My dog got freaky one day and hid under my desk for no apparent reason. Later, there was a small earthquake. Ever since, I've been issuing 'Brown Alerts' (her fur is brown) whenever she hides under the desk.
I didn't realize that her lack of a license was a reason to discredit her. *sigh* I'm really disappointed.
Having VM-Ware (at least initially) would make the transition much more bearable.
Count me in on that sentiment. My job'd like me to run Linux but there's still stuff that has to get done. I don't have a lot of fiddlin time. Nothing against Linux, but my good productivity has been rewarded with increased expectactions. It's like I have a well established cache!
My computer survived an assassination attempt. Shortly after I moved out on my own, I adopted a kitten. He was cute for the first week, then he turned obnoxious. He'd do things like wake me up at the crack of down by biting my nose, or jumping on my back just to see if he could stick, etc.
Boy he loved wires. He loved them a LOT. He learned a lesson about that one day, though, when he bit into the cord on my cell phone charger. I didn't actually witness this, but I did notice chew marks on the connector along with a sudden drop in the number of damage reports. I have a good feeling he learned what electricity is.
Even though he was taught not to bite cables, he still loved them! As a matter of fact, he found my mouse cable far too irresistable. This one was on my laptop. I had a little velcro tie to keep the cable wound up. I also had my laptop on a pair of TV tray tables (hey! I was a bachelor!) the cable dangled between them with this furry looking velco strap. Oh he loved that. I'll never forget one day he jumped up, caught the tie, and learned a physics lesson. Once his weight was on the cable, the path of least resistance (my mouse) started sliding off the table. Moments later *Whap* he was hit in the face with an optical mouse. The look on his face was hilarious! I imagine all he saw was a blinding flash of light quickly followed by a smack to the forehead!
But that's not why I'm writing. You see, I was a bit careless back in those days. More efficient in some ways, I never put the screws in my PCI/AGP cards on my computer. Never needed to! Call me lazy if you like, but if you ever tilted this comuter you'd hear the scrape of sliding screws that fell all the way to the bottom where I cannot reach them. Never bothered me, though. Everything was cool. Until I got this damn cat... You see, I came home one day and noticed that my monitor didn't come back on upon moving the mouse. This was odd. I assumed that the computer had frozen or something and pressed the reset button. Only, nothing really happend other than the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beep beep message you get from your bios that basically says "Somethin just ain't right." I was a little worried. I hadn't done anything to the computer, had no reason to think something was up. I thought about it for a sec and realized that the monitor hadn't come on, fortunately this observation lead me towards the video card. And what'd I find?
I found an unseated AGP card. After examining it for a bit, I realized what probably happened. My cat attempted to assassinate it. I'd seen him do this type of stunt before. He did a Tarzan stunt where he jumped off a shelf and grabbed the cable. The leverage caused the card to turn and unseat itself completely. From there, I assume he landed on the ground and found something else to do. I don't think that would have worked on the PCI cards, the AGP one was the loosest. Grr, I wanted to kill that little shit over that. I was worried he might have blown the video card or the mobo. Either would have been bad financially. After that happened, I decided a new directive would be issued that required ALL cables and cards to be securely fastend down. And I did.
My cat helped me with the operation. He must have either loved or really hated my computer. I brought it out on the floor under my apartment's only light. (Hey! I was a bachelor!) I then got the screws I needed and started the operation, only to find that moments later my cat was INSIDE the case sniffin around. Grr. I had no idea what kitten fur would do to this computer, fortunately I never learned either.
My computer survived the assassination and malpractice attempts. It didn't survive, however, the upgrade to a 3x faster Athlon.
As funny as this is, there is a point to be made here. Roughly a year ago I bought a $300 laser printer made by Brother. (it's $250 today) I'm still on the original cartridge. I'm probably would have bought at least 2 or 3 ink replacement cartridges for my old inkjet by now. Frankly, I don't like futzing with that. Sometimes the ink just evaporates.
Right now it costs about $60 to replace the cartridge. $85 gets me a cartridge with double the capacity. $180 gets me 6x the capacity of the original cartridge.
That may be a little steep of an investment, but imagine buying the $250 printer + $180 drum (after the original cartridge is empty a year or two later) and never having to worry about it again.
"I cannot see how this is ever going to turn out good for the consumer. This will enable the makers of printers to almost charge whatever they want for their cartridges."
