for iso cd-r's, you also don't have infinite space - for those car and portable players that use the data cd's
You don't have infinite space? Let's see, at 128kbps, you can fit 11 hours of music on a CD. If you think that sounds like shit, go up to 256, and put 5+ hours on it. 320kbps will still give you over 4 hours. On a piece of storage that costs less than a dollar. (Less than 50 cents if you buy in sufficient bulk.) That's not "stupid-cheap"? I'd call that as close to infinite storage as anyone gets today. ---- "Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
They chose Linux because it's very developer-friendly, so that they can easily code the big window with giant red letters that says "ACCESS DENIED". (Sorry, couldn't resist.) ---- "Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
Those are NOT the only two albums, with the advent of CDR/CDRW mp3 players. I got an Iomega Hipzip (cheap 40MB removable media) for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I'm exchanging it for a Phillips Expanium. CD-R/RW was already my favorite storage medium, since they average to a dollar apiece, can be read in nearly every computer, and can hold about 6 and a half ZIP disks. Now I can play music from them? At 128 kbps, that's 11 hours for a dollar! For the purist, it's still 5 hours at 256. Want to go up to 320? You're still way over 75 minutes. My prediction is that, unless the industry can stop it, this will be the new standard for audio distribution. Kudos to Phillips for leading the way and not sucking up the RIAA.
Does anyone out there can identify with me on this - my mouse is killing my hand a lot faster than my keyboard. Mouse motion is, IMHO, a lot less natural than typing. The only time I've ever felt really "at home" with a pointing device was on my dad's Toshiba Satellite laptop, which had something which, according to a little Internet research, is called Accupoint. Apparently it's a trademark of Toshiba. Anyway, it looks, feels, and is the size of a pencil's eraser and it sits somewhere on the keyboard, and you just touch it lightly to move the mouse pointer around. To each his own, but it felt like this thing was reading my mind.
Does anyone have ANY idea where I could get one of these, or something similar, for a PS/2 port to replace my mouse?
I've hear the story with auto companies, oil companies, tire companies...as the villains.
Yes, the correct answer is all three. National City Lines was a holding company formed mainly by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. Here's the story from my hometown of Philadelphia's point of view.
Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time, sparked by astonishingly inventive new technologies like the PS 2.
Ok, if you'd told me that game DESIGNERS are the new yada yada yada of our time, I'd be with you. Gamers aren't artists any more than moviegoers are artists. They're consumers. They plunk down their cash and take it and enjoy it. I'm not calling them stupid, I play games and go to movies, but I'm saying that although it may take intelligence to fully appreciate a game, there is no creativity whatsoever involved.
Write a column on how the video game is an amazing art form that's going to change the world, and I'll read it. But don't you dare write it without researching. Play Infocom's text adventures, play some of the newer text adventures written in the Infocom engine (some are truly brilliant), play Sierra's 80's and early 90's "Quest" titles all the way through, and compare them to today's games, for better or for worse. You might write something really insightful.
You mentioned a web page of the State of Texas. I know this is offtopic but I can't resist showing this to people. This is not a joke.
They have this Execution Info page where you can see a list of everyone Texas has executed since 1982, with pictures of them and their last words. Now maybe you're saying "Gee Mark, this all isn't morbid enough for me!" Well guess what? You can see last meal requests for all 239 of them. Nobody will ever accuse this bunch of having sparse web content.
So far, the only thing it can't do is MS Networking (browse fileshares, access resources, log into domains, and etc.).
Well, they have Samba for that. I've successfully mounted my friends' shared mp3 directories with Samba and used them as/mnt/joesmp3s for example. I'd imagine once you did that, you could get Win4Lin to recognize it as part of your hard drive....
This is a recurring problem that the left has which the right successfully avoids--no one on the left knows how to compromise.
Actually I see the opposite as the right's problem. The reason John McCain and Pat Buchanan posed no threat to Bush is that they have Rush Limbaugh on the radio for three hours every day towing the party line and keeping all the faithful in line. Bush was able to abandon his party's core constituency but keep their votes through fear. Sad, really. Buchanan and McCain were the real thing for conservatives, not just corporate pawns....
Also good are the early Sierra games.
