When can I get this for my car? I would love to come out in the morning to windows free of dew or bug guts! Driving in a hard rain would be much nicer too. Easily worth a 20% premium for the cost of a windshield.
Drink or Die used to host their warez (years ago) on.mil ftp servers that they had cracked (DoD, Department of Defense)
This sounds like a much bigger reason to get 33 months in jail than warezing out new PC games every week. Prosecuting him for piracy and throwing the book at him gets a fat win for the BSA and keeps the egg off the face of the DoD.
If they consider Mozilla 1.0 unstable, then IE and Navigator are each a steaming pile of poo. I have all three browsers installed on my system, and Mozilla 1.0 pounds the rest into the ground. Mozilla runs faster, and has only crashed once on me.
If the RIAA had to live off people like me, their sales would have dropped below 1 billion/year by now. I hate the mass marketed junk on the radio, and none of the CD stores in town (new or used) have listening stations to check out anything but the cover artwork for albums. With Napster gone, I have NO reasonable way to find new music that interests me.
Since the shutdown of Napster, I have shifted all the money that I used to spend on CDs over to DVDs. In two years I have amassed a collection of over 100 DVDs (every one of which plays fine on my computer, BTW). That is a LOT of money out of the RIAA's pockets.
The RIAA complains about having to shell out tons of dough to get stations to play their music. The internet has created an incredible new 'radio' format where they get to go directly to the user, without having to worry about FCC decency laws or paying local stations for airtime (indirectly, but only by one step). Don't tell me it can't be done. I've listened to radio stations from halfway around the world that play in WinAmp. A small Java applet runs in your web browser to tell you what song is playing. To fight piracy, all the record company has to do is overlay a message halfway through the song saying the recording company, artist, album and title. If they are still worried, they can just reduce the song quality to about 96 kbit/sec (radio quality). At that point, anyone who still rips the song from the stream probably would never buy it anyway.
There are dozens of other ways that the RIAA could use the MP3 format to recognize huge profits and goodwill from customers, but their shortsightedness is clouding their judgement.
Why doesn't apple seem to understand what it will take to be a real player? They have the best OS, but their hardware is limited and grossly overpriced. After 20 years, they should realize that a great OS will only sell if it can be installed on the hardware of the user's choice. They would crush Microsoft within 5 years if they would port Mac OSX to Intel/AMD based hardware, sell copies of the OS at $50/ea, and help get software designers to include binaries for both OSes in every box they sell.
Apple is killing themselves by getting entrenched in the hardware side of the market when they should be focused on putting high markup CDroms onto store shelves. Steve Jobs' goal should be to see every x86 based PC sold 'naked', and for people to purchase the OS of their choice to install on it. Apple can go on selling upscale PCs with built in flat screens and dual-processors to yuppies and professionals with 'special needs', but most people just need a cheap PC that is easy to get online with and type papers.
Apple needs a clue.
Before people start getting all excited about how this will help revolutionize the redistribution of historical vinyl recordings, please note that there already are players available that use optical readers instead of needles to get the audio off the record. They were horribly expensive 10 years ago, and I imagine the price is worse now that demand has plummeted.
Amusing, yes. Revolutionary, no. This project rates about on par with the guy who built a DAT changer with a couple of Lego Mindstorms kits.
Unless you are making 150k/year, you should quit. You would be better off going to med school for 4 years and coming out with a MD/CS combined background that will make you a very rare and desireable programmer. ['Doctor' and 'Highly Computer Literate' rarely combine in one person.] All for the same work hours.
Install bandwith meter, hammer line, check usage
on
How to Test Your T1?
·
· Score: 1
Install a bandwidth meter on the machine that all the traffic flows through. Remove any software filtering out pr0n sites. Then let a few teenagers into the office for the afternoon to surf. If your line isn't maxed out at the promised service level, then you're getting ripped.
Or just go over to mp3.com and keep a constant flood of 10 mp3s downloading. They have never had any problem pounding bits down at 400+ KBytes/sec, or 187.50, now that my cable is capped.
dslreports.com usually WRONG about my bandwidth
on
How to Test Your T1?
