qt version of Firefox was started. Unfortunately another route was taken.
I had Lenny installed before it became stable. All was good. When Lenny became stable, I kept it. They decided to do a "patch" on the firewire drivers. My Firewire quit working.
My sound worked perfectly on Lenny and for that matter Etch when I first installed it. There was yet another update that broke my sound. If I jacked with that for an hour or two I could get it to work, in a few programs, but then it would break again after a reboot or two. (I actually shut my laptop down when I'm not using it)
On another machine the "going stable rush" caused a package cram that broke testing so bad I couldn't fix my system in any easily seen manner, so, considering the way I kept/home as a completely separate drive I decided to just reinstall stable from the standard web install disk. THEY HAD BROKE STABLE SO BAD I COULDN'T INSTALL IT.
I personally thing Debian is the absolute best Linux distro out there. I used to use Testing as my normal distro (whichever testing that happened to be at the time) but I got tired of battling broken packages and things getting merged in that weren't quite ready. I understood that's what testing was for so I decided to just stick with stable. Stable did it also - using my firewire and sound as an example. I'm rather good at troubleshooting. If I can't figure something out, I'll shotgun it, do a complete package removal, even config files, then I'll go into my ~ and delete local configs. If it's bad enough I'll do complete remove even on dependent packages even if it means X is no longer on my system by the time I'm done. This is how I got my sound to work half assed again.
Every time I hit "mark all upgrades" it's a game of Russian roulette. I don't want to just not mark all upgrades occasionally, security reasons, holes get fixed and I really would like a more up to date browser or something on occasion. My current laptop has pretty standard Centrino hardware, it's a Toshiba Tecra A5. I have Kubuntu on it right now and it's working great. I seriously don't like Ubuntu, it's a good OS, I recommend it to beginners, but to me it feels like I'm back to using training wheels. I can fix almost any problem I run into and I can look online for known fixes if I can't figure it out for myself, but developer name calling and squabbles show up in the end product all to often of Debian. Most of the downstream distros use the working packages and mix versions that eliminate most of the internal Debian squabbles, which unfortunately once a borked package goes out on Debian it tends to stay broke for quite a while. (use ZSNES for an example)
As for the Apt reference, I was talking about concept, not code. I knew the code wouldn't work.
Google really needs to rip off Apt and Synaptics and make a version for their phones. All the way. Not only do they need to make multiple version specific repositories (and tested, don't let Debian and its ability to break stable regularly set to much of an example). The ability of users to add custom repositories for our apps that Google wont stamp with approval would be nice as well. We really need the carriers and their inability to do anything but lump surcharges on top of crap out of the way.
I reread that. Damn, I can be a little incoherency at 0034 local, but I proved my point.
I would like to personally thank the moderator for selecting troll, I think I earned it. Also thank you for not using one of the cop out mods.
FYI - I posted the original from an at-work Windows machine (I can't escape it) I'm typing this from my at-home Mac. My Linux laptop is in my backpack, thank you very much. Despite being slightly off on my wording at that time of night, I really did mean what I say about Apple trying to move in on Microsofts former evil empire turf. Attempting to suppress competition like they've done with OGG and GNU/Linux support is just the first step down that road.
ANY statement that questions Apple in any way shape or form, be it legitimate questioning of policies, legitimate objective criticism or or outright flaming will get modded troll, off-topic, flamebait, or especially my favorite over rated just for questioning the mystical empire. I know, I've done my fair share of criticizing Apple for legitimate reasons, and I actually like Apple for the most part. Same goes for Linux, and BSD. There is a small population of Microsoft fan-boys around here that will do the same, but they're generally overpowered by the anti-Microsoft status quo. It's one of the main reasons - if you really look into the firehose - so few of the articles that question Apple ever make the main board. Apple fan boys are worse than Linux ones.
Disclosure - I ditched Microsoft a short time after Win 2000 came out. I was a Linux guy exclusively up until about two years ago when I added OS X to my computer environment. I'm thinking of ditching Apple now, not because I think any of there stuff is bad per se, quite the opposite, it's quite good. Apple has a "we're not denying Microsoft we would be stupid to do so" attitude, but Linux flat doesn't exist to them - literally, not only are they not supporting anything Linux they're pretending it doesn't exist at all - except in a few server situations they can't deny. iTunes for X anyone? Exactly.
Apple has declared war on GPL despite the fact they like BSD. You can see this in their active suppression of OGG that is only rivaled by Microsofts attempts to suppress it - though for some reason Nokia is on the same bandwaggon.