Amen and Hallelujah. Actually, not just early. In the early-to-mid 90's, they were still making games with memorable characters and plots, except with high-res VGA they could use beautiful hand-painted backgrounds and facial expressions too.
Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. There's a huge bug in it when it runs on Pentium chips, which I haven't been able to fix, but I haven't forgotten it from my 486 days. I cried the first time I saw scene of Toby's sacrifice.... I can't say anymore. But play that game. Oh my god. Play that game.
I saw Nader talk at my college a few weeks ago, and in the Q&A time, this classic geek came to the mic and started talking about DeCSS, and asked what he would do about it in office. Nader said "Well, in my experience our copyright law is too strict in favor of the copyright owners, but i'm really not familiar with the case in question."
A disappointing answer, sure. But now think about what Gore or Bush might have done in the same situation. (I don't mean the same topic, I mean a topic they had never heard of.) Ask them a question about something they don't know about, and you'll get the classic BS. "Well, what's important is that we build bridges to the future." "What's important is that we protect the freedom to innovate." "We all need to work together."
I'll take an honest "I don't know" over bullcrap any day. In my experience, this applies to most Libertarians as well. They give it to you straight, and that's why they get my votes.
They go for the easiest point of entry, like AOL or Yahoo chat. And who do they find there? Slack jawed yokels who can't get to IRC anymore than they could.
No argument there. That got me thinking, though. Wouldn't it be great if Yahoo chat could have some kind of moderation? In Neil's Unix Talk Server, people are promoted to guards and admins, who can kick people off, or muzzle them, etc. Now obviously you'd have the d00dz who would get m0d and turn it into a big DOS....
What if they had user-created and user-run public chats? In other words, I can create the "Mark's City of Brotherly Love" chat room, and anyone can access it, but I get to ban/muzzle anyone I want, and I get to give submoderator access to anyone I want, too.
When was the last time you got inspired by a speaker?
Inspired? Not sure. Educated and made to think in an entertaining manner? Many times.
Even if all they do is tell their story, you will probably learn from it, as long as they can speak decently enough. I've never heard a firsthand account of the whole Open Source development process from someone who worked on a project not as formal as the Linux kernel, but which still required some kind of "team". I'd like to hear how it got started, how the others got involved, how they interact, and what problems they encounter. Then I'd like to ask questions. Anybody wanna come to Rutgers and do this?
I think what keeps useage (and social isolation) down is the lack of community with a point...
I've been part of what felt like real communities on the net before. My last two years of high school, I was a hardcore regular on the Subway a telnet chat server running Neil's Unix Talk Server, a GPL chat server that was remarkably easy for a newbie to configure. There were some nights when my long-distance girlfriend and I couldn't get a private room, it was so packed. Since the advent of ICQ and AIM, people have lost a lot of interest in telnet chatting, but I know those places still exist as tight communities.
Now, I am not necessarily saying these CAUSE isolation (it's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing), but I just disagree with the idea that all online chatting is limited to LOL and 13/m/NJ.
Now before you flame me, let me say that I use Linux and I own a Compaq, so I know about all the problems with proprietary hardware. (My favorite new one is WinSpeakers with no volume knob, so you can't easily change the volume in Linux and if Windows decides to crash while playing a system sound, it loops endlessly and you have to hit the power switch or wake up your roommate.)
However, I think the biggest problem with a system made by the local geek is support. (No, seriously, wait on the flames.) If all of a sudden the computer decides not to boot, is it the RAM, the HD, the motherboard, or the processor? It's up to the geek to figure out, if he returns your calls at all. With a Gateway, I can just send the whole baby back to the company and let them worry about it. I know someone this happened to.... it IS a consideration.
He is unwilling and unable to deal with anyone who doesn't look and sound like him.
This is less about xenophobia and language barriers than about the state of education. Theoretically, professors are there to teach. In fact, they are there to do research and bring acclaim/money to the university with said research. I'm sure the woman in question is doing some important academic work at the frontiers of Computer Science.
I say it's not about language because I've had plenty of English-speaking teachers who clearly thought of undergraduate teaching as janitorial work, and put no effort whatsoever into it. They should not be teaching students who are paying to learn.
By the same token, people who cannot speak the official language of a country should not teach in that country. I speak French as a horrendous second language and I would not dream of attempting to teach French students.
