I do most of my computer work in the living room with my notebook on my lap and so I could, in theory, have my broadband cake and eat my TV, too. However, with the possible exception of Monday Night Football, there is simply nothing on that is worth my time anymore.
I watched Buffy religiously (and afterwards went out and bought all the DVDs) and before that it was STNG. These shows were funny, intelligent, thought provoking and (with the exception of the first season of STNG and the deus ex machina-farce that is Season 7 of Buffy) well written.
And what are they trying to feed me now?
Enterprise should be taken out and shot for the good of the francise, CSI: All over is always the same, and don't get me started on things like Fear Factor or Survivor. The least bad is Scrubs (some very tighly written episodes with good dialog) but even that doesn't come close to the well prepared punch of "Once More, With Feeling". The narrative is dead in American television; even watching "Restless" over and over again to figure out the remaining hints is so much more fun than watching some silicon-breasted teenager with no brain puke up mixed worms.
So basically, I turn to books, computer games, and fooling around with friends who blog. There is more Terry Pratchett every year, I expect I'll still be trying to finish NetHack on my deathbed, and there is a whole Internet out there with fun, creative people doing interesting things.
If TV stops being stupid -- bring back Willow! -- I might take another look. Until then, my DVD player is the default setting for the big screen.
I used AbiWord for a while, and then threw it out when OpenOffice reached 1.1.0: As nice and small as it is, OOo just lets you do more. I think that attitute might change if AbiWord moved to the common file format that OOo and Kword use by default.
I wonder just how hard AbiWord will get hit when OOo 2.0 comes out this year. You know, an OOo that doesn't take half of the morning to start up...
With the possible exception of the O.J. trial, this must be the most embarrassing court case the U.S. has had to suffer through in front of an international audience. It took the German legal system, what, a week to bitch-slap SCO? And they didn't even dare try any of this crap in countries like Britain.
So just what will it take for an American judge to finally throw this whole pile out? Why does SCO get to spread rumors that hurt the business of RedHat, IBM, and Novell for months and months without one single bit of hard evidence? This is not a game, it is about real money that is being lost because of FUD, real damage to product images and real smears to reputations. Just why does the judge get to wait forever to get something, anything done?
If P.J. has convinced anybody of anything, it is that the rest of the democratic countries can thank heaven that they are not stuck with the 18th Century anachronism we Americans pretend is a real, functioning legal system. Care to hazard a guess how much the lawyers have made on this already?
Intel, though, has a lot more ad dollars to contribute.
Am I the only one who cringes everytime he hears the word "Intel" in an ad, because you just know that their stupid jingle will follow? After years of being subjected to dah-dah-DAH-dah in just about every single ad for a laptop or a computer on TV, this is reason enough to buy AMD.
Dear Intel ad people, there is such a thing as overdoing things. Why don't you quit the "repeats are everything" theory and switch to the "let's be cool and funny" version? Works for Apple anytime.
Until then, I'm saving for my dual Opteron system. You can take your dah-dah-DAH-dah and...
Cash is what matters and not the entire open source movement or whatsoever.
Well, yes, of course, just like IBM. The reason for this is that it is the law: Novell and IBM are both public owned companies, and therefore every person who works for them has to spend every waking moment thinking about how to increase shareholder value. Note they don't have to give a damn about the product or -- oh horror! -- the customer, because these are just means to an end. The moment Novell stops thinking about how to make cash, they get sued.
The best introduction to this, as to most things in life, is of course Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Check out where he explains business plans.
This, by the way, is the reason that Microsoft is getting slowly cut into bits by Linux: Microsoft's first and foremost worry always has to be shareholder value, not the quality of the product. Spending money for security is bad for them because they don't make more money from it: If they can get by without it, their profit is higher. The Linux people are free to concentrate on the product. On the long run, this makes a difference.
There is no question that c't is one of the best computer magazines on the planet in either German or English -- can't speak for the other languages (no pun intended), but I would be surprised if there is anything on the planet quite like them. In fact, I would rate them right up there with the best in terms of journalistic quality: They pull no punches, are thorough, well-written, and you can use their backgrounders as textbooks. These people seriously know their stuff and I for years I have been following their hardware recommendations without being disappointed once. If you ever needed an excuse to learn German, this is it.