·
· Score: 1
I've found in my case that DSLreports.com has usually underreported my bandwidth by 25-50%. I have a bandwidth meter installed on my system, and I would run a bot hammering my ISP's newsgroups for about 150 KBytes/sec, and hammer mp3.com (they always have AMAZING bandwidth) for music files for another 300-350 KBytes/sec by downloading 10 files at a time. This resulted in a throughput of 450-500 KBytes/sec over cable, even though DSLreports had reported around 250-300 KBytes/sec just a little earlier before I started hammering with the other stuff.
[not that I have a PVR...]
I think PVR owners are primarily people who watch alot more TV than your average person. Bitching that they don't willingly sit through the same irrelevant commercials over and over is like complaining that someone doesn't eat at your restaurant... enough. If someone has seen your commercial before, don't whine about them skipping it the next time. Especially when they are re-watching a recorded show the second time through.
Don't PVR owners pay like $10/month for the TV listing service? The cable companies should buy them out (or come out with their own service that is free) and insert a reduced number of targetted ads. Once you have watched the show through once with the commercials, you get to watch it after that without them. And commercial breaks should be shorter and less obtrusive because you could set up preferred profiles (car ads, beverage ads, lingerie ads, ads with sports stars, feminine hygiene ads, cleaning product ads, computer ads, movie ads, similar TV show ads, any TV show ads, only new stuff, only special sales, etc).
Commercials take up about 25% of the airtime. 15 minutes out of every hour, about 10 minutes of product placement, and 5 minutes of promo spots for other shows on the network. The PVR knows what you are going to record anyway and can eliminate a few minutes of the promo spots. The other promo spots can be set up to auto-record the show being advertised at the press of a button. The other 10 minutes of airtime has maybe 2 minutes of product information that is of interest to you.
Americans have very busy lives. The more time advertisers spend trying to shove crap at us, the more resistant we are becoming to it. They are completely failing to understand that.
Laws will never stop spammers. The damages are very hard to prove, especially when the judge/jury don't realize that their ISP filters their mail for 95+% of the spam already. Most people just don't GET it. And most spammers are sending the spam from another country, running a fly-by-night operation, so prosecution is nearly impossible.
Filters are helpful, but they still require huge resources to receive the e-mail and process it. And as stated in the article, the risk of a false positive is often much worse than just receiving the spam.
There are already only a few mail relays that are willing to send out spam, and virtually nobody accepts ANY mail from them. The spam going out is coming through illegally used mail servers. This shows what is to be the solution to the problem of spam: ISPs will only act to stop spam when the spammer is damaging their system.
Most spam gets deleted without the enclosed links getting clicked by at least 99%. The company hosting the web site just sees their customer getting some success with their business. They don't know why, and they really don't believe/care when someone e-mails them to say that the user spammed them from a mail relay in china. The user probably paid for a 2 gig/month of traffic, and they are well under quota.
It's time to change that. With a SETI@Home / Prime95 type application, we could easily DDoS a daily spammer off the net. Slashdot alone could easily field 10000 users willing to put their cable modems up to the task of pounding spammers accounts (and possibly the hosting ISP) off the net. Beat them down until the account appears to be deleted. Maybe then ISPs would hold users accountable for being spammers. Web hosting contracts might start including fines ($500+) for abusing the service, rather than just the scary risk of a cancelled account. All we have to do is beat them down before the few clueless morons come buying and make it worth their while.
Legal? Sure, I don't see why not. I can send a 10 http requests to the ISP in a second... I've never heard of a law that says I can't do that every second. As long as the computers involved are from willing users (sysadmins get permission in writing first), there is no 'hacking'. Every DDoS case I've ever heard of involved charges of 2k+ computers 'hacked', rather than the ensuing attack. Even if it is illegal, this is vigilantism that nobody (other than the hosting ISP) is going to complain about.
Every damn LAN card I've ever bought (and there have been many) has come with the drivers on floppy. The one time I can't download the drivers off the net to get my machine back up and running is the time the stupid drivers come on floppy. For the love of god, why do the stupid manufacturers put lan drivers on floppy instead of CDrom??? It's 2002, if someone doesn't have access to a CDrom, yet does have a floppy in the machine, then they are rather sad.
