On the Atari 5200/SuperSystem (really A400 computers without keyboards). In an era when everything was digital (like Pac-man and Dig Dug) having analog sucked.
Ironically, the original Atari 400/800- as well as the original Atari VCS (2600)- already supported analogue paddles, two per joystick port. (*) Given that the 5200 was basically a badly modified 800, I suspect that its analogue joystick interface hardware implementation used the existing twin-paddle input internally.
I never had them, as by the time I got my Atari 8-bit in the mid-80s, they seemed to be out of fashion, but AFAIK they were two-dimensional (i.e. left/right only) analogue controllers. I don't recall seeing any complaints about them, presumably because the games that used paddle control were *suited* to it (e.g. Breakout, etc.)
But it's absolutely true that Pac Man must have sucked with analogue, non-centering joysticks, which would be why the 400/800 version (and even the otherwise maligned 2600 version) used the traditional Atari digital joysticks.
(*) The computer could measure analogue resistance- the paddles were essentially adjustable resistors- by timing how long a capacitor took to fill up.
We will be a mystery to archaeologists of the future.
No we won't, and I'm tired of hearing this trite assertion repeated as a truism. This is one of those things that has become a meme because it sounds plausible, but under analysis it's flawed because it (a) disregards the massive proliferation of digital data and (b) misapplies digital fragility.
To start off with, most artifacts and information from previous cultures have likely perished too. On top of this we're producing a staggering amount of information- or at least data- in general compared to previous generations.
It's true that any given piece of data stored on a given digital medium is arguably at higher risk of being lost. But this disregards the fact that there may easily be multiple copies of that information stored elsewhere.
However, the primary flaw is that it focuses on the fragility of any *specific* piece of digital information, e.g. that photo of your dog in a funny hat you have stored on a mouldering old CD-R is at serious risk of being lost forever. While that's true, it doesn't apply to this situation, because our future archaeologists or historians probably won't require specific pieces of information to have a decent idea of our culture- they'll merely require an adequately large arbitrary selection of such data to get a decent picture of who we were.
And because there's so much data out there, we could probably lose 99.999% of the stuff at random and it'd still probably be far easier to reconstruct our culture than those that have gone before.
So yeah, if one is worried about a particular hilarious photo of their dog, or any given film, or whatever... digital fragility is an issue. But using it to asssert that our culture is going to become a digital "black hole" to future generations is fundamentally flawed.
We will not disappear from history- at least not for those reasons.
The shuttered glasses are an incredibly unimpressive hack IMO; the polarized lenses used in late '70s and early '80s 3D was much better.
They're nothing new either; I remember seeing shuttered glasses advertised for use with an Atari ST app in the late 1980s. I think the 8-bit Sega Master System (same era) had some games in 3D using a similar technique as well.
Besides, even though it's a cult favourite, you can hardly put BR in the same money league as SW. It's just not going to pull in as many suckers^W fans to keep buying those new, special, collectors, Blu-ray editions.
You only think that because Ridley Scott was more successful than George Lucas when he bought up and destroyed all traces of the Blade Runner Holiday Special.
Atari is American. Or at least it was. What exactly it is now I don't know, but it isn't the company that made the stuff we loved in the 70s and 80s.
No, as the other guy said, Atari (or rather "Atari") is now French.
I don't know if you meant it isn't the same "company that made the stuff we loved" in spirit. But actually, the modern Atari *literally* isn't the same company because it's just a renaming of Infogrames which has *nothing* to do with the original Atari beyond having got the rights to the name and some IP in the early 2000s.
FWIW, the "real" Atari (the one founded in 1972) was split in 1984 following the video game crash, with the arcade and computer divisions sold separately. Its two successors, Atari Corp. and Atari Games were legally new companies (AFAIK) but with some arguable legitimacy due to continuity business operations. However, both those companies fizzled out or were merged beyond any meaningful recognition years ago. There really isn't any company that could legitimately be called the "true" Atari nowadays.
All it does is stuff a bunch of random 'safe' http requests around your illicit requests
Thank you for clarifying that. I was very critical of a similar technique used with web browsers that "hid" your browsing history from Google (or whoever) by sending lots of bogus requests, and this sounds like it would have similar problems.