What really pisses me off is that at my college I work in a program tutoring people from our maintenance staff, mainly from China and the Dominican Republic, in English. They are required to take it. Yet many of them speak equal or better English than many professors, but nobody would consider demanding that the professors learn the language.
In conclusion, expecting someone to be qualified for his or her job is not racism.
In my current financial situation, $4.95 is absolutely nothing for what Napster means to me. However, Napster's strength is in the number of its users. A subscription fee would put people off: some wouldn't wanna pay, some wouldn't feel like going through the registration process for something they hadn't tried before (in particularly lazy moods i won't do free registrations with emailed passwords), and some don't have credit cards. Therefore, I wouldn't be paying $4.95 for the current Napster, I'd be paying $4.95 for a severely limited Napster, which WOULDN'T be worth the money. And others would feel the same way, and the chicken, and the egg, etc.
I took an encryption class last semester, and it was good, but this grad student came in to talk to us one time, and she said she worked for Counterpane and she was working on Twofish. She had really pale skin and big black hair and she dressed all in black, so she looked like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She laughed a lot, really loudly, at times when it didn't make sense to laugh. I'm scared of Twofish.
That's what I've been telling everyone this year. Gore doesn't represent liberals, and Bush doesn't represent conservatives. And as for libertarians, if they buy the Republican party's pseudo-libertarian rhetoric ("We're against Big Government, by which we mean we're against the government doing anything that big corporations don't like!") I've got some oceanfront property for sale in Kansas.
Those presidential debates mean nothing now that Nader, Browne, and Buchanan have been excluded. Do you expect to hear Gore and Bush debate the death penalty? The war on drugs? Free trade with China? Any of the scary technological issues spawned by too much corporate power we read about here every day? Nope. As Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) say, "We don't care who you vote for: We've already bought them."
Their site seems designed to discourage everyone from downloading their distro. I guess they figure if people are inconvenienced long enough, they might just give up the cash. Not me, I'm a student and I'm cheap.
I'm not advocating legal action against these people, but it really seems like a violation of the spirit of the GPL. If I weren't a Linux moron I'd start a "Free SuSE" distro that would basically take all the SuSE packages (they do have a list) and put them up on FTP sites in ISOs. Ah well.
I don't want to get into a flamewar with anybody, but I've wanted to discuss Mac filetyping with people here for a while. Fact is, I hate it. I worked as a classroom assistant in a Mac lab one summer, and those types caused me nothing but trouble. It's great within the Mac world, exchanging files with other Macs, but when you get into downloading from other sites running Windows and Unix, you're fscked. I remember downloading GIFs from web-based email servers and bending over backwards to get the Mac OS to believe me that yes, it was a fscking GIF, so all the damn Mac image programs would let me open it.
That's one thing that makes me nostalgic for DOS. In Compushow, you could rename a BMP to have the extension.TXT, and the program actually EXAMINED the file to determine the type rather than rejecting it out of hand.
If you care about the cause of getting Linux onto the desktops of people like my mom, then GNOME and KDE are probably the two most significant projects in the whole movement. They are very different, and that difference may end up helping or hurting the Linux desktop. The fact that they have been in a flame war for the last two weeks is certainly not GOOD news, but it's important news. When I saw that KDE was going GPL, I thought maybe, just maybe, it was over. How wrong I was.
I see a Shakespeare for Nerds theater production: Gnomeo and K-D-et. Two teenagers from feuding GUI development mailing lists fall in love and meet a tragic end right before Friar Malda was going to marry them.
It's such a fine line between stealing and learning. If I buy Joe's Guide to Phatty-Bo-Batty HTML and use Example 69 from his chapter on tables in my site, have I stolen? I'll freely admit that every time I want to add something to my site that I don't know how to implement, I find a site that looks like my vision, and pirate some of their HTML.... I don't think there's an easy answer here, except that courtesy is a good thing, and if you feel you owe someone credit, then you should give it.
When Microsoft is developing "Rights Management" software, how can you NOT be paranoid?!
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You don't have infinite space? Let's see, at 128kbps, you can fit 11 hours of music on a CD. If you think that sounds like shit, go up to 256, and put 5+ hours on it. 320kbps will still give you over 4 hours. On a piece of storage that costs less than a dollar. (Less than 50 cents if you buy in sufficient bulk.) That's not "stupid-cheap"? I'd call that as close to infinite storage as anyone gets today.