Despite the fact they consider Linux an abject nothing, they actually have some great interaction with it, mostly because they like POSIX.
Despite the fact they hate freedom that threatens their proprietary world they make great products. I'm seriously considering ditching Apple products soon, my iPhone for certain, mostly due to OS and even system Lock-In, it's not like I can really use my phone with multiple computers. I am not 100% certain about the Mac systems. Despite the fact I feel like they're trying a little too hard to push Safari on me, it's nowhere near as bad as Microsoft tried to push IE on me, on the Mac anyways - on the iPhone they make the way Microsoft used to push IE look like nothing more than a telemarketer next to a Chinese official suggesting you put the camera down - surrounded by armed G-Men. I love my Airport Express's, but they only work fully with an actual Airport base station, why can't they play repeater for my Linksys if I want them to?
Now - let's start the bets now. I have legitimate criticism of Apple - a company that makes great products and I've said as much.
Which will I get modded first?
1. Flame Bait 2. Over Rated 3. Off Topic 4. Troll
My personal favorite it Troll. When I get modded Troll that makes me feel like I actually accomplished something. In this particular post case Flame Bait is probably the most appropriate, Over Rated and Off Topic are both cop-outs.
The time is 353:06:34:45 according to the time code reader - place your bets now. Fan Boys start modding!
They have enough asinine copyright laws as it is. Seriously? An extra charge on blank optical and tape media because it "might" be used to pirate? Does this go for hard drives and bandwidth? I'm with the current US and Canada system. The artist don't benefit much, it's the royalty houses are the ones that really benefit. Don't they get enough from performance, broadcast, sales, etc..? Artist can go broke trying to collect their money.
I can't stand needy people, and I can't stand needy programs that NEED to be on my wall and whore for attention.
The only "App" I still use on Facebook is the movie app, yeah, I right a few movie reviews, find out what the movies are about and rate them. I don't want addicting Mafia, Farm, Navel Gazing crap.
The big difference is, the DailyKos, which granted is a bunch of drivel, is a privately run bunch of drivel pushing an agenda. The Chinese drivel sites are either government run or government censored/dictated sites pushing an agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
People wanted to fear it.
I was at Wal-Mart getting an oil change (for the record never go there for that) in 1999 while in the waiting area a conversation was struck up between myself and another person waiting on a vehicle. It came out that I worked for an ISP and had done all kinds of other computer/networking work. The person wanted to know my thoughts on Y2K.
I answered "I think there's going to be a few hiccups and glitches. I don't think they're going to be all that big, we've done a pretty good job of preparing, and many things may fail over to a wrong date, but will continue to work anyways. All in all whatever problems come of it a majority will be fixed in the first couple of days and a few may take longer, but I don't think there will be much impact."
The person became visibly annoyed at my answer. We stopped talking very quickly after that. I had many other conversations with people along these lines, a couple of them even sited Art Bell and how his show was talking about the doom and gloom to come. I listened to Art Bell. He must have made a fortune selling crank radios, flash lights, and other survival gear in preparations for Y2K, not to mention his business model relies on crazies and they were coming out of the woodwork for this.
I was working the night shift during the roll over. I wasn't worried about our equipment failing. I went to work armed, I was worried about crazies who might decide our company was going to be the cause of the downfall of civilization.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario. It gave me insight into the human condition, I'll say that for sure.
But they block something say, like port 80 outbound or port 25.......
I came here to report the same thing! “Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2” Wow.
I agree with you on most things, but I'm going to cut the Gamecube some slack. I love my Gamecube, but mostly because I actually like platformers and I think the control was absolutely perfect for RPGs. The ported from Dreamcast Skies of Arcadia Legends completely rocked, I actually enjoyed Luigi's Mansion, in my opinion Mario Kart Double Dash is the best version of Mario Kart, and I say that even with the incredibly awesome SNES version in mind. When you have kids you learn to look at Mario Party through a whole different set of eyes. Granted - the Gamecube was not for hardcore gamers who want FPS type games or the absolute best graphics, it was the predecessor to the Wii - more for casual gaming and the younger crowd, or in my case the platformer still likes Mario and Zelda crowd. Personally, I'm not too excited about the Wii, oh, I'll probably get one eventually, but the Gamecube is to me exactly what the Wii is to others, a great casual gaming machine, only the Gamecube isn't based around a gimmick controller. As a matter of fact it introduced the Wavebird Wireless, the first wireless game control on any console that didn't suck.
On the XBox360 controller, I think you meant the original XBox.