In the case of the browser plugin, the people you're trying to avoid have access to it too, and only have to figure out if there's any pattern to the bogus requests and if so, how to filter them out. It's not unlikely that they'd succeed. Even if they don't manage now, they have a record of your requests they can hold on to for future processing.
The idea smacked of a sounds-good-when-someone-suggests-it-on-Slashdot idea that broke down when you thought about the implications properly, and your suggestion that Haystack is "essentially the work of inexperienced students" has a similar vibe.
When you're making a tool that others may be indirectly trusting their lives with, it's bordering on criminally negligent to release it to the world not having thought it through to at least that level.
The fact that people irrationally believe that a remote is better than a mouse is completely meaningless to me. Subjective opinions do not change facts.
That you believe in your subjective opinion to such an extent that you think it is a "fact" does not change the fact it is a subjective opinion.
I don't think that you're a troll- I think that you genuinely *are* that arrogant, and blinkered as a consequence.
If their circuitry is vulnerable to RF interference (not completely implausible for an analogue synthesiser, but still a bit unlikely), why on earth wasn't it shielded from radio signals? It's a simple case of putting the thing into a metal box...
Well, from what I understand, early synths like that were already big, bulky and unwieldy. Putting them in a massive metal box would have made things worse, I assume.
Plus, AFAIK most of them were modular, "programmed" by connecting modules with wires and (again AFAIK) some could even have modules added and removed, possibly making case shielding while allowing access more complex.
Don't forget that analogue synths were inherently based on the... analogue qualities of electronic signals and thus I'm guessing it probably took quite a few years for them to design out such foibles while keeping the synth flexible.
Remember also that synths only emerged from being lab-based curiosities in the late 1960s- those *were* early days!
"A consumer device needs to cater to consumers, not you specifically."
But I've already shown how a mouse is better.
You've put forward your argument about why a mouse is better. Some might or might not agree with that argument.
The fact that people don't recognize that is irrelevant.
No, you're about as wrong as you could be- it's completely relevant if you actually want to sell the device to consumers! If people don't like it, they won't buy it. Which is the whole damn point of a consumer product(!)
This applies regardless of whether that dislike is irrational or not.
You're free to hold the opinion that "most people are idiots", but if you disregard their opinion as "irrelevant" without even trying to convince them otherwise, you won't sell anything to them... even if they *are* idiots.
Though in this case, it's more likely that they just hold a different opinion, and your "I know what's best" attitude is simply arrogance promoting your personal preference as absolute fact and dismissing everyone else.
Yes the synths can sound very convincing, but they're just not the same thing. They don't have the level of human error and randomness built in.
IIRC during the early 1970s one of the prog rock bands (I think it was Yes) had an early analogue synth that was extremely tempramental and unreliable. One evening in the middle of a concert it picked up a radio transmission of an announcer reading out the football results.
Start pulling business out of these places and be done with them. Isolate them like North Korea.
North Korea has a population of around 22 million. The People's Republic of China has a population of 1.3 *billion* people. That's over four times the size of the United States.
Now, I'm not defending amoral businesses investing in China without giving a toss about anything beyond the bottom line. Frankly, I don't have an easy answer or solution to what we should do. But suggesting that we should simply "isolate them like North Korea" is much easier said than done.
You know how much trouble a small country like North Korea is causing? Well, China is 65 times larger in terms of population. Even if it was possible to "isolate" them (it won't be), I doubt the effects would be productive. It would, to paraphrase you, "make play-tough types feel better and do little for them anyway".
But frankly, it's too late for that- the genie is out of the bottle, with the US's help (in their defence, many believed that their becoming more capitalist would bring them closer to the Western world). Whatever you can do now, it's not going back in, and you can't act like that's possible. The only way to truly "isolate" China would be to isolate the rest of the world from the US- or rather, to isolate the US from the rest of the world.
That girl now has a $20 million bounty on her head for her death. All taxpayers have an incentive to kill the child now.
Kill the child? Seriously? If there is incentive for anything, it would be to appeal the case.