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
They chose Linux because it's very developer-friendly, so that they can easily code the big window with giant red letters that says "ACCESS DENIED". (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
----
Does anyone have ANY idea where I could get one of these, or something similar, for a PS/2 port to replace my mouse?
----
Yes, the correct answer is all three. National City Lines was a holding company formed mainly by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. Here's the story from my hometown of Philadelphia's point of view.
----
Ok, if you'd told me that game DESIGNERS are the new yada yada yada of our time, I'd be with you. Gamers aren't artists any more than moviegoers are artists. They're consumers. They plunk down their cash and take it and enjoy it. I'm not calling them stupid, I play games and go to movies, but I'm saying that although it may take intelligence to fully appreciate a game, there is no creativity whatsoever involved.
Write a column on how the video game is an amazing art form that's going to change the world, and I'll read it. But don't you dare write it without researching. Play Infocom's text adventures, play some of the newer text adventures written in the Infocom engine (some are truly brilliant), play Sierra's 80's and early 90's "Quest" titles all the way through, and compare them to today's games, for better or for worse. You might write something really insightful.
----
They have this Execution Info page where you can see a list of everyone Texas has executed since 1982, with pictures of them and their last words. Now maybe you're saying "Gee Mark, this all isn't morbid enough for me!" Well guess what? You can see last meal requests for all 239 of them. Nobody will ever accuse this bunch of having sparse web content.
----
Well, they have Samba for that. I've successfully mounted my friends' shared mp3 directories with Samba and used them as /mnt/joesmp3s for example. I'd imagine once you did that, you could get Win4Lin to recognize it as part of your hard drive....
Actually I see the opposite as the right's problem. The reason John McCain and Pat Buchanan posed no threat to Bush is that they have Rush Limbaugh on the radio for three hours every day towing the party line and keeping all the faithful in line. Bush was able to abandon his party's core constituency but keep their votes through fear. Sad, really. Buchanan and McCain were the real thing for conservatives, not just corporate pawns....
Also good are the early Sierra games.
Amen and Hallelujah. Actually, not just early. In the early-to-mid 90's, they were still making games with memorable characters and plots, except with high-res VGA they could use beautiful hand-painted backgrounds and facial expressions too.
Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. There's a huge bug in it when it runs on Pentium chips, which I haven't been able to fix, but I haven't forgotten it from my 486 days. I cried the first time I saw scene of Toby's sacrifice.... I can't say anymore. But play that game. Oh my god. Play that game.
A disappointing answer, sure. But now think about what Gore or Bush might have done in the same situation. (I don't mean the same topic, I mean a topic they had never heard of.) Ask them a question about something they don't know about, and you'll get the classic BS. "Well, what's important is that we build bridges to the future." "What's important is that we protect the freedom to innovate." "We all need to work together."
I'll take an honest "I don't know" over bullcrap any day. In my experience, this applies to most Libertarians as well. They give it to you straight, and that's why they get my votes.
No argument there. That got me thinking, though. Wouldn't it be great if Yahoo chat could have some kind of moderation? In Neil's Unix Talk Server, people are promoted to guards and admins, who can kick people off, or muzzle them, etc. Now obviously you'd have the d00dz who would get m0d and turn it into a big DOS....
What if they had user-created and user-run public chats? In other words, I can create the "Mark's City of Brotherly Love" chat room, and anyone can access it, but I get to ban/muzzle anyone I want, and I get to give submoderator access to anyone I want, too.
Yet another idea Mark will never implement.
Even if all they do is tell their story, you will probably learn from it, as long as they can speak decently enough. I've never heard a firsthand account of the whole Open Source development process from someone who worked on a project not as formal as the Linux kernel, but which still required some kind of "team". I'd like to hear how it got started, how the others got involved, how they interact, and what problems they encounter. Then I'd like to ask questions. Anybody wanna come to Rutgers and do this?
Now, I am not necessarily saying these CAUSE isolation (it's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing), but I just disagree with the idea that all online chatting is limited to LOL and 13/m/NJ.
