I say we put Bill Gates and Steve Case in a cage match and let them fight to the death...with a 10 hungry komodo draggons! I'd even pay $50 on Time Warner/AOL pay-per view to watch it...nah, I'd get a test chip for my descrambler instead.
Ever bother to think WHY we'd rather stay home?
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 1
Okay, time for the blunt edge that only cynicism can provide. Has anyone ever bothered to consider why we choose to stay at home? I might be alone in this belief (and if I am I'm sure it will be explained to me), but the reason some choose to stay home is because of all the damned idiots in the world! After a day of dealing with every fool on the freeway (two words...lane discipline...don't go 45mph in the passing lane!) to get to work, a gaggle of program managers who bring new meaning to the word clueless, getting pulled over by a cop on the way home because my window tint is so dark you can't see inside the car (duh, that's why I put it on there!) and getting to donate $85 to the city of columbus for wanting a little privacy, is it any wonder that I don't want to go out and mingle with the rest of the morons who I was lucky to avoid in the first place? Ye Gods! Even a trip to the grocery store is an excercise in restraint. Do you have any idea how many bloated spandex queens are in ohio? I haven't counted, but there are way too many and it is almost certain that at least two of them are going to be blocking each isle. Then there's the woman across the street who watches kids for a living and her idea of babysitting is pinning them all up on her front porch to scream and yell all day so she can watch Judges Judy, Mathis, etc. Is it any wonder why a night in the quiet basement at the broadband enabled Duron box is preferable to going out? Hell, you can't even have a beer or two at the local watering hole for fear of getting caught in one of the many speed traps with beer on your breath thanks to the mad mothers and the city that loves those $2000 fines?
IF this happens I hope that they don't fade away like Netscape did. Now that I got that out of the way, AOL buying RH might work out. If Linux is going to have a chance in the desktop war with M$, then the leader in the industry has to do just that...LEAD! If Linux is going to fight for market share against M$, they will need resources. AOL has plenty of cash for research and product development and Steve Case has no love for Bill Gates.
Buy all the DVD's you like, but what I want is the big black desk with the monitors built into it and the virtual keyboad. I'd even consider a room-addition on to my house just to hold the damn thing (well, I'd have to because I don't have anywhere to put it).
A little OT, but then it isn't everyday that I get to post a reply on/. about Tron.
Everytime I hear anything about this movie I remember what Dennis Miller said about Al Gore...
"This man is the Vice President?! His favorite movie is 'Tron' for fucks-sake!"
looks similar to articles written 70 years ago touting how everyone would eat pills for food and fly personal jetpacks.
I agree but whenever I hear someone say that something is 70 or 80 years away, I remember a quote that I heard a long time ago from around the year 1901:
"The secret of powered flight will not be discovered within our lifetime."-Orvil Wright, two years before the first powered flight at Kittyhawk.
If they start making broken CDs massively, all you will trust will be mp3.
Let them cut their own throats. If the stupidity of these businesses encourages people to "appropriate" the products they sell...well, lets just say I can appriciate the ironic nature of what will happen. Maybe they will learn or maybe not. Ignorance is correctable but "stupid" means forever.
Get ready for more and more of these schemes to protect copyrighted material...also be ready for a larger percentage of the market to participate in ways of circumventing it. Every time these guys raise the bar it makes the act of "getting away with it" that much more appealing to Joe-Sixpack. Hey, who doesn't want to be considered part of the tech savy croud.
The dinosaurs of the record and music industry will do whatever it takes to preserve their outdated business models. Inovation outside of their control is a direct threat to the empires they have built. I'm sure there were quite a few record execs that were grabbing for their heart medication when (gasp!) they found out that people were so fed up with paying $17 for a CD with one or two good songs and another 8 tracks of crap that their "customers" were now able to take them out of the loop. If they want to survive and, yes, even become more successful, they should consider cutting prices and making more profit on volume of sales instead of higher profit margins and embracing newer, more efficient means of distribution.
I mean, c'mon, cd burners are selling for well under $100. These companies could save a bloody fortune in manufacturing, packaging, logistics and transportation by using electronic distribution methods over the internet. They could sell indvidual tracks over the net, cut out at least 3 middle-men in the process, save consumers money and possibly make more money than ever. Short-sighted morons!
AMEN! I bought a TI92 back in 96 while in college and I loved it! The only thing I didn't like is that it couldn't do base conversions but that was a fairly minor issue. You should have seen the geeks ooh and ahh when I walked into class and said "Behold, the mighty TI-92."
Not to get my connectors externally, that's not an issue (I can get any extensions I like).
If you don't mind my asking, what are you using to get line out/RCA connectors? I've tried using a 14" to RCA splitter on my SB live value to the aux in on my stereo but all that does is give me a lot give me a lot of hiss and no channel seperation.
