When you start having even games and sequels derived from PC games coming out (at least at first) only on console, of course things are going to drop.
FFX hasn't come out on PC, not sure it will (but hoping).
Starcraft ghost, derived from Starcraft, is coming out on console
I mean, come on people. If something is going to come out on, let's say, X-box, how hard can it be to port to PC? X-box is basically a mini almost-PC anyways, so I'm sure that it wouldn't be a huge chore.
Of course, FFX is one PS2... but I still want it on PC. Too many gaming companies are jumping the console bandwagon and leaving loyal PC fans in the dust.
Patching servers, fixing machines, crawling under desks. If you want a job with a fair bit of action, work at a school. If there's anyone who can find a way to screw something up, or do something unexpected, it's a 15-yr-old with a keyboard and mouse. That, or it's my 57-yr-old grandparents that somehow magically manage to screw things up that should be unscrewupable.
Combine that with archaic computers, underfunding, etc etc... and it's an exciting job.
Unforunately, if you compile your own with RH8 (or at least on my machine) the new version chokes and dies... big time. Seems there may be an issue with the glibc on this distro?
b1: Look what's that in his hand
b2: Let's rush him, he can't take all of at once right
b1: What's that bigass gun he's holding?
b2: Says BFG on it. No idea what that means. Let's go
b1: Alright, I'm in.
Yeah...not only that, but fearless soldiers would also not fear the government, or many other things. Somehow I think that removing this gene would also make them a bit hard to handle.
I just compare it to some of the late-night hacking sessions I've had, fixing servers etc.
1:30am, I've been coding like mad, fixing this and that and everything is running smoothly.
2:00am, the jolt is wearing out and I'm getting droopy, so I log off and head to bed for the night
8:00am, suddenly nothing's working anymore... processes dying, etc etc. Of course, in computers it's usually predictable, death starts to occur right about the time a lot of users start logging on.
But the point is, even if it WORKED... and then suddenly didn't, and there were notes, how do you believe it?
I'm not talking "I didn't take notes", I'm saying "I followed exact procedures XX and YY and got results ZZ". Sometimes it could be as simple as "it worked at night because there was no sunlight".... who knows.
Ever has a car or appliance that only worked right when it gets to the mechanic? You'll know what I mean then:-)
If everyone did it, it would help a lot, though I admit ebay.ca makes sense (as I always check the.ca first for Canadian sites... but perhaps a forward to canada.ebay.com would work as well).
Even so though, you'd bound to have stupid users who fall for it no matter what the parent company does. And as long as you have foolish users, you'll have somebody trying to make a buck (or a thousand bucks, or several-hundred-thousand) off of them.
Over the last several years, keyboard have taken many evolutionary steps. We've got ergo-keyboards, enhanced-keyboards, laser-projected-keyboards, etc.
We may very well still be using keyboard 10 years from now, but they'd probably differ at least a bit from the ones we use now.
We're not going to get rid of the old QWERTY (or for some odd few, the DVORAK) until perhaps we can plug into ourselves, or until that one-handed keyboard comes around.
Personally... I'd like to plug myself in, but viruses would really suck then.
Sure there was some expansion here and there, but in general the feelings for the characters never changed. Checkov never really "rose through the ranks" like Wesley did
I believe that in "the Undiscovered Country", cheesy as it was, Sulu did get a captaincy (sp?). Checkoff... well he probably never made it 'cause he couldn't pass his written test:
Desired Rank: Keptain
Experience: Starships and Nuclear Wessels
Not much will save you against professionals, unfortunately. But there are an increasing number of amatures out there, people who have figured out that it's easy to scam people... others that simple have light-fingers and snitch somebody's laptop while they're not looking.
The guy in the article was operating on a fairly large basis, but by the sounds it was just one guy who found it's easy to scam people who are foolish (and don't use the ebay internal bidding system properly). A lot of crooks are clever in some ways, dumb in others, so a GPS solution might work.
The software-enabled solution might still work too. , and while it might detect the nuking software it would not necessarily get the call-home. There are a lot of programs that delete files, nuke entries, but don't follow the patterns of virii. Also, if you preinstalled say, Mcafee... then you could probably find ways to make it *not* detect your own virus (is there an ignore list?).
Another thing to think of is that a lot of criminals keep data on PC's so they can sift through. Oh, look, he's his banking info. Oh, he's saved his online banking password. A lot of smart crooks would avoid nukage just to retain this information, which is often worth more than the PC (how about the banking password to somebody's business bank account).