But then you could be comfortable saying 'myob' to the 'e-mail' field, and then fill in the rest truthfully. They just have to make it so that there is at least as much effort involved in checking off the 'myob' answer as putting in a real one. I'm beginning to think that the internet is being taken over by moron execs who never actually USE the internet themselves. I see stupid things all the time that make me leave a website before I've even gotten past the second page.
The kind of questions that most of these sites ask include stuff that is impolite for friends to ask each other sometimes, never mind some random business. If they want accurate results, they should include the option for people to answer with a "MYOB" option. People are rather unlikely to keep tossing in crap data when they have the "MYOB" option, at least not in the 40% range. There is no way in hell that anyone making 100k+/year would actually admit it and give a business their real e-mail address. They would be begging for a flood of advertisements. Why is it that online business feel they have the right to try and force so much personal information out of us? In brick 'n mortar stores, the worst info anyone asks me for is my zip code (or age to purchase alcohol). They can get my name if I use my credit card, but I can easily pay cash to avoid that. It's very ironic that NYTimes would run this story.... Why do they expect me to tell them where I live, work, and what I make, just to read their articles? The paper version is nowhere near this invasive.
Ebay raise fees? They would never dream of doing that... C2it from citibank might actually have a chance of success now. They were basically the same as Billpoint, but without the Ebay integration.
After like 2 years of screwed up payments from idiot customers, Paypal finally introduced a feature this year where you can cancel an un-filed transaction in the first few days. So when a bonehead bidder double pays you for an item, you can just cancel the second payment, rather than refunding the money and sucking up paypal's comission.
I would benefit greatly from a keyboard that would allow me to type pretty much non-stop with my left hand. I'd much rather be able to keep hold of the mouse in one hand and keyboard in the other, rather than switch my right hand back and forth all the time. This is probably not very feasible, but at least a situation where the least used keys like x,q,w,z are all moved to the right area replacing m,i,o,p. I could probably type a few words out in the time it takes me to get my hand off the mouse (or page up/down, arrow keys) and centered on the home keys. Surely, the genetic algorithym came up with one glaring conclusion after 100k lines of C code: SWITCH THE SHIFT POSITION OF BRACES AND BRACKETS. And why is the minus key non-shifted, while the plus key is.
Sprint has been sending out mailers to customers on old plans recommending which new plan they should be on based on their usage. My old plan, which I almost never go over, is the original $29.95/month plan. Their cheapest plan now is $39.95. They actually recommended I move to the $39.95 plan as the best value for me.
When I first saw it, I thought they were discontinuing my old plan and forcing me to pick a new one. I was rather pissed at the tactic. Instead I became annoyed that they would try to trick me into a more expensive plan.
Sometimes when you say this, they will tell you at warp speed that in order to be added to their no call list, you can call a 1-800 number to request it. They are speaking as fast as they can because they will hang up on you at the end of the sentence, leaving you still on their call list. You need to cut them off right away and tell them on on uncertain terms that *they* will personally take you off the call list right now.
In general, 'put me on your do not call list' is highly effective'. Without adding myself to any state or national registries, it's cut my telemarketing hassles dramatically.
Also, don't thank them for anything, not even a 'no, thank you'. They don't deserve any courtesy. And I don't buy any of the crap about 'making ends meet'. The checker at the grocery store is making ends meet. The garbage man is making ends meet. Telemarketers get paid to harass people.
Regarding the original cell phone thread, I've never received a single telemarketing call to my cell phone in about two years. I've also never given the number to a single company.
[I've been playing Magic since 1994.]
The only people that I could see willing to pay full retail PLUS entry fee of $3 to play in a single elimination booster draft would have to be living somewhere where you couldn't get 8 players together on your own. Of course, if you live somewhere like that, you've probably never heard of Magic anyway.
Most people who have internet access never pay more than $80/box of cards, ~$2.25/pack. This is a whole dollar less than what WotC is charging for VIRTUAL packs. Add on entry fee, for a total of $15, and someone trying out MTGonline for the first time could spend nearly $50 in a single night getting swept over and over.