I'm an engineer at Qwest (the long distance/data side of the house) and I can tell you that things on the telecom end are not going to change anytime soon. Why? Because the big wigs in Denver have decided that any further network expansion will no longer be based on projected future demand, like it has been for the past few years, but only based on immediate need. Hardware spending has been all but eliminated. Unless a big increase in demand for broadband at home developes, then no one telecom is going to spend the money on anymore big roll-outs of new services.
Respectfully, I think you both missed something in the article. The reason braodband is not taking off is because the content providers are not providing the content that new broadband internet technologies can develope around. With a lack of interesting content, there is no over-riding reason for the average net user to get the high speed pipe. Remember when the compact disc was new in the late 70's/early 80's? The cd players were horribly expensive and the only thing you could get on cd was classical music. Think about it...would you bother with the internet at all if all you could really use was email?/. would just be a bulletin board that people would call into directly...
I try and do my part to make their data as worthless as possible (at least the data they get from me). Both of the big grocery stores in the area started using those god-damn "club" cards. {Pssst...these onlt entitle you to the sale price that they used to give you all the time before thier damned "club was around!} I have a whole wallet full of these things, all with made up names and addresses and other personal info. I'll use each one about 10 times then pitch it in the trash when I clean out my car interior. In fact, on one card I just celebrated my 99th birthday!
If you ask the nosey puds at radio shack, they think my home phone number is actually the phone number for the local pizza shop.
I think the BIG thing that a lot of people are missing is that even a much smaller impact could be mistaken for as the detonation of a nuclear device or missile warhead. Think about what would happen if one of these impacted on the US or Russia. The one that hit Tungusca was before the atomic age. If it happened again it could be seen as either a terrorist incident (hopefully that would be the first assumption by NORAD) or a first strike by one of the nuclear countries.
Commodity RAM...Flibbildy Floo! In my day we had to put together our own memory cards! We didn't have any of those fancy 30 pin SIMM cards with their flashy gold or tin pins! We had to pay some guy working in his parent's basement to etch a board that we new wasn't going to fit in any of the S-100 slot of the backplane then we had to drill our own holes and solder our own chips. Those little bastard chips cost us $25.00 each. Then when we'd solder them in the iron would slip and we burn ourselves and we'd say "Oh look at me! I've got third degree burns from all this sloppy soldering!" and thats the way it was AND WE LIKED IT!
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Hukked on foniks wurkd phor mee!
First anthrax in the mail and now XP CD's. The terrorists must be stopped!
Well, okay maybe it's not hell yet, but I'll know I'm in hell when the Johova's Witnesses start going door to door and handing out MS CD-ROM's.
I say we put Bill Gates and Steve Case in a cage match and let them fight to the death...with a 10 hungry komodo draggons! I'd even pay $50 on Time Warner/AOL pay-per view to watch it...nah, I'd get a test chip for my descrambler instead.
Okay, time for the blunt edge that only cynicism can provide. Has anyone ever bothered to consider why we choose to stay at home? I might be alone in this belief (and if I am I'm sure it will be explained to me), but the reason some choose to stay home is because of all the damned idiots in the world! After a day of dealing with every fool on the freeway (two words...lane discipline...don't go 45mph in the passing lane!) to get to work, a gaggle of program managers who bring new meaning to the word clueless, getting pulled over by a cop on the way home because my window tint is so dark you can't see inside the car (duh, that's why I put it on there!) and getting to donate $85 to the city of columbus for wanting a little privacy, is it any wonder that I don't want to go out and mingle with the rest of the morons who I was lucky to avoid in the first place? Ye Gods! Even a trip to the grocery store is an excercise in restraint. Do you have any idea how many bloated spandex queens are in ohio? I haven't counted, but there are way too many and it is almost certain that at least two of them are going to be blocking each isle. Then there's the woman across the street who watches kids for a living and her idea of babysitting is pinning them all up on her front porch to scream and yell all day so she can watch Judges Judy, Mathis, etc. Is it any wonder why a night in the quiet basement at the broadband enabled Duron box is preferable to going out? Hell, you can't even have a beer or two at the local watering hole for fear of getting caught in one of the many speed traps with beer on your breath thanks to the mad mothers and the city that loves those $2000 fines?
IF this happens I hope that they don't fade away like Netscape did. Now that I got that out of the way, AOL buying RH might work out. If Linux is going to have a chance in the desktop war with M$, then the leader in the industry has to do just that...LEAD! If Linux is going to fight for market share against M$, they will need resources. AOL has plenty of cash for research and product development and Steve Case has no love for Bill Gates.
Buy all the DVD's you like, but what I want is the big black desk with the monitors built into it and the virtual keyboad. I'd even consider a room-addition on to my house just to hold the damn thing (well, I'd have to because I don't have anywhere to put it).