*Devil's Advocate Mode*
On the flip side, there's incentive for printer manufacturers to keep developing new and interesting printers at lower and lower prices. That may not sound all that interesting to you, but I think it's damn cool that I recently bought a laser printer for only $300. I thought those things would forever stay in the > $1000 range.
As for your comment about them charging whatever they want, that's not entirely true. If they get crazy, people will pay attention to the cost of ink when they go to buy the printer. I can tell you that I've personally done that. I don't own an ink-jet anymore because I think the cost of a small container of ink is ridiculous. If cheap-ink alternatives aren't available, then the manufacturer has done a pretty good job of branding themselves as expensive. Ever look at a row of printer ink and see the sea of $30 price tags?
I agree with you that it sucks in one way, but it can potentially suck the other way as well. Seems like we either get cheap printers OR we get cheap ink. I've yet to see both.
"Uh huh, yeah, there's a lot of rape in that game alright. Dumbass."
Heh. I'm sick of stupid comments like that too. I've noticed that the people who are loudest about GTA 3 are people that have never actually played it.
The funny thing is that it's more like a sim. Which means, just like the parent poster said, you can choose to be a good guy if ya like. You get out of what you put in. I think that's pretty much why the ppl who've played it aren't complaining.
"I agree. GTA is one of many testaments to the idea that you don't need to go purely 3D for a game to be fun."
I agree completely with your comment. However, one of the observations I made about GTA 3 was that despite being 3D, they managed to retain the fun of it. I'm really glad they didn't blow it.
No, I was just sharing a story. It'd be a troll if I said Macs suck because of the problem I had. I didn't. What I said was that making the assumption that Macs sucked over that test would have been unfair.
Unfortuantely, I don't think parent poster read the last line of my post:
"In any case, the point of my post isn't to bash Apple. Just the opposite really. You really can't compare it that way."
"I side on the fence that if you care enough about privacy to make it your job to fight it, you clearly have something to hide."
I'm more worried about lack of context. For example, if the MPAA finds a log somewhere that shows my computer downloaded Harry Potter.avi, how do they know the following:
1.) That the.AVI actually contained the movie. 2.) That I don't already own the DVD. 3.) That I was the one who downloaded it, as opposed to a clever e-mail virus or something. 4.) That I downloaded it beacuse I clicked the wrong link or because it was misrepresented.
Not having anything to hide does not mean you're exempt from being burned by this. People can draw all kinds of wild conclusions with little bits of data like that. Do you want to be labeled as a music pirate because you made a copy of a music CD to keep in your car?
"My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times."
I had a similar experience back in 1995. Heh. Seriously, I had a 486 33 with 8 meg of RAM running Windows 95. At school we had a Mac, 16 meg of RAM, 75 mhz. (I think it was PowerPC, but I will let you all know right now I am not Mac Literate.) My school had and I each had similar HP inkjet printers. However, when it came to print artwork, it took over half an hour to get it to finish spooling and printing at school on the Mac. At home, my 486 responded REALLY fast in comparison, my images were printed within 5 minutes.
Macs really suck, don't they? At twice the clock speed and RAM, they should have stomped my piddly PC, right? It'd be easy to make that assumption, but no. The problem wasn't with the machine, it wasn't a fair test.
The program I used for the artwork was called 'Photostyler'. Imagine Photoshop with no layers support and virtually no features. We were using Photoshop on the Mac, which needed a LOT more RAM to to the most basic operation. It wasn't bloated, but more sophisticated. Also, the Mac at school had LOTS and LOTS of fonts installed on it, which we think were cached by the machine, forcing it to swap. My Windows 95 box was a lot more direct to doing what I wanted to do.
Now I will fault Apple for one thing, they had this insistence on loading EVERYTHING into RAM and storing it there even if it's not being used. Got a plugin for Photoshop? No problem, we'll load it in case you need it. I could sort of understand that today when RAM is abundant, but geez why would you do this when you're working on print-level graphics and you're starting point is only 16 megs?!
In any case, the point of my post isn't to bash Apple. Just the opposite really. You really can't compare it that way.
"Please feel free to add your own misinformation because there's not all that much real information to be discussed, anyway."
As for the color of the chip, Apple had originally intended to use 'Banana'. Unfortunately, they were served with a cease and desist from Intel over concern that it might be confused with Banias.