PSP actually does have region locking but they don't use it on anything but movies and it's easily defeated - at least on 1000's and 2000's.
My guess based on most surveys I've participated in, each person gets one vote, so the same machine breaking a dozen times or a dozen machines breaking once but all owned by the same person would count as 1 vote. The answer is 1 vote for broken. I didn't see the actual survey in question, I'm just answering based on what I've seen.
I'm not calling a working XBOX 360 lame. I'm calling a 54.2% failure rate and no plans to revamp the hardware lame.
The Slashdotters will prove to you that we can come up with WAY more than 87 - you just watch. So many of them neck and neck it's hard to narrow it down.
The 360 for its inexcusable failure rate, then in the wake of Microsofts competitors constantly revising their models and offering updates Microsoft declares they will not create a version two or revise their hardware.
Then - while XBox 360's were new and failing in droves, Microsoft not only decides the old model will no longer be supported with new products they recall as much existing stock of the old model as they can and do their best to make it got away. Sort of like they wanted to do with XP when Vista came out.
Something all the game consoles need:
Older laptop style optical drives that can be changed by release a lever. Can anyone say failure rate?
Right, but they're working on obtaining the same level of freedom as North Korea in the eyes of the world. As far as I'm concerned they're working on that goal pretty hard.
You can't censor in secret anymore. Either you can pull a China/North Korea/Cuba/Most of the Middle East and just outright limit, filter and forbid in the open and go full tilt enforcement while not hiding the fact you're being a douche about it, or you can go hands off and only enforce your countries top level domain. Few people in the US use a .us top level domain, though the popularity is increasing. .com is for the world and can be hosted anywhere nearly transparently. It's time Australia figures that out.
Nifty
I have heard a minimum amount about this, mostly because I was excited when the work on a Qt version of Firefox was started. Unfortunately another route was taken.
--still want QT Firefox.
I had Lenny installed before it became stable. All was good. When Lenny became stable, I kept it. They decided to do a "patch" on the firewire drivers. My Firewire quit working.
My sound worked perfectly on Lenny and for that matter Etch when I first installed it. There was yet another update that broke my sound. If I jacked with that for an hour or two I could get it to work, in a few programs, but then it would break again after a reboot or two. (I actually shut my laptop down when I'm not using it)
On another machine the "going stable rush" caused a package cram that broke testing so bad I couldn't fix my system in any easily seen manner, so, considering the way I kept /home as a completely separate drive I decided to just reinstall stable from the standard web install disk. THEY HAD BROKE STABLE SO BAD I COULDN'T INSTALL IT.
I personally thing Debian is the absolute best Linux distro out there. I used to use Testing as my normal distro (whichever testing that happened to be at the time) but I got tired of battling broken packages and things getting merged in that weren't quite ready. I understood that's what testing was for so I decided to just stick with stable. Stable did it also - using my firewire and sound as an example. I'm rather good at troubleshooting. If I can't figure something out, I'll shotgun it, do a complete package removal, even config files, then I'll go into my ~ and delete local configs. If it's bad enough I'll do complete remove even on dependent packages even if it means X is no longer on my system by the time I'm done. This is how I got my sound to work half assed again.
Every time I hit "mark all upgrades" it's a game of Russian roulette. I don't want to just not mark all upgrades occasionally, security reasons, holes get fixed and I really would like a more up to date browser or something on occasion. My current laptop has pretty standard Centrino hardware, it's a Toshiba Tecra A5. I have Kubuntu on it right now and it's working great. I seriously don't like Ubuntu, it's a good OS, I recommend it to beginners, but to me it feels like I'm back to using training wheels. I can fix almost any problem I run into and I can look online for known fixes if I can't figure it out for myself, but developer name calling and squabbles show up in the end product all to often of Debian. Most of the downstream distros use the working packages and mix versions that eliminate most of the internal Debian squabbles, which unfortunately once a borked package goes out on Debian it tends to stay broke for quite a while. (use ZSNES for an example)
As for the Apt reference, I was talking about concept, not code. I knew the code wouldn't work.
One last note, I certainly am not a Red Hat fan.
As a non-Nokia user, that's news to me. I like the idea though.
Google really needs to rip off Apt and Synaptics and make a version for their phones. All the way. Not only do they need to make multiple version specific repositories (and tested, don't let Debian and its ability to break stable regularly set to much of an example). The ability of users to add custom repositories for our apps that Google wont stamp with approval would be nice as well. We really need the carriers and their inability to do anything but lump surcharges on top of crap out of the way.