He wasn't recommending it, he was just describing the results of the outcome.
Yeah, sure he was.
As the GP pointed out, the probable response to the outcome is that people would (and probably should) complain about the legal process that handed down a flawed decision.
If a rich guy in an expensive car accidentally drives into a dangerous poor area, and someone pointed out that if the guy was to be killed and his car stolen the perpetrator would probably get away with it... hey, they're just "describing" the situation, right?
The OP is either being exceptionally disingenuous or he's indulging in the sort of detached, pseudo-logical wankery that too often passes for argument on Slashdot.
Now let's be honest and morally sound, who would deny the financially disadvantaged fellow a cheap copy of a big screen TV or a car, or even a house, if your going to call it intellectual property you might as well compare it to that, seriously who would deny anyone person a quick cheap copy of a home.
Have you ever considered becoming a politician? Because that was a *very* slick and seamless shift of the argument from copying a "big screen TV" (a definite non-essential) via a car (borderline essential depending on circumstances) to a house (an essential). (*)
Because anyone who disagrees with copying films (which is what we were originally talking about) is arguing in favour of making people homeless. OMG HOW COULD YOU BE SO HEARTLESS!!!!!!!!11111
Personally, I'm in favour of reasonable IP laws that reward effort and encourage creativity and innovation that wouldn't otherwise take place (which isn't to say that I agree with some of the more excessive IP laws around the world- very far from it). But I'm not going to bore everyone with it beyond that- this is another of the endless IP discussions on Slashdot, same arguments every time, same opportunity for the same people to make the same point backing up the same positions and no minds are changed. Doesn't mean that all these views are wrong, just that they're repeated countless times when everyone can repeat them ad nauseum, just like the GPL vs. BSD licensing debate...
(*) Got the tone right as well, "who would deny the financially disadvantaged fellow a cheap copy", nice and populist without sounding too commie.:-)
Nice smartass comment, but you're aware that there is a "post anonymously" checkbox and many good reasons why one might not always want to post under their account name?
I hope for your sake that this is a pretty good troll, because if it's for real, then you're a total fuckwit.
The obvious mistakes you make are:-
(1) Presumption of guilt.
(2) Borderline circular reasoning, using the above presumption of guilt "proves" that he doesn't respect boundaries which "proves" that he's a guilty of rape.
Well, circletimessquare, I know that you're a liar and a paedophile. Say what you like in your defence, but we won't believe you because we already know that you're a lying paedophile, and we all know that paedophiles lie, which proves that you're a liar. (See what I mean?)
for those of you who wish to flame me because i am dissing their personal hero
No, they wish to flame you due to the presumption of guilt. I saw the guy on television, and I didn't particularly warm to him- matter of fact, I thought he was a bit arrogant and dickish. I still think you're an idiot.
I see TV, outside of niche market like the obsessive sport fan, TVs serve two purposes. [..] The other purpose is increasing to replace the radio as background noise.
Yes there are crowds [..] that are actually to spend time glued to the tv for hours on end [..] people are less willing to sit idly for an hour or so and passively consume entertainment.
I've been like this for *years*- perhaps everyone else is catching up.:-)
Part of the reason I don't like films that much is that I generally don't have the patience to sit down and pay attention to a screen for two hours.
Even the people I work with who use the net a lot and are arguably *more* into new technology than me still use it to download films and stuff. It's why I'm pretty "meh" about big-screen displays and stuff that as a nerd I'm supposed to care about and why I'm happy with my portable Trinitron CRT- the former is just a means to watch films and subconsciously I know that once the techie "wow" factor wears off, I'm just not going to care about it.
In all honesty, it surprises me that in this information-rich society people are still so much into films and have the patience to sit on their arses and watch them- I'd have thought that the geek types would have got more bored of it by now, but from what I read on Slashdot I get the impression that people are still interested in watching films. Personally, I'd say that watching a programme that's more than 30 minutes long starts to offset the relaxation with the attention required. Even then I usually like to do something else while I'm watching the TV, then realise that I'm missing the programme(!)