"Remember when every saved game on a console game was held right in your cartridge? "
I vaguely remember that Nintendo was sort of working on something that did that, only their technique was different.
Dislcaimer: What I'm about to say I read in a rumor section of a magazine, I cannot verify it's authenticity.
Supposedly, back in the SNES days when Nintendo was working on a CD-ROM addition, they were developing a CD-Caddy which had a small memory chip on it for save games etc. Not only did you have a protected disc (why aren't CD's protected anyway?!) but the chip was the key to preventing bootlegging. If that chip didn't respond properly, or didn't exist, the game wouldn't play.
I wish that had come out. Not only would that have been an interesting game technology, but imagine today if CD's came in caddies that had a smart media card attached to them as well. If the RAM is fast enough (maybe SM isn't the right memory for that, but bear with me...) it'd be a nice compliment to the CD. Cache maybe? I dunno, I'd have to think about it more.
Oh the bright side, though, this is not a technology I'd want the RIAA to have.
Slashdot Mirror
Thta was exactly why this was called "Brown Alert". I thought it was bitterly ironic given that my dog's not a cat. ;)
"So which are you saying is impressively durable: your computer, or your cat?"
Come to think of it, I'm not really sure. My cat didn't get the duarbility testing he deserved for. Damn he was cute before he became a cat.
My dog got freaky one day and hid under my desk for no apparent reason. Later, there was a small earthquake. Ever since, I've been issuing 'Brown Alerts' (her fur is brown) whenever she hides under the desk.
I didn't realize that her lack of a license was a reason to discredit her. *sigh* I'm really disappointed.
Having VM-Ware (at least initially) would make the transition much more bearable.
Count me in on that sentiment. My job'd like me to run Linux but there's still stuff that has to get done. I don't have a lot of fiddlin time. Nothing against Linux, but my good productivity has been rewarded with increased expectactions. It's like I have a well established cache!
My computer survived an assassination attempt. Shortly after I moved out on my own, I adopted a kitten. He was cute for the first week, then he turned obnoxious. He'd do things like wake me up at the crack of down by biting my nose, or jumping on my back just to see if he could stick, etc.
Boy he loved wires. He loved them a LOT. He learned a lesson about that one day, though, when he bit into the cord on my cell phone charger. I didn't actually witness this, but I did notice chew marks on the connector along with a sudden drop in the number of damage reports. I have a good feeling he learned what electricity is.
Even though he was taught not to bite cables, he still loved them! As a matter of fact, he found my mouse cable far too irresistable. This one was on my laptop. I had a little velcro tie to keep the cable wound up. I also had my laptop on a pair of TV tray tables (hey! I was a bachelor!) the cable dangled between them with this furry looking velco strap. Oh he loved that. I'll never forget one day he jumped up, caught the tie, and learned a physics lesson. Once his weight was on the cable, the path of least resistance (my mouse) started sliding off the table. Moments later *Whap* he was hit in the face with an optical mouse. The look on his face was hilarious! I imagine all he saw was a blinding flash of light quickly followed by a smack to the forehead!
But that's not why I'm writing. You see, I was a bit careless back in those days. More efficient in some ways, I never put the screws in my PCI/AGP cards on my computer. Never needed to! Call me lazy if you like, but if you ever tilted this comuter you'd hear the scrape of sliding screws that fell all the way to the bottom where I cannot reach them. Never bothered me, though. Everything was cool. Until I got this damn cat... You see, I came home one day and noticed that my monitor didn't come back on upon moving the mouse. This was odd. I assumed that the computer had frozen or something and pressed the reset button. Only, nothing really happend other than the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beep beep message you get from your bios that basically says "Somethin just ain't right." I was a little worried. I hadn't done anything to the computer, had no reason to think something was up. I thought about it for a sec and realized that the monitor hadn't come on, fortunately this observation lead me towards the video card. And what'd I find?
I found an unseated AGP card. After examining it for a bit, I realized what probably happened. My cat attempted to assassinate it. I'd seen him do this type of stunt before. He did a Tarzan stunt where he jumped off a shelf and grabbed the cable. The leverage caused the card to turn and unseat itself completely. From there, I assume he landed on the ground and found something else to do. I don't think that would have worked on the PCI cards, the AGP one was the loosest. Grr, I wanted to kill that little shit over that. I was worried he might have blown the video card or the mobo. Either would have been bad financially. After that happened, I decided a new directive would be issued that required ALL cables and cards to be securely fastend down. And I did.