"But what about card redemption?", you may ask. Card redemption is a joke. They want people to think that there is actually some sort of parity between real and online cards. There is NOT. You have to collect a *complete*set* just to redeem them for a real complete set. I guarantee you will have tons of leftover virtual rares, uncommons and commons that you can't redeem. Even if you manage to trade all of your rares 1 for 1 to build a set of Odyssey (the last standalone expansion), you would have paid over $360 for the set. SUCKER! You could have bought the same thing on Ebay for $110-$140.
My scores for MtGOnline:
Game mechanics implementation: A+
Graphics: B (it's a card game)
GUI: F (horribly inconvienent to navigate)
Price: F- (even the malls don't charge retail price for REAL cards)
Playtesting: D (you can't playtest your real decks unless you have virtual copies of the cards too! holy crap!)
OVERALL: C-
It does make a pretty good database to search for cards.
"* How dare they call it The Two Towers after 9-11"
Not only was the story named 'The Two Towers' LONG BEFORE the destruction of the World Trade Center, but the naming occured before even the BUILDING of the World Trade Center. It's time to relax your sphincter already.
Matrox has always been the king of making quality 2D cards with killer features for the business and graphics features. They have never been a compelling 3D company. Their 3D engineering team has always been riding behind the pack. They focus on a few very interesting features to get recognition, but always manage to put out a poor 3D product. This board is their submission for their 2D customers who want an exceptional 2D board including *average* 3D gaming performance.
Expect these to be snatched up by the programmers and graphic artists who like to play games once in a while. There are lots of people who will grab them just for the easy to set up triple-head design who never game at all.
If you're not going to hook up two or three monitors to this thing, stay away from it like the plague.
The commonly used benchmarks change about every 12-18 months. Video card power has been doubling every 6 to 9 months though. This means that if you make a benchmark that has the average new hardware posting framerates of 40FPS(decent), in a year, that same benchmark will be tossing out scores of 100-120.
So why don't you toss the old benchmark away? The only real reason to go to the trouble of writing a new benchmark program is to test and showcase newer graphics card features. However, if you use the latest features that are only available in $250+ graphics cards, the benchmark can't be used to compare the new card to older cards selling for $150 and under. So all you have really done is make a pretty demo.
People who buy the cards that score 300FPS in Quake 3 arena don't pay the money for the Quake 32 Arena framerate, they pay it for the framerate it's going to get in Doom3, and all the games that are coming out in the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
When can I get this for my car? I would love to come out in the morning to windows free of dew or bug guts! Driving in a hard rain would be much nicer too. Easily worth a 20% premium for the cost of a windshield.
Drink or Die used to host their warez (years ago) on .mil ftp servers that they had cracked (DoD, Department of Defense)
This sounds like a much bigger reason to get 33 months in jail than warezing out new PC games every week. Prosecuting him for piracy and throwing the book at him gets a fat win for the BSA and keeps the egg off the face of the DoD.
If they consider Mozilla 1.0 unstable, then IE and Navigator are each a steaming pile of poo. I have all three browsers installed on my system, and Mozilla 1.0 pounds the rest into the ground. Mozilla runs faster, and has only crashed once on me.
If the RIAA had to live off people like me, their sales would have dropped below 1 billion/year by now. I hate the mass marketed junk on the radio, and none of the CD stores in town (new or used) have listening stations to check out anything but the cover artwork for albums. With Napster gone, I have NO reasonable way to find new music that interests me.
Since the shutdown of Napster, I have shifted all the money that I used to spend on CDs over to DVDs. In two years I have amassed a collection of over 100 DVDs (every one of which plays fine on my computer, BTW). That is a LOT of money out of the RIAA's pockets.
The RIAA complains about having to shell out tons of dough to get stations to play their music. The internet has created an incredible new 'radio' format where they get to go directly to the user, without having to worry about FCC decency laws or paying local stations for airtime (indirectly, but only by one step). Don't tell me it can't be done. I've listened to radio stations from halfway around the world that play in WinAmp. A small Java applet runs in your web browser to tell you what song is playing. To fight piracy, all the record company has to do is overlay a message halfway through the song saying the recording company, artist, album and title. If they are still worried, they can just reduce the song quality to about 96 kbit/sec (radio quality). At that point, anyone who still rips the song from the stream probably would never buy it anyway.
There are dozens of other ways that the RIAA could use the MP3 format to recognize huge profits and goodwill from customers, but their shortsightedness is clouding their judgement.