Everytime I hear anything about this movie I remember what Dennis Miller said about Al Gore... "This man is the Vice President?! His favorite movie is 'Tron' for fucks-sake!"
Oh that will cost me some karma.
I agree but whenever I hear someone say that something is 70 or 80 years away, I remember a quote that I heard a long time ago from around the year 1901:
"The secret of powered flight will not be discovered within our lifetime."-Orvil Wright, two years before the first powered flight at Kittyhawk.
Let them cut their own throats. If the stupidity of these businesses encourages people to "appropriate" the products they sell...well, lets just say I can appriciate the ironic nature of what will happen. Maybe they will learn or maybe not. Ignorance is correctable but "stupid" means forever.
Get ready for more and more of these schemes to protect copyrighted material...also be ready for a larger percentage of the market to participate in ways of circumventing it. Every time these guys raise the bar it makes the act of "getting away with it" that much more appealing to Joe-Sixpack. Hey, who doesn't want to be considered part of the tech savy croud. The dinosaurs of the record and music industry will do whatever it takes to preserve their outdated business models. Inovation outside of their control is a direct threat to the empires they have built. I'm sure there were quite a few record execs that were grabbing for their heart medication when (gasp!) they found out that people were so fed up with paying $17 for a CD with one or two good songs and another 8 tracks of crap that their "customers" were now able to take them out of the loop. If they want to survive and, yes, even become more successful, they should consider cutting prices and making more profit on volume of sales instead of higher profit margins and embracing newer, more efficient means of distribution. I mean, c'mon, cd burners are selling for well under $100. These companies could save a bloody fortune in manufacturing, packaging, logistics and transportation by using electronic distribution methods over the internet. They could sell indvidual tracks over the net, cut out at least 3 middle-men in the process, save consumers money and possibly make more money than ever. Short-sighted morons!
AMEN! I bought a TI92 back in 96 while in college and I loved it! The only thing I didn't like is that it couldn't do base conversions but that was a fairly minor issue. You should have seen the geeks ooh and ahh when I walked into class and said "Behold, the mighty TI-92."
If you don't mind my asking, what are you using to get line out/RCA connectors? I've tried using a 14" to RCA splitter on my SB live value to the aux in on my stereo but all that does is give me a lot give me a lot of hiss and no channel seperation.
I'm an engineer at Qwest (the long distance/data side of the house) and I can tell you that things on the telecom end are not going to change anytime soon. Why? Because the big wigs in Denver have decided that any further network expansion will no longer be based on projected future demand, like it has been for the past few years, but only based on immediate need. Hardware spending has been all but eliminated. Unless a big increase in demand for broadband at home developes, then no one telecom is going to spend the money on anymore big roll-outs of new services.
Respectfully, I think you both missed something in the article. The reason braodband is not taking off is because the content providers are not providing the content that new broadband internet technologies can develope around. With a lack of interesting content, there is no over-riding reason for the average net user to get the high speed pipe. Remember when the compact disc was new in the late 70's/early 80's? The cd players were horribly expensive and the only thing you could get on cd was classical music. Think about it...would you bother with the internet at all if all you could really use was email? /. would just be a bulletin board that people would call into directly...
I try and do my part to make their data as worthless as possible (at least the data they get from me). Both of the big grocery stores in the area started using those god-damn "club" cards. {Pssst...these onlt entitle you to the sale price that they used to give you all the time before thier damned "club was around!} I have a whole wallet full of these things, all with made up names and addresses and other personal info. I'll use each one about 10 times then pitch it in the trash when I clean out my car interior. In fact, on one card I just celebrated my 99th birthday! If you ask the nosey puds at radio shack, they think my home phone number is actually the phone number for the local pizza shop.
I think the BIG thing that a lot of people are missing is that even a much smaller impact could be mistaken for as the detonation of a nuclear device or missile warhead. Think about what would happen if one of these impacted on the US or Russia. The one that hit Tungusca was before the atomic age. If it happened again it could be seen as either a terrorist incident (hopefully that would be the first assumption by NORAD) or a first strike by one of the nuclear countries.
Commodity RAM...Flibbildy Floo! In my day we had to put together our own memory cards! We didn't have any of those fancy 30 pin SIMM cards with their flashy gold or tin pins! We had to pay some guy working in his parent's basement to etch a board that we new wasn't going to fit in any of the S-100 slot of the backplane then we had to drill our own holes and solder our own chips. Those little bastard chips cost us $25.00 each. Then when we'd solder them in the iron would slip and we burn ourselves and we'd say "Oh look at me! I've got third degree burns from all this sloppy soldering!" and thats the way it was AND WE LIKED IT!