I subscribed to Playboy when I was 14 (my parents said I could, as long as THEY didn't have to pay for it, thinking the check/credit card would be some kind of barrier) At one point a few months I got a reader's survey, so I filled it out in the most outlandish way possible. I don't remember many details, but something pretty close to what the grandparent poster's roommate did.
Not more than a month went by and I - at age 14 - received a pre-approved American Express card (you know, the one with no preset credit limit?).
Of course, I didn't ever use it for anything, and my parents finally found out about it a year later when I got a bill with an Amex logo on it (the annual fee on the card), but it was undeniably hilarious to me that I could walk around without a driver's license and yet have a card worth untold thousands of dollars.
IIRC the weirdest piece of mail I ever got, besides the Amex card, whas a long, very high quality pamphlet from a company that sold cryogenic services. I guess rich people are into that stuff?
Instead of looking at a semi-commodity 1TB solution - which is a PITA for needing an industrial strength case, power supply, drive controller card and HVAC, you need to look at the other end:
Two or three fairly normal PCs with STANDARD drive controllers, PSUs and HVAC.
Look, we're talking file servers here. 128MB RAM is gobs if you aren't running any other service on 'em. Pick and OS, any OS: 2000 gets you dfs, *nix gives you NFS. Both give you a homogenous networked file system.
So... Standard case/PSU/cheapo CPU (Athlon mobile or Via or P3, for lower power consumption)/RAM - That's $250, maybe. Add another $20 for a gigabit NIC or two per machine. 4x 200GB drives @ $110 apiece (pricewatch shows $96 as the low price, but I'll go $110 for a little wiggle room)
So... something around $700 gets you.8TB. Buy three machines. $2100 gets you tons of storage and scads of redundancy no matter how you look at it.
This is the philosophy I use in setting up my file servers (now serving 6.5TB!). Over time I've added 3ware cards, upgraded PSUs and added gobs of RAM, but my basic starting point is a very modestly-appointed system.
I wasn't kidding or making anything up. Check the numbers for various Samsung and Seagate ATA products at Storagereview.com if y'all don't believe me. The biggest drive manufacturer in the world can't make a fast ATA drive, and it can't make a cheap one, either (Samsung, Maxtor and WD are all normally less expensive even for resellers).
Link to the new Seagate warranty policy. Including the bit about the last two years as credit at 25% and 10% of the final retail price in years four and five, respectively.
It's not uncommon to find EOL'd drives at around the $40 price mark, folks. Hope that $4 or whatever is worth what it cost to send the defective drive in.
1. Samsung drives are fast, quiet, reliable, and ALL of them have three year warranties, and always have.
2. The fourth and fifth year in the Seagate warranty are returns for credit only, which means that when your underperforming, overpriced-yet-slightly quieter-than-Samsung drive dies, you'll get $3 or whatever Seagate says the drive is worth, which will no doubt go a long way toward the $11 it cost you to UPS the drive to a repair depot in the first place.
A five year old drive at this point is a 10-20GB model.
How could you forget Ralph Vaughn Williams? Shame!
On the other hand, I completely and totally agree with your assessment of the Beatles. O-blah-don't.
I'm deeply annoyed that Paul McCartney is now take seriously enough that someone is willing to write "symphonies" for him. And that they find their way into the tiny, precious space where local stores keep their classical music. I'm in the habit of removing McCartney's work from the classical section at my local book-and-record megastore. Usually I put those CDs in with the plumbing how-to guides. Which, frankly, is the best place for them.
One thing to point out, is that an NcSoft MMO subscription is good for both CoH and Lineage 2. I'm not interested in any other MMO, but the fact that you're given a choice of games for your $15 might well be part of the reason for the slightly higher pricing.
WRT to getting old, if you play straight through for many hours at a time, you're going to see things over and over. For a slightly more casual player, who doesn't do the same mission three times in one night because your two friends have the same contact you do, I'd say there's more than enough going on to keep the game fresh. People talk about hunting like it's the only way to play the game, the rewards for missions are small, etc. But for someone who plays an hour or so a night, those missions are bite-sized chunks of CoH with a defined end-point and a goal other than levelling which IMO is just want someone who plays casually would want.