Why doesn't apple seem to understand what it will take to be a real player? They have the best OS, but their hardware is limited and grossly overpriced. After 20 years, they should realize that a great OS will only sell if it can be installed on the hardware of the user's choice. They would crush Microsoft within 5 years if they would port Mac OSX to Intel/AMD based hardware, sell copies of the OS at $50/ea, and help get software designers to include binaries for both OSes in every box they sell.
Apple is killing themselves by getting entrenched in the hardware side of the market when they should be focused on putting high markup CDroms onto store shelves. Steve Jobs' goal should be to see every x86 based PC sold 'naked', and for people to purchase the OS of their choice to install on it. Apple can go on selling upscale PCs with built in flat screens and dual-processors to yuppies and professionals with 'special needs', but most people just need a cheap PC that is easy to get online with and type papers.
Apple needs a clue.
Before people start getting all excited about how this will help revolutionize the redistribution of historical vinyl recordings, please note that there already are players available that use optical readers instead of needles to get the audio off the record. They were horribly expensive 10 years ago, and I imagine the price is worse now that demand has plummeted.
Amusing, yes. Revolutionary, no. This project rates about on par with the guy who built a DAT changer with a couple of Lego Mindstorms kits.
Unless you are making 150k/year, you should quit. You would be better off going to med school for 4 years and coming out with a MD/CS combined background that will make you a very rare and desireable programmer. ['Doctor' and 'Highly Computer Literate' rarely combine in one person.] All for the same work hours.
Install a bandwidth meter on the machine that all the traffic flows through. Remove any software filtering out pr0n sites. Then let a few teenagers into the office for the afternoon to surf. If your line isn't maxed out at the promised service level, then you're getting ripped.
Or just go over to mp3.com and keep a constant flood of 10 mp3s downloading. They have never had any problem pounding bits down at 400+ KBytes/sec, or 187.50, now that my cable is capped.
I've found in my case that DSLreports.com has usually underreported my bandwidth by 25-50%. I have a bandwidth meter installed on my system, and I would run a bot hammering my ISP's newsgroups for about 150 KBytes/sec, and hammer mp3.com (they always have AMAZING bandwidth) for music files for another 300-350 KBytes/sec by downloading 10 files at a time. This resulted in a throughput of 450-500 KBytes/sec over cable, even though DSLreports had reported around 250-300 KBytes/sec just a little earlier before I started hammering with the other stuff.
[not that I have a PVR...]
I think PVR owners are primarily people who watch alot more TV than your average person. Bitching that they don't willingly sit through the same irrelevant commercials over and over is like complaining that someone doesn't eat at your restaurant... enough. If someone has seen your commercial before, don't whine about them skipping it the next time. Especially when they are re-watching a recorded show the second time through.
Don't PVR owners pay like $10/month for the TV listing service? The cable companies should buy them out (or come out with their own service that is free) and insert a reduced number of targetted ads. Once you have watched the show through once with the commercials, you get to watch it after that without them. And commercial breaks should be shorter and less obtrusive because you could set up preferred profiles (car ads, beverage ads, lingerie ads, ads with sports stars, feminine hygiene ads, cleaning product ads, computer ads, movie ads, similar TV show ads, any TV show ads, only new stuff, only special sales, etc).
Commercials take up about 25% of the airtime. 15 minutes out of every hour, about 10 minutes of product placement, and 5 minutes of promo spots for other shows on the network. The PVR knows what you are going to record anyway and can eliminate a few minutes of the promo spots. The other promo spots can be set up to auto-record the show being advertised at the press of a button. The other 10 minutes of airtime has maybe 2 minutes of product information that is of interest to you.
Americans have very busy lives. The more time advertisers spend trying to shove crap at us, the more resistant we are becoming to it. They are completely failing to understand that.
Laws will never stop spammers. The damages are very hard to prove, especially when the judge/jury don't realize that their ISP filters their mail for 95+% of the spam already. Most people just don't GET it. And most spammers are sending the spam from another country, running a fly-by-night operation, so prosecution is nearly impossible.
Filters are helpful, but they still require huge resources to receive the e-mail and process it. And as stated in the article, the risk of a false positive is often much worse than just receiving the spam.