My cat helped me with the operation. He must have either loved or really hated my computer. I brought it out on the floor under my apartment's only light. (Hey! I was a bachelor!) I then got the screws I needed and started the operation, only to find that moments later my cat was INSIDE the case sniffin around. Grr. I had no idea what kitten fur would do to this computer, fortunately I never learned either.
My computer survived the assassination and malpractice attempts. It didn't survive, however, the upgrade to a 3x faster Athlon.
"Where would one buy a display?"
Pff. You must be a Mac user.
I realize I'm OT here, but what kind of benefit did you get from going to 18 megs over the default 2?
I can fill it up on RAM for only $40 and I'm seriously tempted to do that.
"Start using Laser Printers.. o wait..."
As funny as this is, there is a point to be made here. Roughly a year ago I bought a $300 laser printer made by Brother. (it's $250 today) I'm still on the original cartridge. I'm probably would have bought at least 2 or 3 ink replacement cartridges for my old inkjet by now. Frankly, I don't like futzing with that. Sometimes the ink just evaporates.
Right now it costs about $60 to replace the cartridge. $85 gets me a cartridge with double the capacity. $180 gets me 6x the capacity of the original cartridge.
That may be a little steep of an investment, but imagine buying the $250 printer + $180 drum (after the original cartridge is empty a year or two later) and never having to worry about it again.
Ah those are the daaaaaaaaaaaaays.
"I cannot see how this is ever going to turn out good for the consumer. This will enable the makers of printers to almost charge whatever they want for their cartridges."
*Devil's Advocate Mode*
On the flip side, there's incentive for printer manufacturers to keep developing new and interesting printers at lower and lower prices. That may not sound all that interesting to you, but I think it's damn cool that I recently bought a laser printer for only $300. I thought those things would forever stay in the > $1000 range.
As for your comment about them charging whatever they want, that's not entirely true. If they get crazy, people will pay attention to the cost of ink when they go to buy the printer. I can tell you that I've personally done that. I don't own an ink-jet anymore because I think the cost of a small container of ink is ridiculous. If cheap-ink alternatives aren't available, then the manufacturer has done a pretty good job of branding themselves as expensive. Ever look at a row of printer ink and see the sea of $30 price tags?
I agree with you that it sucks in one way, but it can potentially suck the other way as well. Seems like we either get cheap printers OR we get cheap ink. I've yet to see both.
"Uh huh, yeah, there's a lot of rape in that game alright. Dumbass."
Heh. I'm sick of stupid comments like that too. I've noticed that the people who are loudest about GTA 3 are people that have never actually played it.
The funny thing is that it's more like a sim. Which means, just like the parent poster said, you can choose to be a good guy if ya like. You get out of what you put in. I think that's pretty much why the ppl who've played it aren't complaining.
"8.5 million drones will buy a buggy, unpolished game just to: "
If that were remotely true then the console market would be a lot more successful than it really is.
Honestly, I don't see why your post is 'Insightful'. The only insight that you've provided is that you don't like the game.
"That "Duke Nukem Forever" joke is made every single time any software on Earth is behind schedule. I, for one, am a little sick of it. "
I think it's great! It's so much better than 'Soviet Russia'. You really don't want Smirnoff's voice in your head.
"Do you really want to be marrying this chick?"
Yeah, because if he's posting on Slashdot, you know he can choose from any woman he wants!
"I agree. GTA is one of many testaments to the idea that you don't need to go purely 3D for a game to be fun."
I agree completely with your comment. However, one of the observations I made about GTA 3 was that despite being 3D, they managed to retain the fun of it. I'm really glad they didn't blow it.
"It's a T-R-O-L-L. 'Tard."
No, I was just sharing a story. It'd be a troll if I said Macs suck because of the problem I had. I didn't. What I said was that making the assumption that Macs sucked over that test would have been unfair.
Unfortuantely, I don't think parent poster read the last line of my post:
"In any case, the point of my post isn't to bash Apple. Just the opposite really. You really can't compare it that way."
I'm not convinced you did either, Mr. Coward.
"Caller ID faking... Is that not illegal yet?"