People talk about grinding like that's all there is to do. I don't think that's true. I spend my non-group time (my toon isn't solo-friendly) making life a little easier for newbies - healing them, showing them around, teleporting them out of the Perez Park maze and teaching group tactics. None of those things is part of the "official" game, but all of them are really quite enjoyable.
Plus, despite Playboy's near historic association with Jazz, Jazz isn't covered in the magazine any more. And they only review classical music maybe once every other year... I don't know how 50somethings get to be "influential rock critics". Christgau's been reviewing music for playboy for at least 25 years, and I can't believe he has anything relevant to add to today's youth culture (something I'm emphatically not a part of, age notwithstanding).
Believe me, I wouldn't've provided more information if someone hadn't asked. I think about it too much already.
Like geeky guys who are unable to have human contact with girls, people who don't realize they're gay until they've started their adult lives are another incredibly sad thing.
She was a girl I met in high school whom I considered a dear friend. She made it very clear she was interested in me. Very, very clear. After dropping hints for years (that I never picked up on), she did the very most forthright thing she could think of, and suddenly we were a couple.... only, she never actually wanted to have sex in the classical definition, and seemed pretty uninterested in the experience in general.
I am a very patient man, and I love her very much, so we were a couple for seven years, until, at age 26, one of her (female) TAs began to hit on her unmercifully. She'd never received that kind of attention from a woman, and she couldn't deny that it excited her. She was forthright about it at the time, and more than a little disturbed.
OK, now that sounds like a letter to Penthouse, doesn't it?
Fast forward a few months: She realizes, at age 26, that she'd never felt the physical component of desire that hits most human beings at, oh, 12 or 13. So when it came to her, it was like she became a whole different person.
So she went out with a woman. They had sex. She realized it was what she wanted, and that it would be unfair to both of us if we remained a couple. Over a four month period I watched her cry and struggle with her emotions toward me and toward women, eventually coming to terms with the fact that I couldn't give her something very important. The emotional issues surrounding this were extremely complex for both of us. I can't do them justice here.
I will freely admit that this experience has left me severely emotionally disturbed. I take medication, have a suicide prevention hotline on speed dial, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on utterly worthless therapy.
Actually I bear more than a passing resemblance to Wayne Knight, who apparently was Newman or somesuch. I've never seen Seinfeld.
I've heard this constantly since whenever the hell the first Jurassic Park movie came out. Which is lovely, 'cause everyone thinks they're being cute and original when they say it.
All of this pre-supposes that someone is capable of getting a date. I'll agree that in my limited experience with (a) woman, your advice sounds right to me, but as one of those poor bastards who define every bad stereotype about geeks (er, I do shower and groom at least daily. But all the other ones), let me just say the chances of getting so far as an actual "date" have a lot in common with quasars, nebulae and black holes.
I mean zero contact with a human being. I don't go places where it's crowded, so I can't say I've even bumped into someone. I mean, if someone is giving me change back from my purchase and grazes my fingertips with theirs, that's as close as I get.
I'm not phobic about it, and at one time I *did* have a fiance (who, it turned out, was gay) who did let me grab her butt and hug her.
But now the extent of my social interaction with anyone is talking to my cats.
It's incredibly fucking sad that there's a large enough group of people from whom contact with members of the opposite sex is such a foreign concept as to induce such atypical physical reactions - the article refers to the awkwardness the male conventiongoers have around the so-called "Booth Babes".
I freely admit I'd likely be in the same category. I don't think I've actually touched another human being in a couple years.
I read (READ!, see above) Playboy. I read Wired. I sometimes read the Utne Reader or Adbusters. I read Newsweek.
I read Maximum PC and CPU at work, on the john, 'cause someone keeps leaving them in there. In fact, almost all the computer-related reading I do takes place in the bathroom. I get a half-dozen computer magazines - none that I actually subscribed to or paid for, so I stack 'em up on top of The Throne and save 'em for my porcelain vacations.
As do I. I really like the long-format Playboy interview, and I've tracked down old issues based on finding, say, the Jimmy Carter "Lust in My Heart" issue or the last print interview Martin Luther King Jr. did before he was assassinated.