There are already only a few mail relays that are willing to send out spam, and virtually nobody accepts ANY mail from them. The spam going out is coming through illegally used mail servers. This shows what is to be the solution to the problem of spam: ISPs will only act to stop spam when the spammer is damaging their system.
Most spam gets deleted without the enclosed links getting clicked by at least 99%. The company hosting the web site just sees their customer getting some success with their business. They don't know why, and they really don't believe/care when someone e-mails them to say that the user spammed them from a mail relay in china. The user probably paid for a 2 gig/month of traffic, and they are well under quota.
It's time to change that. With a SETI@Home / Prime95 type application, we could easily DDoS a daily spammer off the net. Slashdot alone could easily field 10000 users willing to put their cable modems up to the task of pounding spammers accounts (and possibly the hosting ISP) off the net. Beat them down until the account appears to be deleted. Maybe then ISPs would hold users accountable for being spammers. Web hosting contracts might start including fines ($500+) for abusing the service, rather than just the scary risk of a cancelled account. All we have to do is beat them down before the few clueless morons come buying and make it worth their while.
Legal? Sure, I don't see why not. I can send a 10 http requests to the ISP in a second... I've never heard of a law that says I can't do that every second. As long as the computers involved are from willing users (sysadmins get permission in writing first), there is no 'hacking'. Every DDoS case I've ever heard of involved charges of 2k+ computers 'hacked', rather than the ensuing attack. Even if it is illegal, this is vigilantism that nobody (other than the hosting ISP) is going to complain about.
Every damn LAN card I've ever bought (and there have been many) has come with the drivers on floppy. The one time I can't download the drivers off the net to get my machine back up and running is the time the stupid drivers come on floppy.
For the love of god, why do the stupid manufacturers put lan drivers on floppy instead of CDrom??? It's 2002, if someone doesn't have access to a CDrom, yet does have a floppy in the machine, then they are rather sad.
But then you could be comfortable saying 'myob' to the 'e-mail' field, and then fill in the rest truthfully. They just have to make it so that there is at least as much effort involved in checking off the 'myob' answer as putting in a real one.
I'm beginning to think that the internet is being taken over by moron execs who never actually USE the internet themselves. I see stupid things all the time that make me leave a website before I've even gotten past the second page.
The kind of questions that most of these sites ask include stuff that is impolite for friends to ask each other sometimes, never mind some random business. If they want accurate results, they should include the option for people to answer with a "MYOB" option. People are rather unlikely to keep tossing in crap data when they have the "MYOB" option, at least not in the 40% range. There is no way in hell that anyone making 100k+/year would actually admit it and give a business their real e-mail address. They would be begging for a flood of advertisements.
Why is it that online business feel they have the right to try and force so much personal information out of us? In brick 'n mortar stores, the worst info anyone asks me for is my zip code (or age to purchase alcohol). They can get my name if I use my credit card, but I can easily pay cash to avoid that.
It's very ironic that NYTimes would run this story.... Why do they expect me to tell them where I live, work, and what I make, just to read their articles? The paper version is nowhere near this invasive.
Ebay raise fees? They would never dream of doing that...
C2it from citibank might actually have a chance of success now. They were basically the same as Billpoint, but without the Ebay integration.
After like 2 years of screwed up payments from idiot customers, Paypal finally introduced a feature this year where you can cancel an un-filed transaction in the first few days. So when a bonehead bidder double pays you for an item, you can just cancel the second payment, rather than refunding the money and sucking up paypal's comission.
I would benefit greatly from a keyboard that would allow me to type pretty much non-stop with my left hand. I'd much rather be able to keep hold of the mouse in one hand and keyboard in the other, rather than switch my right hand back and forth all the time. This is probably not very feasible, but at least a situation where the least used keys like x,q,w,z are all moved to the right area replacing m,i,o,p. I could probably type a few words out in the time it takes me to get my hand off the mouse (or page up/down, arrow keys) and centered on the home keys.
Surely, the genetic algorithym came up with one glaring conclusion after 100k lines of C code: SWITCH THE SHIFT POSITION OF BRACES AND BRACKETS.
And why is the minus key non-shifted, while the plus key is.