Another thing that should be mentioned is that c't are just about the only magazine in Germany that publishes science fiction short stories. In a country where science fiction is considered to be Trivialliteratur that educated people should be ashamed of wasting their time with, this is especially noteworthy.
However:
Incredable as it might seem, c't has been slowly dumbing down its content and focusing more and more on test and reports instead of the hands-on stuff that made them famous. It used to be that they would lead you through the steps to build your own bloody computer, do cool coding things in assembler (these were the eight bit days), and stuff that would send most of their current readers screaming. They once started a Java course, but stopped it after a few episodes.
Given this hard core background, c't was amazingly slow to take Linux seriously and in fact just about ignored it right up to the point where people like me found it was not worth the price. In the old days, they would have been jumping all over the kernel, explaining all the juicy little techniques to their users and showing them how to change stuff themselves. No go: The Windows crowd is probably just larger and their ads pay more.
It is nice to see that there is an English edition of iX. However, what they really should do is launch a Linux spin-off. I can't believe I am the only one who misses the good old c't, and the Linux community should be easily large enough to make it worth their parent company's time.
The best thing about Firefox (and OpenOffice) is
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... that you don't have to give a rat's ass anymore about what opering system you use. I run Firebird on Linux and run Firebird on Mac OS X and would run Firebird on Windows NT at work, except for the fact that my company has a contract with Microsoft that forbids us using anything but their software. Same thing with OpenOffice.org: Who cares anymore what the operating system is? Edit the same files with the same program on different systems. All for free. Oh, and did I mention the Videl Lan Client (VLC)?
The same might be true at some point for ThunderBird, but at the moment, KMail is just so far ahead of everything else that hurts. When that happens, though, Microsoft should be very, very afraid: If you don't need to care about the operating system anymore for 95 percent of the things you do, you don't need to pay all that money to actually buy one from them.
Maybe its just because I never buy bleeding edge hardware, but why would you want to get stuff in a store like Best Buy anyway? For the last years, I have been very happy with the following procedure:
1. Find the lowest price for the part you want. There are machines on the Internet that will help you do that.
2. Go to an online auctioneer.
3. Enter your maximum bid for the part: Lowest price in store minus shipping costs given by the person selling.
4. Wait until the auction is finished.
5. If you didn't win, repeat steps 3 and 4. Otherwise:
6. Savings!
Obviously you need patience, because you're going to lose a couple of auctions, but the amount I've saved this way is pretty spectacular. There are some things that I wouldn't get used, of couse, like hard disks or monitors, but everything else: Cut out the middlemen, screw the store before they can screw you.
The latest medium is alway the evil one: Before computers and the Internet, television was blamed for everything, and before that, radio. You just don't see "it's television's fault" anymore, now it's always something somebody saw in a compter game or read on the Internet. Remember when they caught Saddam's sons and had all the articles pointing out how one of them had picked up torture tips on the Internet? If he had been reading them in books, nobody would have even bothered mentioning it.
So what we obviously need is the next medium so we have something new to blame all violence on. I suggest iPods: All that music all the time, the glare of the white headphones, and now the thousands and thousands of pornographic images that teenagers carry around with them everywhere just have to have a bad influence. When will Australia finally live up to its moral responsibilty and ban them? And now that Bush has been reelected, shouldn't Ashcroft finally do something to save American's children from Apple's murderous grip?
I always thought Steve Jobs is smiling just a little to brightly when he holds up those things...
Probably one of the saddest developments in America in the last few decades is the way "abuse humor" has replaced the real thing -- more and more seems to be about making fun of other people, putting them down, and claiming this is funny. I realize that insulting people is easier than displaying real talent, but still. It is sad to me as an American that the best English-language comedians by far and wide today seem to be Brits, while we're paying "shock jocks" milions to spew garbage that wouldn't be allowed on any well-run playground.
What is even more depressing is the complete lack of self-irony in these pieces. Take Monty Python's song "Never Be Rude To An Arab", where the singer makes fun of himself more than anybody else -- these are the masters, go snivel at their feet. "Fawlty Towers" has an episode where all they do is make fun of Germans ("Never mention the war!") but it is done so well that even my German friends can laugh, because John Cleese makes such a complete ass out of himself, too. Eddie Murphy has lots of abusive humor in his stand-up pieces, but he is the first to make poke fun of himself. At least the guy from Jackass is sticking his own tongue in drainage pipes.