I love the heck out of older Playboys. Did you know that OJ Simpsons was once the spokesman for a line of Hunting Knives? I get a kick out of the tone of some of the then current-events articles and the little blurbs about the high-tech (e.g. Videodiscs in the late 70s) of the day.
Nowadays Playboy has moved closer to Maxim/FHM-style content, which I consider a sad state of affairs, but it's one general interest magazine I do generally read in its entirety.
One thing that REALLY SUPREMELY pisses me off is how much worse the content is in Cosmopolitan than Playboy. Open a Playboy, and the first 120 or so pages are largely political or general interest (the forum, the interview etc), then a 3 - 7 page pictorial, then 20 more pages of general-interest material or fiction, then the PMOM (3 - 7 pages), 50 more pages - fashion, sports etc., the last pictorial, then more general interest stuff. There might be an article about sex - history of contraception or somesuch, and there's the Advisor, which is a two page column that's about half sex questions in a given month, but... it's not generally bad or explicit.
Open a Cosmo: Fashion, fashion, celebrity news, DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS RELATED TO PROSTATE MASSAGE, general interest, fashion, diet tips, six pages on "Spit or Swallow"... basically, other than the ~15 pages of artistic nudes in Playboy, something like Cosmo is a FAR worse Smut Rag.
For what it's worth, CoH just launched its first content patch yesterday, two months after the game came out. For the most part, the game has been pretty smooth sailing, with only a couple of serious bugs worth noting (some story arcs that can't be finished by some characters, problems with Task forces that have been resolved, and the occasional persistence of Vahz disease, which has also been fixed).
We miss capes, of course, and there's a certain component that whines constantly about PVP (CoH doesn't have it, huzzah!), but based ony my understanding of existing MMOs, it's been one of the really great places to be since the day it came out.
Bullshit. It's completely moronic for me to give up control of my browser to some every moron with a copy of Macromedia Fuckweaver and a bad idea.
Let's see... standard web content: I can control text sizing, colors, whether or not (and which) images load, save or print things out, even use a screen reader if I'm particularly lazy (or, y'know, blind)... and generally make my browsing experience comfortable for myself.
Flash Bullshit: I wait for hundreds of kilobytes of useless crap to stream onto my computer. I can't control sizing. I can't print it. I can't save it. Plus "people" (using only the most liberal definition) use it for stupid shit like dancing badgers and 1.5MB intros on motherboard manufacturer home pages. The only thing that keeps me from declaring fatwa on Macromedia developers is the living fucking saint who wrote the "Flash Click to View" plug-in for Moz/Firewhatever.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Yes, Flash sites should be available as an alternative. But only after the regular site conveys all the information one needs.
How about a naval battle simulator where the players each take an important function in running a ship? I could see this implemented with tall ships or a WWII setting or in a setting like "Star Trek" or "BattleTech" (especially since the latter could also then have a Mechwarrior-like 3rd person game and/or an RTS-like Mechcommander game).
How about an espionage/stealth-based game where players protect and steal information from one another, or an MMO based more closely on electoral politics (since that's what a lot of games degenerate into anyway)? Combine the two, even, and play out a game of continous organization and supression of surreptious rebellions, assasinations, riots and coups.
I sorta remember them being broadcast on the Playboy channel a couple months ago, actually. I think what you're thinking of is AdultDex which wasn't held last year, either.
So do I. I just kept buying jukeboxes to accomodate my music collection (3300-odd CDs, all classical music - I can have 1200 in use at a time, but I seldom listen to more than about 300 of those).
On the low end, 300 disc changers are as little as $200 new. Even with "way, way, way" more CDs than that, it's less time and less hassle to buy four or five of them to accomodate your collection than to sit around swapping hundreds of discs into and out of your PCs every five minutes (or however long it takes to rip a disc) until you've ripped everything.
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I subscribed to Playboy when I was 14 (my parents said I could, as long as THEY didn't have to pay for it, thinking the check/credit card would be some kind of barrier)
At one point a few months I got a reader's survey, so I filled it out in the most outlandish way possible. I don't remember many details, but something pretty close to what the grandparent poster's roommate did.