Again, this probably won't work on organized crime, or those smart enough to nuke a hard-drive before ever plugging-it-in or turning it on, but it's better than nothing.
It's not such a difficult scam to perpetrate. Swipe ebay's look and feel, stick it up on a site with a similar name, and advertise.
Ebay is smart enough to cover a lot of their bases, for example, Canadian ebay'ers might be tricked into trying ebaycanada.com, except ebay has already been smart enough to grab:
ebaycanada.ca
ebaycanada.com
ebaycanada.net
They did miss, however (according to my domain search) ebaycanada.org, but you can't get 'em all.
All somebody really needs to do is make a duplicate of a common site, or way for a new domain extension.
ebaysales.com, ebaymarketing.com, they all "sound" like they are affiliated with ebay. If they look the same, how are you to know the difference?
Incidentally, ebaysales is taken for all the most common extensions except ebaysales.ca
It's social engineering at its worst. When you see something that looks like it's associated with something else, acts like it's associate, many people just assume "they must be part of the same thing." It's in many ways similar to scams like the "Domain Registry of XXX."
In Canada, they used marking very similar to the Canadian government to look affiliated, and also wrote their "renewal" letters which lead many people to believe they were affiliated with the original domain provider. Eventually the use of government markings got them nailed, but for every one of these slimey scammers that get shut down, it seems two more pop up.
Getting this info on slashdot is nice. If the server hadn't already been shut down, a good slashdotting probably would have helped put some sand in the gears.
If froogle were out sooner
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's really too bad that nobody saw this beta until now. It would have been a very nice and useful tool for Christmas shopping. Somewhat like ebay, but a way like finding what you want from retailers.
Online shopping is kicking up. This will be a great tool for shoppers and retailers, so long as it doesn't get hacked or biased towards certain retailers.
That it will make it that much harder to believe the real scientific breakthroughs. I mean, if you've got some scientists working a month of after-hours in a lab, and suddenly he comes through with cold fusion or a cure for AIDS. The next day, he's on the phone yammering about how he's done it, but because of the stress/caffeine/lack-of-sleep he can't remember the exact steps to making his project, and it's not quite working today. The scientific communicate will just hum and haw, ignoring his finding until they can be fully substantiated.
Unfortunately, not all experiments are a 100% reproducable result. Sometimes there are outside factors that one doesn't think of (hey, the moon was full and the tide was high), that make an experiment very hard to produce. If scientists aren't trusted and can't immediately able to produce results, they won't be able to get the additional funding that may be required for further research (it worked, but doesn't now, but it worked, so why?).
I'm not quite getting how this works. A car battery charger plugs into wall and thus charges the battery. But, since the activists are up a tree, how are they plugging in?
I'm assuming it means they're using a car-battery to charge it, but eventually that would run out of juice too.
This has NOTHING to do with buying a machine. At least not from a legit seller. This is to put on your machine, in case it gets stolen, etc.
Given the post about the Mac machine which was found using Timbuktu and some creative hacking, this woudld be a cool idea.
And in this case, the thief was too dumb to format. Also worth mentioning is the fact that - being your hardware - you can put whatever you want on it to track it for theft.
It might not protect you from professionals. For that some hardware can get GPS-type devices to assist in tracking - but they're expensive. And if it's an ebay scammer, it may very well be that he/she is too lazy to immediate wipe the OS (instead booting to see if it works first).
This brings up an interesting idea. Does anyone know of any good projects that implement this, so that the computer, as soon as connecting to the internet - will dial home (or a home server) and instantiate some type of callback script.
It would be great if there were a copy compatible with both win32 and 'nix. Maybe sourceforge or somewhere already has one?
Scenario:
User connects to internet (high speed or dialup)
Computer detects internet connection, connects to equivilent homebase.com
Homebase.com returns an indicator as to whether the computer should be in "theft mode"
Computer, on entering "theft mode" subsequently tried tricks such as
a) Sends owner/etc info to homebase
b) Establishing a PPP/Dialup connection to a monitored line, providing phone # info
c) Sending IP/username info the homebase
d) Sending info on cookies, checking for variables indicating names - to homebase
e) Checks for new email accounts on PC, sends email from them to homebase
f) Pop up forms with "you won" asking for personal info
Eventually, with enough tricks, homebase should be able to gather enough intel to track said computer. If not, then perhaps homebase can send a type of "timed destruction" sequence to the PC, which will result in erasure and whatever damage is necessary to disable it.
Considering the amount of crap that goes into cookies, I wouldn't be surprised if one of these - or situation (f) - turns up personal info enough to track said machine.