Ironically, I usually end up absorbed when I'm channel flicking, not paying attention and unintentionally end up engrossed in one of those police camera chase video footage shows. But that's usually an exception...
The "monkey pushing a button for reward" interactivity of the Internet's information on demand and YouTube videos have probably made this much worse and increased my awareness of it, but to some extent I've been like this for years.
That's nice for you. Yes, I'm well aware that online services had been available since the early 1980s, but that doesn't mean that the majority of computer users could afford them back then!
Computers in the early-80s were only just getting cheap enough to be an affordable proposition for ordinary people. The modem on top of that would have added considerably to the cost, but I suspect that the astronomical cost-per-minute of services like Compuserve would be the killer.
It's cute how your name is commodore64_love and you think that there was no porn on the internet until the world wide web went graphical.
Most people who grew up with 8-bit computers didn't have access to modems or online services, let alone the Internet, some weird academic thing until circa the mid-90s, which most of us had never even heard of.
That said, I do remember downloading porn from text-based bulletin boards when I first got on the net circa 1994....
I blame it on Amazon, who first pushed this as a way for ordinary people to "monetize their web site" back in the early 90s.
I assume you mean the late 90s or early 2000s; the web was launched in 1990, but it wasn't until around 1994 that it started taking off (with very little commercialism at that time), and Amazon themselves didn't launch until '95!
I prefer to use C4. I prefer the smell of almonds to oranges.
Suggesting that one uses a highly explosive substance merely because it smells of almonds is highly irresponsible. Particularly when so many non-explosive alternatives exist, like prussic acid.
Since that bug with the exec-shield patch that occasionally killed a perfectly innocent process.
It will probably just add more bugs which no-one will notice or care about,
Wasn't Fedora always intended to be a test-bed for Red hat Linux anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
On the Atari 5200/SuperSystem (really A400 computers without keyboards). In an era when everything was digital (like Pac-man and Dig Dug) having analog sucked.
Ironically, the original Atari 400/800- as well as the original Atari VCS (2600)- already supported analogue paddles, two per joystick port. (*) Given that the 5200 was basically a badly modified 800, I suspect that its analogue joystick interface hardware implementation used the existing twin-paddle input internally.
I never had them, as by the time I got my Atari 8-bit in the mid-80s, they seemed to be out of fashion, but AFAIK they were two-dimensional (i.e. left/right only) analogue controllers. I don't recall seeing any complaints about them, presumably because the games that used paddle control were *suited* to it (e.g. Breakout, etc.)
But it's absolutely true that Pac Man must have sucked with analogue, non-centering joysticks, which would be why the 400/800 version (and even the otherwise maligned 2600 version) used the traditional Atari digital joysticks.
(*) The computer could measure analogue resistance- the paddles were essentially adjustable resistors- by timing how long a capacitor took to fill up.
We will be a mystery to archaeologists of the future.
No we won't, and I'm tired of hearing this trite assertion repeated as a truism. This is one of those things that has become a meme because it sounds plausible, but under analysis it's flawed because it (a) disregards the massive proliferation of digital data and (b) misapplies digital fragility.
To start off with, most artifacts and information from previous cultures have likely perished too. On top of this we're producing a staggering amount of information- or at least data- in general compared to previous generations.
It's true that any given piece of data stored on a given digital medium is arguably at higher risk of being lost. But this disregards the fact that there may easily be multiple copies of that information stored elsewhere.
However, the primary flaw is that it focuses on the fragility of any *specific* piece of digital information, e.g. that photo of your dog in a funny hat you have stored on a mouldering old CD-R is at serious risk of being lost forever. While that's true, it doesn't apply to this situation, because our future archaeologists or historians probably won't require specific pieces of information to have a decent idea of our culture- they'll merely require an adequately large arbitrary selection of such data to get a decent picture of who we were.
And because there's so much data out there, we could probably lose 99.999% of the stuff at random and it'd still probably be far easier to reconstruct our culture than those that have gone before.
So yeah, if one is worried about a particular hilarious photo of their dog, or any given film, or whatever... digital fragility is an issue. But using it to asssert that our culture is going to become a digital "black hole" to future generations is fundamentally flawed.