Not more than a month went by and I - at age 14 - received a pre-approved American Express card (you know, the one with no preset credit limit?).
Of course, I didn't ever use it for anything, and my parents finally found out about it a year later when I got a bill with an Amex logo on it (the annual fee on the card), but it was undeniably hilarious to me that I could walk around without a driver's license and yet have a card worth untold thousands of dollars.
IIRC the weirdest piece of mail I ever got, besides the Amex card, whas a long, very high quality pamphlet from a company that sold cryogenic services. I guess rich people are into that stuff?
Er, do I know you?
I do contract my services. I've never run into an organization that needed that amount of data on-line.
Instead of looking at a semi-commodity 1TB solution - which is a PITA for needing an industrial strength case, power supply, drive controller card and HVAC, you need to look at the other end:
.8TB.
Two or three fairly normal PCs with STANDARD drive controllers, PSUs and HVAC.
Look, we're talking file servers here. 128MB RAM is gobs if you aren't running any other service on 'em. Pick and OS, any OS: 2000 gets you dfs, *nix gives you NFS. Both give you a homogenous networked file system.
So...
Standard case/PSU/cheapo CPU (Athlon mobile or Via or P3, for lower power consumption)/RAM - That's $250, maybe. Add another $20 for a gigabit NIC or two per machine.
4x 200GB drives @ $110 apiece (pricewatch shows $96 as the low price, but I'll go $110 for a little wiggle room)
So... something around $700 gets you
Buy three machines. $2100 gets you tons of storage and scads of redundancy no matter how you look at it.
This is the philosophy I use in setting up my file servers (now serving 6.5TB!). Over time I've added 3ware cards, upgraded PSUs and added gobs of RAM, but my basic starting point is a very modestly-appointed system.
Flamebait?
I wasn't kidding or making anything up. Check the numbers for various Samsung and Seagate ATA products at Storagereview.com if y'all don't believe me. The biggest drive manufacturer in the world can't make a fast ATA drive, and it can't make a cheap one, either (Samsung, Maxtor and WD are all normally less expensive even for resellers).
Link to the new Seagate warranty policy. Including the bit about the last two years as credit at 25% and 10% of the final retail price in years four and five, respectively.
It's not uncommon to find EOL'd drives at around the $40 price mark, folks. Hope that $4 or whatever is worth what it cost to send the defective drive in.
1. Samsung drives are fast, quiet, reliable, and ALL of them have three year warranties, and always have.
2. The fourth and fifth year in the Seagate warranty are returns for credit only, which means that when your underperforming, overpriced-yet-slightly quieter-than-Samsung drive dies, you'll get $3 or whatever Seagate says the drive is worth, which will no doubt go a long way toward the $11 it cost you to UPS the drive to a repair depot in the first place.
A five year old drive at this point is a 10-20GB model.
Obviously you've never been to Northwest Indiana. I've been to North Jersey and, uh, they don't have it so bad there.
Gotta love a country where the majority of the residents still think "Waltzing Matilda" should be the national anthem.
Although, after a brief google, I see it has rather a more complex meaning than I would've ever guessed.
How could you forget Ralph Vaughn Williams? Shame!
On the other hand, I completely and totally agree with your assessment of the Beatles. O-blah-don't.
I'm deeply annoyed that Paul McCartney is now take seriously enough that someone is willing to write "symphonies" for him. And that they find their way into the tiny, precious space where local stores keep their classical music. I'm in the habit of removing McCartney's work from the classical section at my local book-and-record megastore. Usually I put those CDs in with the plumbing how-to guides. Which, frankly, is the best place for them.
One thing to point out, is that an NcSoft MMO subscription is good for both CoH and Lineage 2. I'm not interested in any other MMO, but the fact that you're given a choice of games for your $15 might well be part of the reason for the slightly higher pricing.
WRT to getting old, if you play straight through for many hours at a time, you're going to see things over and over. For a slightly more casual player, who doesn't do the same mission three times in one night because your two friends have the same contact you do, I'd say there's more than enough going on to keep the game fresh. People talk about hunting like it's the only way to play the game, the rewards for missions are small, etc. But for someone who plays an hour or so a night, those missions are bite-sized chunks of CoH with a defined end-point and a goal other than levelling which IMO is just want someone who plays casually would want.