I used this site "eopinions.com" to check for reviews when I was looking for a new (well, used, but new to me) car. It came up fairly accurately towards what I've heard. My current car, a '91 Accord, fit most of the reviews very well (excellent body/speed/reliability, a little underpowered on hills, plastic in the interior breaks).
These tend to be best for older products, since they've got more time to be reviewed, but you could probably check out that new PC/printer/etc based on prior models.
Are these coupled with burn-ins? If it had a partially programmable BIOS coupled with a fixed one, it would be fine so long as you could boot in the CSOM settings to reconfigure everything after the decade is up.
CMOS batteries don't last that long anyways though.
Yeah, getting it to recognise your/my handwriting might take awhile... especially when considering the time involved in getting a good font set in linux.
Half the time it doesn't even print text nicely, how's it going to recognise it!
What about MP3 players? Surely piracy ensures one never has to spend a dime on their favorite music. Just because they haven't caught on as much doesn't mean eventually they won't. When was the last time you bought a record or an 8 track cassette?
And your point is??? Perhaps if they had a properly legitimate and convenient method for getting these songs on a mp3 player, they'd make money. Instead, they copy-protect CD's, which means that only those who pirate the songs can actually use them on the new technology.
Think about it, if you couldn't buy cassettes with music, and you couldn't copy from another source to cassette, how many cassettes would have sold?
Last I checked, pirates can hear what songs they like on the radio, and the TV, via MTV and VH1, then download them for free. Despite what this article claims, pirates really can get away with music for free and it's only through advertising to those ignorant of how to pirate music, and to honest people, that the industry is, for now, not be seriously hurt.
And if they couldn't pirate said music via internet, they wouldn't have just recorded it off of the radio, MTV, or from a friend? Nahhhhh, they definately would have bought that $20 label for the one good song on it.
As the industry improves, so will the solutions of the underground. I remember when you would have to connect every day for a month to a 2400 BBS to download a 4 meg file via Zmodem. Now you're able to go to Kazaa and type in a keyword or two for your favorite song and artist, and even select the bit rate you want, almost every time able to get a high quality copy of every song on a CD. Might have to let the thing download for a bit, but all the MP3's are piled onto your hard drive in an easy, automated process. Especially with broadband. It's going to get even easier in time. Soon we'll have high enough speed connections where instead of a song by song distribution, you just download the entire collection of songs from an artist off Kazaa in one ZIP file.
And there's the problem. It's too convienient, and the alternatives are lacking.
How about this: how about if mp3's were just as convenient, but you could only get them in crappy bitrates. You get to heard to songs you want and get a preview (to wet your palette for them), but because of inferior quality you still buy the CD.
Honestly, when I see a DVD and a VHS movie, the VHS is still significantly cheaper at times, but I buy the DVD because (even on my crappy TV) the picture is better and the surfing easier.
If all mp3's were only low bitrate, suddenly you've got the advertising equivilent of radio (yes, I know radio stations pay, but they advertise too) and MTV but on a much more global scale.
How we'd get rid of the high-rate MP3's I don't know, other than perhaps flooding the filesharing services with servicable, but lower-quality copies.
Yes, but when it's just plain-text anyways, that makes it no less inconvenient. Especially if I'm on my 'nix box, using links.
StartX
Open browser
View document in Acrobat-decoder, with crappy X-windows fonts...
A few things that should be considered along with the lifetime of current PC's
a) Heat and dissipation: They run hot as hell. Yeah, this was filled with Vacuum tubes and probably got fairly warm as wellone probably got fairly warm as well, but in modern PC's the heat tends to be focussed over particular components, leading to detioration over time.
b) Moving parts: Fast-spinning hard drives, fans (see heat, above), etc. The more moving parts you have the greater chance of failure. It also takes more power impulses to start a motor spinning up (hard drive, CD-ROM).
c) Expected time of usage: We're going through PC's a lot faster than we used to. How long was CSIRAC in use? For most home users, you can usually expect an upgrade at least every 5 years. Perhaps not a new PC, but at least a component. Why build a PC that's going to last forever if it's going to be obsolete very soon - except for consideration to servers, etc.
But sometimes it's a major pain to allow you to backtrack through the whole game. A lot of RPG's use limiting points to trash out junk data that would otherwise take savespace.
E.G. if you get dropped into section 2 of the game, then no longer do you need to keep track of all the treasure chests open in section 1.