We will not disappear from history- at least not for those reasons.
The shuttered glasses are an incredibly unimpressive hack IMO; the polarized lenses used in late '70s and early '80s 3D was much better.
They're nothing new either; I remember seeing shuttered glasses advertised for use with an Atari ST app in the late 1980s. I think the 8-bit Sega Master System (same era) had some games in 3D using a similar technique as well.
Occasionally I get the urge to watch the cool parts of Episode 1. It takes about 20 minutes.
That demands the question... why does it take you 17 minutes to set up the DVD player?
Besides, even though it's a cult favourite, you can hardly put BR in the same money league as SW. It's just not going to pull in as many suckers^W fans to keep buying those new, special, collectors, Blu-ray editions.
You only think that because Ridley Scott was more successful than George Lucas when he bought up and destroyed all traces of the Blade Runner Holiday Special.
No, "fag" refers to a cigarette in Britain; "faggot" is a sort of meatball-like dish.
Atari is American. Or at least it was. What exactly it is now I don't know, but it isn't the company that made the stuff we loved in the 70s and 80s.
No, as the other guy said, Atari (or rather "Atari") is now French.
I don't know if you meant it isn't the same "company that made the stuff we loved" in spirit. But actually, the modern Atari *literally* isn't the same company because it's just a renaming of Infogrames which has *nothing* to do with the original Atari beyond having got the rights to the name and some IP in the early 2000s.
FWIW, the "real" Atari (the one founded in 1972) was split in 1984 following the video game crash, with the arcade and computer divisions sold separately. Its two successors, Atari Corp. and Atari Games were legally new companies (AFAIK) but with some arguable legitimacy due to continuity business operations. However, both those companies fizzled out or were merged beyond any meaningful recognition years ago. There really isn't any company that could legitimately be called the "true" Atari nowadays.
All it does is stuff a bunch of random 'safe' http requests around your illicit requests
Thank you for clarifying that. I was very critical of a similar technique used with web browsers that "hid" your browsing history from Google (or whoever) by sending lots of bogus requests, and this sounds like it would have similar problems.
In the case of the browser plugin, the people you're trying to avoid have access to it too, and only have to figure out if there's any pattern to the bogus requests and if so, how to filter them out. It's not unlikely that they'd succeed. Even if they don't manage now, they have a record of your requests they can hold on to for future processing.
The idea smacked of a sounds-good-when-someone-suggests-it-on-Slashdot idea that broke down when you thought about the implications properly, and your suggestion that Haystack is "essentially the work of inexperienced students" has a similar vibe.
When you're making a tool that others may be indirectly trusting their lives with, it's bordering on criminally negligent to release it to the world not having thought it through to at least that level.
The fact that people irrationally believe that a remote is better than a mouse is completely meaningless to me. Subjective opinions do not change facts.
That you believe in your subjective opinion to such an extent that you think it is a "fact" does not change the fact it is a subjective opinion.
I don't think that you're a troll- I think that you genuinely *are* that arrogant, and blinkered as a consequence.
If their circuitry is vulnerable to RF interference (not completely implausible for an analogue synthesiser, but still a bit unlikely), why on earth wasn't it shielded from radio signals? It's a simple case of putting the thing into a metal box...
Well, from what I understand, early synths like that were already big, bulky and unwieldy. Putting them in a massive metal box would have made things worse, I assume.
Plus, AFAIK most of them were modular, "programmed" by connecting modules with wires and (again AFAIK) some could even have modules added and removed, possibly making case shielding while allowing access more complex.
Don't forget that analogue synths were inherently based on the... analogue qualities of electronic signals and thus I'm guessing it probably took quite a few years for them to design out such foibles while keeping the synth flexible.
Remember also that synths only emerged from being lab-based curiosities in the late 1960s- those *were* early days!
"A consumer device needs to cater to consumers, not you specifically."
But I've already shown how a mouse is better.
You've put forward your argument about why a mouse is better. Some might or might not agree with that argument.
The fact that people don't recognize that is irrelevant.