It'll become illegal when somebody finds a way to block telemarketers with it.
"I side on the fence that if you care enough about privacy to make it your job to fight it, you clearly have something to hide."
.AVI actually contained the movie.
I'm more worried about lack of context. For example, if the MPAA finds a log somewhere that shows my computer downloaded Harry Potter.avi, how do they know the following:
1.) That the
2.) That I don't already own the DVD.
3.) That I was the one who downloaded it, as opposed to a clever e-mail virus or something.
4.) That I downloaded it beacuse I clicked the wrong link or because it was misrepresented.
Not having anything to hide does not mean you're exempt from being burned by this. People can draw all kinds of wild conclusions with little bits of data like that. Do you want to be labeled as a music pirate because you made a copy of a music CD to keep in your car?
"I believe Virginia is the only state which continues to outlaw them."
Are you saying Radar Detectors are legal now?
"My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times."
I had a similar experience back in 1995. Heh. Seriously, I had a 486 33 with 8 meg of RAM running Windows 95. At school we had a Mac, 16 meg of RAM, 75 mhz. (I think it was PowerPC, but I will let you all know right now I am not Mac Literate.) My school had and I each had similar HP inkjet printers. However, when it came to print artwork, it took over half an hour to get it to finish spooling and printing at school on the Mac. At home, my 486 responded REALLY fast in comparison, my images were printed within 5 minutes.
Macs really suck, don't they? At twice the clock speed and RAM, they should have stomped my piddly PC, right? It'd be easy to make that assumption, but no. The problem wasn't with the machine, it wasn't a fair test.
The program I used for the artwork was called 'Photostyler'. Imagine Photoshop with no layers support and virtually no features. We were using Photoshop on the Mac, which needed a LOT more RAM to to the most basic operation. It wasn't bloated, but more sophisticated. Also, the Mac at school had LOTS and LOTS of fonts installed on it, which we think were cached by the machine, forcing it to swap. My Windows 95 box was a lot more direct to doing what I wanted to do.
Now I will fault Apple for one thing, they had this insistence on loading EVERYTHING into RAM and storing it there even if it's not being used. Got a plugin for Photoshop? No problem, we'll load it in case you need it. I could sort of understand that today when RAM is abundant, but geez why would you do this when you're working on print-level graphics and you're starting point is only 16 megs?!
In any case, the point of my post isn't to bash Apple. Just the opposite really. You really can't compare it that way.
" IBM could have cranked up the clock rate and achieved 0% performance increase and it wouldn't matter to most people."
Wouldn't they have to redesign the processor to ramp up the clock without the processor's actual speed changing?
"Please feel free to add your own misinformation because there's not all that much real information to be discussed, anyway."
As for the color of the chip, Apple had originally intended to use 'Banana'. Unfortunately, they were served with a cease and desist from Intel over concern that it might be confused with Banias.
"~Perhaps this will lead to some sort of debate regarding the virtues of Macs compared with PCs, something so rarely discussed on SlashDot."
/.'ers see my side.
Well you gotta admit, blueberry is much prettier than beige. Unfortunately, few
"2.5 GHz PPC sure would close the gap with x86."
:(
Yeah!! I can't wait to see my Quake 3 scores then! Damn I want a new game.
"Remember when every saved game on a console game was held right in your cartridge? "
I vaguely remember that Nintendo was sort of working on something that did that, only their technique was different.
Dislcaimer: What I'm about to say I read in a rumor section of a magazine, I cannot verify it's authenticity.
Supposedly, back in the SNES days when Nintendo was working on a CD-ROM addition, they were developing a CD-Caddy which had a small memory chip on it for save games etc. Not only did you have a protected disc (why aren't CD's protected anyway?!) but the chip was the key to preventing bootlegging. If that chip didn't respond properly, or didn't exist, the game wouldn't play.
I wish that had come out. Not only would that have been an interesting game technology, but imagine today if CD's came in caddies that had a smart media card attached to them as well. If the RAM is fast enough (maybe SM isn't the right memory for that, but bear with me...) it'd be a nice compliment to the CD. Cache maybe? I dunno, I'd have to think about it more.
Oh the bright side, though, this is not a technology I'd want the RIAA to have.
"Easy...
Install once, write on the CD "I have been installed" and refuse nay other installation attempt."
I predict that Sharpie stocks will go up.