And sorry, I think "ricer" is a racest term. Obviously the Slashdot editors and a lot of people here don't agree, but I was pretty suprised to see this article promoted here. Hope they don't get into trouble with OSTG.
So: It is not funny, it offers no insight, and uses racist language for what seems to be its own sake. Even if it has the word "Gentoo" in it and it is a slow day, I fail to see what this is doing on the front page of Slashdot. Me, I'll stick with reruns of the Soviet Russia jokes, and -- and mod the original article down as "troll".
Depends on your programming language
on
Short Coding Projects?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think you need to be a bit more specific about which programming language you are talking about. In Python, a program that lets you write an email with your favorite editor and send it via SMTP is something you can do a few hours; however, in assembler, some of the most easy problems quickly get tricky:
Now try doing that without looking up things in a book -- obviously I cheated here and just used the GCC. You see what I mean, though: Writing a mail program in assembler is somewhat more tricky than Python.
... NetHack for OS X / Darwin only seems to come in the girlie man Qt version. Some things in life are simply more important than cool graphics, a consistant user interface, and easy to use multimedia apps.
It is too late now, but to anybody who finds themselves in a situation like this: Buy a 12" iBook or PowerBook and avoid these kind of headaches. So far, my experience has been that attaching any external monitor is a difficult as plugging the damn thing in -- "It just works" indeed.
Note that I am a Linux person at heart and have my gripes with Apple -- the stupid spanning block in the iBooks, for example -- but this is one thing they do very, very well.
Sorry to distrub your editorializing here, but there are in fact quite a number of countries that do this. Other things more modern democracies have found out work pretty well are not announcing any election results until everybody's vote is in (aw, the Californian says, why go vote, Gore is going to win anyway); vote on a Sunday so people don't have to skip work; give everybody the same ballot sheet; give every person one vote instead of some screwy system with a bunch of middlemen who distort the effect of the popular vote.
As with the legal system and electricity, America's electorial system suffers enormously from being one of the first ones implemented and the inability of Congress to pass any serious reforms. Get rid of trial by jury, switch to 220 volts, make it a direct vote, and then you will be ready to enter the 21. Century. Computers that run with 220 volts are twice as fast!
You want "If I ran the zoo" by Dr. Seuss - it has a nerd, and an it-kutch and a preep and a proo and a nerkle and a seersucker, too! It also has an iota. Personally, I like "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish" better, because it explains telephone technology: If you can't hear anything, check your cable to see if a mouse hasn't cut the wires with scissors.
Anybody who things that science fiction is just about the future should take time to read "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis, which has won just about every award that the field has to offer: Half of the book takes place in the 14th Century, showing everyday life. And how can anybody in their right mind say that science fiction is doomed (pardon the pun) when some of the most successful films are about aliens, space ships, and monsters?
... is not any crappy detail about some country or historical figure or something else you can find in any other reference work. The true strength are its entries on stuff that you really want to know -- try looking up the background on Willow Rosenberg from Buffy in the Britannica, or Slashdot for that matter. I can reach over to my shelf to find out who one the War of the Roses, but Wikipedia is just about the only reference that will tell me when Deanna Troi's birthday is.
Now the DVD player won't read anything, not the Season 5 disk, none of our other disks...nothing!
That's okay. Season 6 of "Buffy" is terribly depressing anyway, and Season 7 has the worst writing of the whole show. You've seen the most important parts.
I can testify that VideoLAN works great with Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", in fact on a G4, it works better than the stupid DVD Player that Apple includes by default. The important part is the G4 processor, it seems, since the G3 doesn't have the AltiVec stuff that is needed for fast video. G3s can do it, they just have to work a lot harder.
If most of the updates will be available for current versions of Windows, what is the incentive to upgrade?"
So you don't look like a complete bozo when all your friends show off their Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and Linux new X.org systems. Both are looking really cool already, are getting lots of press coverage, and Microsoft needs to do something to give their customers the feeling that they are not being left behind any more than they are already. This is a "me too" release.