No, you're about as wrong as you could be- it's completely relevant if you actually want to sell the device to consumers! If people don't like it, they won't buy it. Which is the whole damn point of a consumer product(!)
This applies regardless of whether that dislike is irrational or not.
You're free to hold the opinion that "most people are idiots", but if you disregard their opinion as "irrelevant" without even trying to convince them otherwise, you won't sell anything to them... even if they *are* idiots.
Though in this case, it's more likely that they just hold a different opinion, and your "I know what's best" attitude is simply arrogance promoting your personal preference as absolute fact and dismissing everyone else.
Yes the synths can sound very convincing, but they're just not the same thing. They don't have the level of human error and randomness built in.
IIRC during the early 1970s one of the prog rock bands (I think it was Yes) had an early analogue synth that was extremely tempramental and unreliable. One evening in the middle of a concert it picked up a radio transmission of an announcer reading out the football results.
:-)
Now, you were saying...?
Start pulling business out of these places and be done with them. Isolate them like North Korea.
North Korea has a population of around 22 million. The People's Republic of China has a population of 1.3 *billion* people. That's over four times the size of the United States.
Now, I'm not defending amoral businesses investing in China without giving a toss about anything beyond the bottom line. Frankly, I don't have an easy answer or solution to what we should do. But suggesting that we should simply "isolate them like North Korea" is much easier said than done.
You know how much trouble a small country like North Korea is causing? Well, China is 65 times larger in terms of population. Even if it was possible to "isolate" them (it won't be), I doubt the effects would be productive. It would, to paraphrase you, "make play-tough types feel better and do little for them anyway".
But frankly, it's too late for that- the genie is out of the bottle, with the US's help (in their defence, many believed that their becoming more capitalist would bring them closer to the Western world). Whatever you can do now, it's not going back in, and you can't act like that's possible. The only way to truly "isolate" China would be to isolate the rest of the world from the US- or rather, to isolate the US from the rest of the world.
That girl now has a $20 million bounty on her head for her death. All taxpayers have an incentive to kill the child now.
Kill the child? Seriously? If there is incentive for anything, it would be to appeal the case.
He wasn't recommending it, he was just describing the results of the outcome.
Yeah, sure he was.
As the GP pointed out, the probable response to the outcome is that people would (and probably should) complain about the legal process that handed down a flawed decision.
If a rich guy in an expensive car accidentally drives into a dangerous poor area, and someone pointed out that if the guy was to be killed and his car stolen the perpetrator would probably get away with it... hey, they're just "describing" the situation, right?
The OP is either being exceptionally disingenuous or he's indulging in the sort of detached, pseudo-logical wankery that too often passes for argument on Slashdot.
Now let's be honest and morally sound, who would deny the financially disadvantaged fellow a cheap copy of a big screen TV or a car, or even a house, if your going to call it intellectual property you might as well compare it to that, seriously who would deny anyone person a quick cheap copy of a home.
Have you ever considered becoming a politician? Because that was a *very* slick and seamless shift of the argument from copying a "big screen TV" (a definite non-essential) via a car (borderline essential depending on circumstances) to a house (an essential). (*)
:-)
Because anyone who disagrees with copying films (which is what we were originally talking about) is arguing in favour of making people homeless. OMG HOW COULD YOU BE SO HEARTLESS!!!!!!!!11111
Personally, I'm in favour of reasonable IP laws that reward effort and encourage creativity and innovation that wouldn't otherwise take place (which isn't to say that I agree with some of the more excessive IP laws around the world- very far from it). But I'm not going to bore everyone with it beyond that- this is another of the endless IP discussions on Slashdot, same arguments every time, same opportunity for the same people to make the same point backing up the same positions and no minds are changed. Doesn't mean that all these views are wrong, just that they're repeated countless times when everyone can repeat them ad nauseum, just like the GPL vs. BSD licensing debate...
(*) Got the tone right as well, "who would deny the financially disadvantaged fellow a cheap copy", nice and populist without sounding too commie.
My FaceBook account was zombified quite a while ago - all its content deleted.
In your dreams! Once opened, Facebook accounts and content are notoriously difficult (if not impossible) to "remove" completely.