But yeah, it always sucks when you miss that one thing, but it does give you sometime to play for in a few months when you have no new RPG's
I've often wondered about this in records. I know in most old Vinyl systems, the sounded has degraded so it's hard to tell what it "used to" sound like at it's best. I've also heard a complaint that because CD's are digital they sometimes sound too "electronic" or "filtered" (coming from musicians).
Do records really sound better in some situations, or perhaps it's just that CD's of old records suck because of crossover issues?
Slashdot Mirror
When you start having even games and sequels derived from PC games coming out (at least at first) only on console, of course things are going to drop.
FFX hasn't come out on PC, not sure it will (but hoping).
Starcraft ghost, derived from Starcraft, is coming out on console
I mean, come on people. If something is going to come out on, let's say, X-box, how hard can it be to port to PC? X-box is basically a mini almost-PC anyways, so I'm sure that it wouldn't be a huge chore.
Of course, FFX is one PS2... but I still want it on PC. Too many gaming companies are jumping the console bandwagon and leaving loyal PC fans in the dust.
Patching servers, fixing machines, crawling under desks. If you want a job with a fair bit of action, work at a school. If there's anyone who can find a way to screw something up, or do something unexpected, it's a 15-yr-old with a keyboard and mouse. That, or it's my 57-yr-old grandparents that somehow magically manage to screw things up that should be unscrewupable.
Combine that with archaic computers, underfunding, etc etc... and it's an exciting job.
Unforunately, if you compile your own with RH8 (or at least on my machine) the new version chokes and dies... big time. Seems there may be an issue with the glibc on this distro?
b1: Look what's that in his hand
b2: Let's rush him, he can't take all of at once right
b1: What's that bigass gun he's holding?
b2: Says BFG on it. No idea what that means. Let's go
b1: Alright, I'm in.
Yeah...not only that, but fearless soldiers would also not fear the government, or many other things. Somehow I think that removing this gene would also make them a bit hard to handle.
I wonder how many space-geeks are also trekkies. They could have some big decisions to make what with Nemesis also out tonight
Of course, for many meteors might be a very fitting finale to the night of a trek movie.
I just compare it to some of the late-night hacking sessions I've had, fixing servers etc.
:-)
1:30am, I've been coding like mad, fixing this and that and everything is running smoothly.
2:00am, the jolt is wearing out and I'm getting droopy, so I log off and head to bed for the night
8:00am, suddenly nothing's working anymore... processes dying, etc etc. Of course, in computers it's usually predictable, death starts to occur right about the time a lot of users start logging on.
But the point is, even if it WORKED... and then suddenly didn't, and there were notes, how do you believe it?
I'm not talking "I didn't take notes", I'm saying "I followed exact procedures XX and YY and got results ZZ". Sometimes it could be as simple as "it worked at night because there was no sunlight".... who knows.
Ever has a car or appliance that only worked right when it gets to the mechanic? You'll know what I mean then
If everyone did it, it would help a lot, though I admit ebay.ca makes sense (as I always check the .ca first for Canadian sites... but perhaps a forward to canada.ebay.com would work as well).
Even so though, you'd bound to have stupid users who fall for it no matter what the parent company does. And as long as you have foolish users, you'll have somebody trying to make a buck (or a thousand bucks, or several-hundred-thousand) off of them.
Yeah, I've seen something better than that on the market... it was called a second battery :-)
Over the last several years, keyboard have taken many evolutionary steps. We've got ergo-keyboards, enhanced-keyboards, laser-projected-keyboards, etc.
We may very well still be using keyboard 10 years from now, but they'd probably differ at least a bit from the ones we use now.
We're not going to get rid of the old QWERTY (or for some odd few, the DVORAK) until perhaps we can plug into ourselves, or until that one-handed keyboard comes around.
Personally... I'd like to plug myself in, but viruses would really suck then.
Sure there was some expansion here and there, but in general the feelings for the characters never changed. Checkov never really "rose through the ranks" like Wesley did
I believe that in "the Undiscovered Country", cheesy as it was, Sulu did get a captaincy (sp?). Checkoff... well he probably never made it 'cause he couldn't pass his written test:
Desired Rank: Keptain Experience: Starships and Nuclear Wessels
Not much will save you against professionals, unfortunately. But there are an increasing number of amatures out there, people who have figured out that it's easy to scam people... others that simple have light-fingers and snitch somebody's laptop while they're not looking.
The guy in the article was operating on a fairly large basis, but by the sounds it was just one guy who found it's easy to scam people who are foolish (and don't use the ebay internal bidding system properly). A lot of crooks are clever in some ways, dumb in others, so a GPS solution might work.