Sprint has been sending out mailers to customers on old plans recommending which new plan they should be on based on their usage. My old plan, which I almost never go over, is the original $29.95/month plan. Their cheapest plan now is $39.95. They actually recommended I move to the $39.95 plan as the best value for me. When I first saw it, I thought they were discontinuing my old plan and forcing me to pick a new one. I was rather pissed at the tactic. Instead I became annoyed that they would try to trick me into a more expensive plan.
Sometimes when you say this, they will tell you at warp speed that in order to be added to their no call list, you can call a 1-800 number to request it. They are speaking as fast as they can because they will hang up on you at the end of the sentence, leaving you still on their call list. You need to cut them off right away and tell them on on uncertain terms that *they* will personally take you off the call list right now.
In general, 'put me on your do not call list' is highly effective'. Without adding myself to any state or national registries, it's cut my telemarketing hassles dramatically.
Also, don't thank them for anything, not even a 'no, thank you'. They don't deserve any courtesy. And I don't buy any of the crap about 'making ends meet'. The checker at the grocery store is making ends meet. The garbage man is making ends meet. Telemarketers get paid to harass people.
Regarding the original cell phone thread, I've never received a single telemarketing call to my cell phone in about two years. I've also never given the number to a single company.
[I've been playing Magic since 1994.] The only people that I could see willing to pay full retail PLUS entry fee of $3 to play in a single elimination booster draft would have to be living somewhere where you couldn't get 8 players together on your own. Of course, if you live somewhere like that, you've probably never heard of Magic anyway. Most people who have internet access never pay more than $80/box of cards, ~$2.25/pack. This is a whole dollar less than what WotC is charging for VIRTUAL packs. Add on entry fee, for a total of $15, and someone trying out MTGonline for the first time could spend nearly $50 in a single night getting swept over and over. "But what about card redemption?", you may ask. Card redemption is a joke. They want people to think that there is actually some sort of parity between real and online cards. There is NOT. You have to collect a *complete*set* just to redeem them for a real complete set. I guarantee you will have tons of leftover virtual rares, uncommons and commons that you can't redeem. Even if you manage to trade all of your rares 1 for 1 to build a set of Odyssey (the last standalone expansion), you would have paid over $360 for the set. SUCKER! You could have bought the same thing on Ebay for $110-$140. My scores for MtGOnline: Game mechanics implementation: A+ Graphics: B (it's a card game) GUI: F (horribly inconvienent to navigate) Price: F- (even the malls don't charge retail price for REAL cards) Playtesting: D (you can't playtest your real decks unless you have virtual copies of the cards too! holy crap!) OVERALL: C- It does make a pretty good database to search for cards.
"* How dare they call it The Two Towers after 9-11" Not only was the story named 'The Two Towers' LONG BEFORE the destruction of the World Trade Center, but the naming occured before even the BUILDING of the World Trade Center. It's time to relax your sphincter already.
Matrox has always been the king of making quality 2D cards with killer features for the business and graphics features. They have never been a compelling 3D company. Their 3D engineering team has always been riding behind the pack. They focus on a few very interesting features to get recognition, but always manage to put out a poor 3D product. This board is their submission for their 2D customers who want an exceptional 2D board including *average* 3D gaming performance. Expect these to be snatched up by the programmers and graphic artists who like to play games once in a while. There are lots of people who will grab them just for the easy to set up triple-head design who never game at all. If you're not going to hook up two or three monitors to this thing, stay away from it like the plague.
The commonly used benchmarks change about every 12-18 months. Video card power has been doubling every 6 to 9 months though. This means that if you make a benchmark that has the average new hardware posting framerates of 40FPS(decent), in a year, that same benchmark will be tossing out scores of 100-120.
So why don't you toss the old benchmark away? The only real reason to go to the trouble of writing a new benchmark program is to test and showcase newer graphics card features. However, if you use the latest features that are only available in $250+ graphics cards, the benchmark can't be used to compare the new card to older cards selling for $150 and under. So all you have really done is make a pretty demo.
People who buy the cards that score 300FPS in Quake 3 arena don't pay the money for the Quake 32 Arena framerate, they pay it for the framerate it's going to get in Doom3, and all the games that are coming out in the next year.