This looks like it is going to be just one of those Yet Another Stupid Deaths (YASD) in NetHack for SCO: "There is something here you cannot see!" will be the message from now, while the are stumbling around with AC 10, the dunce's cap, their god angry because thei ate their pet, dragging the ball and chain around with them, and their cursed rusting orcish dagger stuck to their hand. "It hits! It bites! It kicks!" will be the next lines, with the final message something like: "Killed by a Nazgul". And don't you just know every article in their grave will be cursed...the really fun thing? Even if they do make it to Mine Town, the gnomes are not going to be on their side in this one.
Maybe they should just eat some yellow fungus, read a scroll of fire, and enjoy the little time they have less watching the the show.
This isn't going to work -- you simply can't solve a social / legal problem with technology. The only way we are going to get rid of spam is if the U.S. makes it a crime, but there is no sign of that: The new law in fact has done nothing less than legalize it. Don't get your hopes up for a new one: Congress gets too much money from industry and too few Americans care to vote that it is a no-brainer for it to support the spam-makers over the citizens -- I'm sorry, the correct word these days is "consumers", isn't it?
So, yeah, nice technology, but nothing the bad guys can't get around. If you are serious about stopping spam, stop playing with your computer and start bugging your congressperson.
You don't see junk patents in other countries
on
Microsoft Patents sudo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It doesn't matter how well staffed the patent office is. It is humanly impossible for a government office to realistically assess all of human knowledge for prior art.
As true as that is, you don't see the patent offices of other countries passing out patents to everybody and his dog for things that anybody with five minutes of experience in the field knows are an old hat. This is getting ridiculous. Next thing you know, Microsoft will be patenting the use of nine inch nails for fixing people to two wood beams set at right angles and demanding money from Trent Reznor.
There is some systematic failure in the American patent process that is responsible for these junk patents, and the longer it is left unfixed, the more expensive it is going to be to go back and clear out the deadwood. Now how much staff is that going to take? How high will the bill be for all the lawyers, judges, and clerks be that it will take to return the system to sanity?
Then again, the U.S. has money to burn, don't we. It's not like we're paying for a war halfway around the globe or are losing business to India and China or have a poverty problem...
I've always wondered about people who seem to be more interesting in collecting games than playing them. Discounting the Atari ST games (which should tell you my age), the shelf with games is about a yard long, and that is counting "re-buying" games of the same kind: Civ went to Civ II went to Call to Power for Linux, Quake went to Quake II to Quake 3, Age of Empires went to Age of Kings, and MOO2 went to MOO3 (and then back to MOO2 very, very quickly). Those are the games that I still play -- Call to Power is a game I expect to be playing for decades. And then of course there is NetHack, which I see more as a life-long quest...nothing comes close to depth of game play.
So frankly, if you have time for all those games, either you don't have a life (job, house, wife, kids), you are not a player, but a collector, or you are not letting yourself get your money's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
I watched Buffy religiously (and afterwards went out and bought all the DVDs) and before that it was STNG. These shows were funny, intelligent, thought provoking and (with the exception of the first season of STNG and the deus ex machina-farce that is Season 7 of Buffy) well written.
And what are they trying to feed me now?
Enterprise should be taken out and shot for the good of the francise, CSI: All over is always the same, and don't get me started on things like Fear Factor or Survivor. The least bad is Scrubs (some very tighly written episodes with good dialog) but even that doesn't come close to the well prepared punch of "Once More, With Feeling". The narrative is dead in American television; even watching "Restless" over and over again to figure out the remaining hints is so much more fun than watching some silicon-breasted teenager with no brain puke up mixed worms.
So basically, I turn to books, computer games, and fooling around with friends who blog. There is more Terry Pratchett every year, I expect I'll still be trying to finish NetHack on my deathbed, and there is a whole Internet out there with fun, creative people doing interesting things.
If TV stops being stupid -- bring back Willow! -- I might take another look. Until then, my DVD player is the default setting for the big screen.
I wonder just how hard AbiWord will get hit when OOo 2.0 comes out this year. You know, an OOo that doesn't take half of the morning to start up...
With the possible exception of the O.J. trial, this must be the most embarrassing court case the U.S. has had to suffer through in front of an international audience. It took the German legal system, what, a week to bitch-slap SCO? And they didn't even dare try any of this crap in countries like Britain.