Because Apple Fan Boys are the absolute worst abusers of mod power. I've said it before and I'll get marked troll again for saying it again.
I reread that. Damn, I can be a little incoherency at 0034 local, but I proved my point.
I would like to personally thank the moderator for selecting troll, I think I earned it. Also thank you for not using one of the cop out mods.
FYI - I posted the original from an at-work Windows machine (I can't escape it) I'm typing this from my at-home Mac. My Linux laptop is in my backpack, thank you very much. Despite being slightly off on my wording at that time of night, I really did mean what I say about Apple trying to move in on Microsofts former evil empire turf. Attempting to suppress competition like they've done with OGG and GNU/Linux support is just the first step down that road.
ANY statement that questions Apple in any way shape or form, be it legitimate questioning of policies, legitimate objective criticism or or outright flaming will get modded troll, off-topic, flamebait, or especially my favorite over rated just for questioning the mystical empire. I know, I've done my fair share of criticizing Apple for legitimate reasons, and I actually like Apple for the most part. Same goes for Linux, and BSD. There is a small population of Microsoft fan-boys around here that will do the same, but they're generally overpowered by the anti-Microsoft status quo. It's one of the main reasons - if you really look into the firehose - so few of the articles that question Apple ever make the main board. Apple fan boys are worse than Linux ones.
Disclosure - I ditched Microsoft a short time after Win 2000 came out. I was a Linux guy exclusively up until about two years ago when I added OS X to my computer environment. I'm thinking of ditching Apple now, not because I think any of there stuff is bad per se, quite the opposite, it's quite good. Apple has a "we're not denying Microsoft we would be stupid to do so" attitude, but Linux flat doesn't exist to them - literally, not only are they not supporting anything Linux they're pretending it doesn't exist at all - except in a few server situations they can't deny. iTunes for X anyone? Exactly.
Apple has declared war on GPL despite the fact they like BSD. You can see this in their active suppression of OGG that is only rivaled by Microsofts attempts to suppress it - though for some reason Nokia is on the same bandwaggon.
Despite the fact they consider Linux an abject nothing, they actually have some great interaction with it, mostly because they like POSIX.
Despite the fact they hate freedom that threatens their proprietary world they make great products. I'm seriously considering ditching Apple products soon, my iPhone for certain, mostly due to OS and even system Lock-In, it's not like I can really use my phone with multiple computers. I am not 100% certain about the Mac systems. Despite the fact I feel like they're trying a little too hard to push Safari on me, it's nowhere near as bad as Microsoft tried to push IE on me, on the Mac anyways - on the iPhone they make the way Microsoft used to push IE look like nothing more than a telemarketer next to a Chinese official suggesting you put the camera down - surrounded by armed G-Men. I love my Airport Express's, but they only work fully with an actual Airport base station, why can't they play repeater for my Linksys if I want them to?
Now - let's start the bets now. I have legitimate criticism of Apple - a company that makes great products and I've said as much.
Which will I get modded first?
1. Flame Bait
2. Over Rated
3. Off Topic
4. Troll
My personal favorite it Troll. When I get modded Troll that makes me feel like I actually accomplished something. In this particular post case Flame Bait is probably the most appropriate, Over Rated and Off Topic are both cop-outs.
The time is 353:06:34:45 according to the time code reader - place your bets now. Fan Boys start modding!
They have enough asinine copyright laws as it is. Seriously? An extra charge on blank optical and tape media because it "might" be used to pirate? Does this go for hard drives and bandwidth? I'm with the current US and Canada system. The artist don't benefit much, it's the royalty houses are the ones that really benefit. Don't they get enough from performance, broadcast, sales, etc..? Artist can go broke trying to collect their money.
Crap, I can't believe I did that. Of all the SNAFUs I usually make that's normally not one of them.
I can't stand needy people, and I can't stand needy programs that NEED to be on my wall and whore for attention.
The only "App" I still use on Facebook is the movie app, yeah, I right a few movie reviews, find out what the movies are about and rate them. I don't want addicting Mafia, Farm, Navel Gazing crap.
w00t! They nailed me with another "I Disagree"!
Common guys, I prefer "Troll"
w00t! Scored another!
Oh, well, not FROM China. That's why we have Slashdot.
Oh look! I got a -1 I disagree urhmm, uhmm, I mean over rated!
Actually, yes, yes there is. Oh, and iPhone, there's an app for that!
The big difference is, the DailyKos, which granted is a bunch of drivel, is a privately run bunch of drivel pushing an agenda. The Chinese drivel sites are either government run or government censored/dictated sites pushing an agenda.