However, I think the biggest problem with a system made by the local geek is support. (No, seriously, wait on the flames.) If all of a sudden the computer decides not to boot, is it the RAM, the HD, the motherboard, or the processor? It's up to the geek to figure out, if he returns your calls at all. With a Gateway, I can just send the whole baby back to the company and let them worry about it. I know someone this happened to.... it IS a consideration.
This is less about xenophobia and language barriers than about the state of education. Theoretically, professors are there to teach. In fact, they are there to do research and bring acclaim/money to the university with said research. I'm sure the woman in question is doing some important academic work at the frontiers of Computer Science.
I say it's not about language because I've had plenty of English-speaking teachers who clearly thought of undergraduate teaching as janitorial work, and put no effort whatsoever into it. They should not be teaching students who are paying to learn.
By the same token, people who cannot speak the official language of a country should not teach in that country. I speak French as a horrendous second language and I would not dream of attempting to teach French students.
What really pisses me off is that at my college I work in a program tutoring people from our maintenance staff, mainly from China and the Dominican Republic, in English. They are required to take it. Yet many of them speak equal or better English than many professors, but nobody would consider demanding that the professors learn the language.
In conclusion, expecting someone to be qualified for his or her job is not racism.
In my current financial situation, $4.95 is absolutely nothing for what Napster means to me. However, Napster's strength is in the number of its users. A subscription fee would put people off: some wouldn't wanna pay, some wouldn't feel like going through the registration process for something they hadn't tried before (in particularly lazy moods i won't do free registrations with emailed passwords), and some don't have credit cards. Therefore, I wouldn't be paying $4.95 for the current Napster, I'd be paying $4.95 for a severely limited Napster, which WOULDN'T be worth the money. And others would feel the same way, and the chicken, and the egg, etc.
"This is easily the most amusingly horrible work of IF I've ever seen." - the first review
I took an encryption class last semester, and it was good, but this grad student came in to talk to us one time, and she said she worked for Counterpane and she was working on Twofish. She had really pale skin and big black hair and she dressed all in black, so she looked like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She laughed a lot, really loudly, at times when it didn't make sense to laugh. I'm scared of Twofish.
That's what I've been telling everyone this year. Gore doesn't represent liberals, and Bush doesn't represent conservatives. And as for libertarians, if they buy the Republican party's pseudo-libertarian rhetoric ("We're against Big Government, by which we mean we're against the government doing anything that big corporations don't like!") I've got some oceanfront property for sale in Kansas.
Those presidential debates mean nothing now that Nader, Browne, and Buchanan have been excluded. Do you expect to hear Gore and Bush debate the death penalty? The war on drugs? Free trade with China? Any of the scary technological issues spawned by too much corporate power we read about here every day? Nope. As Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) say, "We don't care who you vote for: We've already bought them."
Their site seems designed to discourage everyone from downloading their distro. I guess they figure if people are inconvenienced long enough, they might just give up the cash. Not me, I'm a student and I'm cheap.
I'm not advocating legal action against these people, but it really seems like a violation of the spirit of the GPL. If I weren't a Linux moron I'd start a "Free SuSE" distro that would basically take all the SuSE packages (they do have a list) and put them up on FTP sites in ISOs. Ah well.
I don't want to get into a flamewar with anybody, but I've wanted to discuss Mac filetyping with people here for a while. Fact is, I hate it. I worked as a classroom assistant in a Mac lab one summer, and those types caused me nothing but trouble. It's great within the Mac world, exchanging files with other Macs, but when you get into downloading from other sites running Windows and Unix, you're fscked. I remember downloading GIFs from web-based email servers and bending over backwards to get the Mac OS to believe me that yes, it was a fscking GIF, so all the damn Mac image programs would let me open it. .TXT, and the program actually EXAMINED the file to determine the type rather than rejecting it out of hand.
That's one thing that makes me nostalgic for DOS. In Compushow, you could rename a BMP to have the extension
Tired of corporate power? Vote Nader
I see a Shakespeare for Nerds theater production: Gnomeo and K-D-et. Two teenagers from feuding GUI development mailing lists fall in love and meet a tragic end right before Friar Malda was going to marry them.
Tired of corporate power? Vote Nader
When Microsoft is developing "Rights Management" software, how can you NOT be paranoid?!