So just what will it take for an American judge to finally throw this whole pile out? Why does SCO get to spread rumors that hurt the business of RedHat, IBM, and Novell for months and months without one single bit of hard evidence? This is not a game, it is about real money that is being lost because of FUD, real damage to product images and real smears to reputations. Just why does the judge get to wait forever to get something, anything done?
If P.J. has convinced anybody of anything, it is that the rest of the democratic countries can thank heaven that they are not stuck with the 18th Century anachronism we Americans pretend is a real, functioning legal system. Care to hazard a guess how much the lawyers have made on this already?
Am I the only one who cringes everytime he hears the word "Intel" in an ad, because you just know that their stupid jingle will follow? After years of being subjected to dah-dah-DAH-dah in just about every single ad for a laptop or a computer on TV, this is reason enough to buy AMD.
Dear Intel ad people, there is such a thing as overdoing things. Why don't you quit the "repeats are everything" theory and switch to the "let's be cool and funny" version? Works for Apple anytime.
Until then, I'm saving for my dual Opteron system. You can take your dah-dah-DAH-dah and...
Well, yes, of course, just like IBM. The reason for this is that it is the law: Novell and IBM are both public owned companies, and therefore every person who works for them has to spend every waking moment thinking about how to increase shareholder value. Note they don't have to give a damn about the product or -- oh horror! -- the customer, because these are just means to an end. The moment Novell stops thinking about how to make cash, they get sued.
The best introduction to this, as to most things in life, is of course Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Check out where he explains business plans.
This, by the way, is the reason that Microsoft is getting slowly cut into bits by Linux: Microsoft's first and foremost worry always has to be shareholder value, not the quality of the product. Spending money for security is bad for them because they don't make more money from it: If they can get by without it, their profit is higher. The Linux people are free to concentrate on the product. On the long run, this makes a difference.
Another thing that should be mentioned is that c't are just about the only magazine in Germany that publishes science fiction short stories. In a country where science fiction is considered to be Trivialliteratur that educated people should be ashamed of wasting their time with, this is especially noteworthy.
However:
Incredable as it might seem, c't has been slowly dumbing down its content and focusing more and more on test and reports instead of the hands-on stuff that made them famous. It used to be that they would lead you through the steps to build your own bloody computer, do cool coding things in assembler (these were the eight bit days), and stuff that would send most of their current readers screaming. They once started a Java course, but stopped it after a few episodes.
Given this hard core background, c't was amazingly slow to take Linux seriously and in fact just about ignored it right up to the point where people like me found it was not worth the price. In the old days, they would have been jumping all over the kernel, explaining all the juicy little techniques to their users and showing them how to change stuff themselves. No go: The Windows crowd is probably just larger and their ads pay more.
It is nice to see that there is an English edition of iX. However, what they really should do is launch a Linux spin-off. I can't believe I am the only one who misses the good old c't, and the Linux community should be easily large enough to make it worth their parent company's time.
The same might be true at some point for ThunderBird, but at the moment, KMail is just so far ahead of everything else that hurts. When that happens, though, Microsoft should be very, very afraid: If you don't need to care about the operating system anymore for 95 percent of the things you do, you don't need to pay all that money to actually buy one from them.
1. Find the lowest price for the part you want. There are machines on the Internet that will help you do that.
2. Go to an online auctioneer.
3. Enter your maximum bid for the part: Lowest price in store minus shipping costs given by the person selling.
4. Wait until the auction is finished.
5. If you didn't win, repeat steps 3 and 4. Otherwise:
6. Savings!
Obviously you need patience, because you're going to lose a couple of auctions, but the amount I've saved this way is pretty spectacular. There are some things that I wouldn't get used, of couse, like hard disks or monitors, but everything else: Cut out the middlemen, screw the store before they can screw you.
So what we obviously need is the next medium so we have something new to blame all violence on. I suggest iPods: All that music all the time, the glare of the white headphones, and now the thousands and thousands of pornographic images that teenagers carry around with them everywhere just have to have a bad influence. When will Australia finally live up to its moral responsibilty and ban them? And now that Bush has been reelected, shouldn't Ashcroft finally do something to save American's children from Apple's murderous grip?
I always thought Steve Jobs is smiling just a little to brightly when he holds up those things...
With serious gaming, DVI is the way to go.