People talk about grinding like that's all there is to do. I don't think that's true. I spend my non-group time (my toon isn't solo-friendly) making life a little easier for newbies - healing them, showing them around, teleporting them out of the Perez Park maze and teaching group tactics. None of those things is part of the "official" game, but all of them are really quite enjoyable.
Plus, despite Playboy's near historic association with Jazz, Jazz isn't covered in the magazine any more. And they only review classical music maybe once every other year...
I don't know how 50somethings get to be "influential rock critics". Christgau's been reviewing music for playboy for at least 25 years, and I can't believe he has anything relevant to add to today's youth culture (something I'm emphatically not a part of, age notwithstanding).
I would far rather be a troll and my post not be true than deal with reality.
Believe me, I wouldn't've provided more information if someone hadn't asked. I think about it too much already.
Like geeky guys who are unable to have human contact with girls, people who don't realize they're gay until they've started their adult lives are another incredibly sad thing.
She was a girl I met in high school whom I considered a dear friend. She made it very clear she was interested in me. Very, very clear. After dropping hints for years (that I never picked up on), she did the very most forthright thing she could think of, and suddenly we were a couple. ... only, she never actually wanted to have sex in the classical definition, and seemed pretty uninterested in the experience in general.
I am a very patient man, and I love her very much, so we were a couple for seven years, until, at age 26, one of her (female) TAs began to hit on her unmercifully. She'd never received that kind of attention from a woman, and she couldn't deny that it excited her. She was forthright about it at the time, and more than a little disturbed.
OK, now that sounds like a letter to Penthouse, doesn't it?
Fast forward a few months: She realizes, at age 26, that she'd never felt the physical component of desire that hits most human beings at, oh, 12 or 13. So when it came to her, it was like she became a whole different person.
So she went out with a woman. They had sex. She realized it was what she wanted, and that it would be unfair to both of us if we remained a couple. Over a four month period I watched her cry and struggle with her emotions toward me and toward women, eventually coming to terms with the fact that I couldn't give her something very important. The emotional issues surrounding this were extremely complex for both of us. I can't do them justice here.
I will freely admit that this experience has left me severely emotionally disturbed. I take medication, have a suicide prevention hotline on speed dial, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on utterly worthless therapy.
Actually I bear more than a passing resemblance to Wayne Knight, who apparently was Newman or somesuch. I've never seen Seinfeld.
I've heard this constantly since whenever the hell the first Jurassic Park movie came out. Which is lovely, 'cause everyone thinks they're being cute and original when they say it.
All of this pre-supposes that someone is capable of getting a date. I'll agree that in my limited experience with (a) woman, your advice sounds right to me, but as one of those poor bastards who define every bad stereotype about geeks (er, I do shower and groom at least daily. But all the other ones), let me just say the chances of getting so far as an actual "date" have a lot in common with quasars, nebulae and black holes.
College has P.E.?
I'm not around people much. I imagine a lot of gamers and geeks are in the same boat.
I mean zero contact with a human being. I don't go places where it's crowded, so I can't say I've even bumped into someone. I mean, if someone is giving me change back from my purchase and grazes my fingertips with theirs, that's as close as I get.
I'm not phobic about it, and at one time I *did* have a fiance (who, it turned out, was gay) who did let me grab her butt and hug her.
But now the extent of my social interaction with anyone is talking to my cats.
It's incredibly fucking sad that there's a large enough group of people from whom contact with members of the opposite sex is such a foreign concept as to induce such atypical physical reactions - the article refers to the awkwardness the male conventiongoers have around the so-called "Booth Babes".
I freely admit I'd likely be in the same category. I don't think I've actually touched another human being in a couple years.
The question is, what does one do about it?
I read (READ!, see above) Playboy.
I read Wired.
I sometimes read the Utne Reader or Adbusters.
I read Newsweek.
I read Maximum PC and CPU at work, on the john, 'cause someone keeps leaving them in there. In fact, almost all the computer-related reading I do takes place in the bathroom. I get a half-dozen computer magazines - none that I actually subscribed to or paid for, so I stack 'em up on top of The Throne and save 'em for my porcelain vacations.