As someone once said "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave".
Nice smartass comment, but you're aware that there is a "post anonymously" checkbox and many good reasons why one might not always want to post under their account name?
The obvious mistakes you make are:-
(1) Presumption of guilt.
(2) Borderline circular reasoning, using the above presumption of guilt "proves" that he doesn't respect boundaries which "proves" that he's a guilty of rape.
Well, circletimessquare, I know that you're a liar and a paedophile. Say what you like in your defence, but we won't believe you because we already know that you're a lying paedophile, and we all know that paedophiles lie, which proves that you're a liar. (See what I mean?)
for those of you who wish to flame me because i am dissing their personal hero
No, they wish to flame you due to the presumption of guilt. I saw the guy on television, and I didn't particularly warm to him- matter of fact, I thought he was a bit arrogant and dickish. I still think you're an idiot.
I see TV, outside of niche market like the obsessive sport fan, TVs serve two purposes. [..] The other purpose is increasing to replace the radio as background noise. Yes there are crowds [..] that are actually to spend time glued to the tv for hours on end [..] people are less willing to sit idly for an hour or so and passively consume entertainment.
I've been like this for *years*- perhaps everyone else is catching up. :-)
Part of the reason I don't like films that much is that I generally don't have the patience to sit down and pay attention to a screen for two hours.
Even the people I work with who use the net a lot and are arguably *more* into new technology than me still use it to download films and stuff. It's why I'm pretty "meh" about big-screen displays and stuff that as a nerd I'm supposed to care about and why I'm happy with my portable Trinitron CRT- the former is just a means to watch films and subconsciously I know that once the techie "wow" factor wears off, I'm just not going to care about it.
In all honesty, it surprises me that in this information-rich society people are still so much into films and have the patience to sit on their arses and watch them- I'd have thought that the geek types would have got more bored of it by now, but from what I read on Slashdot I get the impression that people are still interested in watching films. Personally, I'd say that watching a programme that's more than 30 minutes long starts to offset the relaxation with the attention required. Even then I usually like to do something else while I'm watching the TV, then realise that I'm missing the programme(!)
Ironically, I usually end up absorbed when I'm channel flicking, not paying attention and unintentionally end up engrossed in one of those police camera chase video footage shows. But that's usually an exception...
The "monkey pushing a button for reward" interactivity of the Internet's information on demand and YouTube videos have probably made this much worse and increased my awareness of it, but to some extent I've been like this for years.
Compuserve. online at 300 baud in 1982.
That's nice for you. Yes, I'm well aware that online services had been available since the early 1980s, but that doesn't mean that the majority of computer users could afford them back then!
Computers in the early-80s were only just getting cheap enough to be an affordable proposition for ordinary people. The modem on top of that would have added considerably to the cost, but I suspect that the astronomical cost-per-minute of services like Compuserve would be the killer.
It's cute how your name is commodore64_love and you think that there was no porn on the internet until the world wide web went graphical.
Most people who grew up with 8-bit computers didn't have access to modems or online services, let alone the Internet, some weird academic thing until circa the mid-90s, which most of us had never even heard of.
That said, I do remember downloading porn from text-based bulletin boards when I first got on the net circa 1994....
I blame it on Amazon, who first pushed this as a way for ordinary people to "monetize their web site" back in the early 90s.
I assume you mean the late 90s or early 2000s; the web was launched in 1990, but it wasn't until around 1994 that it started taking off (with very little commercialism at that time), and Amazon themselves didn't launch until '95!
I prefer to use C4. I prefer the smell of almonds to oranges.
Suggesting that one uses a highly explosive substance merely because it smells of almonds is highly irresponsible. Particularly when so many non-explosive alternatives exist, like prussic acid.
Since that bug with the exec-shield patch that occasionally killed a perfectly innocent process. It will probably just add more bugs which no-one will notice or care about,
Wasn't Fedora always intended to be a test-bed for Red hat Linux anyway?
Using Ksplice is like changing your tampon while speeding down the highway
As in it's something that's unnecessary (if not nonsensical) for the majority of drivers/users anyway?