Probably one of the saddest developments in America in the last few decades is the way "abuse humor" has replaced the real thing -- more and more seems to be about making fun of other people, putting them down, and claiming this is funny. I realize that insulting people is easier than displaying real talent, but still. It is sad to me as an American that the best English-language comedians by far and wide today seem to be Brits, while we're paying "shock jocks" milions to spew garbage that wouldn't be allowed on any well-run playground.
What is even more depressing is the complete lack of self-irony in these pieces. Take Monty Python's song "Never Be Rude To An Arab", where the singer makes fun of himself more than anybody else -- these are the masters, go snivel at their feet. "Fawlty Towers" has an episode where all they do is make fun of Germans ("Never mention the war!") but it is done so well that even my German friends can laugh, because John Cleese makes such a complete ass out of himself, too. Eddie Murphy has lots of abusive humor in his stand-up pieces, but he is the first to make poke fun of himself. At least the guy from Jackass is sticking his own tongue in drainage pipes.
And sorry, I think "ricer" is a racest term. Obviously the Slashdot editors and a lot of people here don't agree, but I was pretty suprised to see this article promoted here. Hope they don't get into trouble with OSTG.
So: It is not funny, it offers no insight, and uses racist language for what seems to be its own sake. Even if it has the word "Gentoo" in it and it is a slow day, I fail to see what this is doing on the front page of Slashdot. Me, I'll stick with reruns of the Soviet Russia jokes, and -- and mod the original article down as "troll".
Now try doing that without looking up things in a book -- obviously I cheated here and just used the GCC. You see what I mean, though: Writing a mail program in assembler is somewhat more tricky than Python.
Note that I am a Linux person at heart and have my gripes with Apple -- the stupid spanning block in the iBooks, for example -- but this is one thing they do very, very well.
Sorry to distrub your editorializing here, but there are in fact quite a number of countries that do this. Other things more modern democracies have found out work pretty well are not announcing any election results until everybody's vote is in (aw, the Californian says, why go vote, Gore is going to win anyway); vote on a Sunday so people don't have to skip work; give everybody the same ballot sheet; give every person one vote instead of some screwy system with a bunch of middlemen who distort the effect of the popular vote.
As with the legal system and electricity, America's electorial system suffers enormously from being one of the first ones implemented and the inability of Congress to pass any serious reforms. Get rid of trial by jury, switch to 220 volts, make it a direct vote, and then you will be ready to enter the 21. Century. Computers that run with 220 volts are twice as fast!
Works for ethernet, too...
Information for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
That's okay. Season 6 of "Buffy" is terribly depressing anyway, and Season 7 has the worst writing of the whole show. You've seen the most important parts.
Finished NetHack yet?
I can testify that VideoLAN works great with Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", in fact on a G4, it works better than the stupid DVD Player that Apple includes by default. The important part is the G4 processor, it seems, since the G3 doesn't have the AltiVec stuff that is needed for fast video. G3s can do it, they just have to work a lot harder.
So you don't look like a complete bozo when all your friends show off their Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and Linux new X.org systems. Both are looking really cool already, are getting lots of press coverage, and Microsoft needs to do something to give their customers the feeling that they are not being left behind any more than they are already. This is a "me too" release.
Maybe they should just eat some yellow fungus, read a scroll of fire, and enjoy the little time they have less watching the the show.
So, yeah, nice technology, but nothing the bad guys can't get around. If you are serious about stopping spam, stop playing with your computer and start bugging your congressperson.
As true as that is, you don't see the patent offices of other countries passing out patents to everybody and his dog for things that anybody with five minutes of experience in the field knows are an old hat. This is getting ridiculous. Next thing you know, Microsoft will be patenting the use of nine inch nails for fixing people to two wood beams set at right angles and demanding money from Trent Reznor.
There is some systematic failure in the American patent process that is responsible for these junk patents, and the longer it is left unfixed, the more expensive it is going to be to go back and clear out the deadwood. Now how much staff is that going to take? How high will the bill be for all the lawyers, judges, and clerks be that it will take to return the system to sanity?
Then again, the U.S. has money to burn, don't we. It's not like we're paying for a war halfway around the globe or are losing business to India and China or have a poverty problem...
So frankly, if you have time for all those games, either you don't have a life (job, house, wife, kids), you are not a player, but a collector, or you are not letting yourself get your money's worth.