As do I. I really like the long-format Playboy interview, and I've tracked down old issues based on finding, say, the Jimmy Carter "Lust in My Heart" issue or the last print interview Martin Luther King Jr. did before he was assassinated.
I love the heck out of older Playboys. Did you know that OJ Simpsons was once the spokesman for a line of Hunting Knives? I get a kick out of the tone of some of the then current-events articles and the little blurbs about the high-tech (e.g. Videodiscs in the late 70s) of the day.
Nowadays Playboy has moved closer to Maxim/FHM-style content, which I consider a sad state of affairs, but it's one general interest magazine I do generally read in its entirety.
One thing that REALLY SUPREMELY pisses me off is how much worse the content is in Cosmopolitan than Playboy. Open a Playboy, and the first 120 or so pages are largely political or general interest (the forum, the interview etc), then a 3 - 7 page pictorial, then 20 more pages of general-interest material or fiction, then the PMOM (3 - 7 pages), 50 more pages - fashion, sports etc., the last pictorial, then more general interest stuff. There might be an article about sex - history of contraception or somesuch, and there's the Advisor, which is a two page column that's about half sex questions in a given month, but... it's not generally bad or explicit.
Open a Cosmo: Fashion, fashion, celebrity news, DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS RELATED TO PROSTATE MASSAGE, general interest, fashion, diet tips, six pages on "Spit or Swallow"... basically, other than the ~15 pages of artistic nudes in Playboy, something like Cosmo is a FAR worse Smut Rag.
But, er, I like the pictures in Playboy, too.
For what it's worth, CoH just launched its first content patch yesterday, two months after the game came out. For the most part, the game has been pretty smooth sailing, with only a couple of serious bugs worth noting (some story arcs that can't be finished by some characters, problems with Task forces that have been resolved, and the occasional persistence of Vahz disease, which has also been fixed).
We miss capes, of course, and there's a certain component that whines constantly about PVP (CoH doesn't have it, huzzah!), but based ony my understanding of existing MMOs, it's been one of the really great places to be since the day it came out.
Bullshit. It's completely moronic for me to give up control of my browser to some every moron with a copy of Macromedia Fuckweaver and a bad idea.
Let's see... standard web content: I can control text sizing, colors, whether or not (and which) images load, save or print things out, even use a screen reader if I'm particularly lazy (or, y'know, blind)... and generally make my browsing experience comfortable for myself.
Flash Bullshit: I wait for hundreds of kilobytes of useless crap to stream onto my computer. I can't control sizing. I can't print it. I can't save it. Plus "people" (using only the most liberal definition) use it for stupid shit like dancing badgers and 1.5MB intros on motherboard manufacturer home pages. The only thing that keeps me from declaring fatwa on Macromedia developers is the living fucking saint who wrote the "Flash Click to View" plug-in for Moz/Firewhatever.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Yes, Flash sites should be available as an alternative. But only after the regular site conveys all the information one needs.
How about a naval battle simulator where the players each take an important function in running a ship? I could see this implemented with tall ships or a WWII setting or in a setting like "Star Trek" or "BattleTech" (especially since the latter could also then have a Mechwarrior-like 3rd person game and/or an RTS-like Mechcommander game).
How about an espionage/stealth-based game where players protect and steal information from one another, or an MMO based more closely on electoral politics (since that's what a lot of games degenerate into anyway)? Combine the two, even, and play out a game of continous organization and supression of surreptious rebellions, assasinations, riots and coups.
I can't allow porn fans to be disappointed.
I sorta remember them being broadcast on the Playboy channel a couple months ago, actually. I think what you're thinking of is AdultDex which wasn't held last year, either.
So do I. I just kept buying jukeboxes to accomodate my music collection (3300-odd CDs, all classical music - I can have 1200 in use at a time, but I seldom listen to more than about 300 of those).
On the low end, 300 disc changers are as little as $200 new. Even with "way, way, way" more CDs than that, it's less time and less hassle to buy four or five of them to accomodate your collection than to sit around swapping hundreds of discs into and out of your PCs every five minutes (or however long it takes to rip a disc) until you've ripped everything.