The software-enabled solution might still work too. , and while it might detect the nuking software it would not necessarily get the call-home. There are a lot of programs that delete files, nuke entries, but don't follow the patterns of virii. Also, if you preinstalled say, Mcafee... then you could probably find ways to make it *not* detect your own virus (is there an ignore list?).
Another thing to think of is that a lot of criminals keep data on PC's so they can sift through. Oh, look, he's his banking info. Oh, he's saved his online banking password. A lot of smart crooks would avoid nukage just to retain this information, which is often worth more than the PC (how about the banking password to somebody's business bank account).
Again, this probably won't work on organized crime, or those smart enough to nuke a hard-drive before ever plugging-it-in or turning it on, but it's better than nothing.
It's not such a difficult scam to perpetrate. Swipe ebay's look and feel, stick it up on a site with a similar name, and advertise.
Ebay is smart enough to cover a lot of their bases, for example, Canadian ebay'ers might be tricked into trying ebaycanada.com, except ebay has already been smart enough to grab:
ebaycanada.ca
ebaycanada.com
ebaycanada.net
They did miss, however (according to my domain search) ebaycanada.org, but you can't get 'em all.
All somebody really needs to do is make a duplicate of a common site, or way for a new domain extension.
ebaysales.com, ebaymarketing.com, they all "sound" like they are affiliated with ebay. If they look the same, how are you to know the difference?
Incidentally, ebaysales is taken for all the most common extensions except ebaysales.ca
It's social engineering at its worst. When you see something that looks like it's associated with something else, acts like it's associate, many people just assume "they must be part of the same thing." It's in many ways similar to scams like the "Domain Registry of XXX."
In Canada, they used marking very similar to the Canadian government to look affiliated, and also wrote their "renewal" letters which lead many people to believe they were affiliated with the original domain provider. Eventually the use of government markings got them nailed, but for every one of these slimey scammers that get shut down, it seems two more pop up.
Getting this info on slashdot is nice. If the server hadn't already been shut down, a good slashdotting probably would have helped put some sand in the gears.
It's really too bad that nobody saw this beta until now. It would have been a very nice and useful tool for Christmas shopping. Somewhat like ebay, but a way like finding what you want from retailers.
Online shopping is kicking up. This will be a great tool for shoppers and retailers, so long as it doesn't get hacked or biased towards certain retailers.
That it will make it that much harder to believe the real scientific breakthroughs. I mean, if you've got some scientists working a month of after-hours in a lab, and suddenly he comes through with cold fusion or a cure for AIDS. The next day, he's on the phone yammering about how he's done it, but because of the stress/caffeine/lack-of-sleep he can't remember the exact steps to making his project, and it's not quite working today. The scientific communicate will just hum and haw, ignoring his finding until they can be fully substantiated.
Unfortunately, not all experiments are a 100% reproducable result. Sometimes there are outside factors that one doesn't think of (hey, the moon was full and the tide was high), that make an experiment very hard to produce. If scientists aren't trusted and can't immediately able to produce results, they won't be able to get the additional funding that may be required for further research (it worked, but doesn't now, but it worked, so why?).
A car battery recharger powers the equipment
I'm not quite getting how this works. A car battery charger plugs into wall and thus charges the battery. But, since the activists are up a tree, how are they plugging in?
I'm assuming it means they're using a car-battery to charge it, but eventually that would run out of juice too.
Ummm, first of all...
This has NOTHING to do with buying a machine. At least not from a legit seller. This is to put on your machine, in case it gets stolen, etc.
Given the post about the Mac machine which was found using Timbuktu and some creative hacking, this woudld be a cool idea.
And in this case, the thief was too dumb to format. Also worth mentioning is the fact that - being your hardware - you can put whatever you want on it to track it for theft.
It might not protect you from professionals. For that some hardware can get GPS-type devices to assist in tracking - but they're expensive. And if it's an ebay scammer, it may very well be that he/she is too lazy to immediate wipe the OS (instead booting to see if it works first).
This brings up an interesting idea. Does anyone know of any good projects that implement this, so that the computer, as soon as connecting to the internet - will dial home (or a home server) and instantiate some type of callback script.
It would be great if there were a copy compatible with both win32 and 'nix. Maybe sourceforge or somewhere already has one?
Scenario:
User connects to internet (high speed or dialup)
Computer detects internet connection, connects to equivilent homebase.com
Homebase.com returns an indicator as to whether the computer should be in "theft mode"
Computer, on entering "theft mode" subsequently tried tricks such as
a) Sends owner/etc info to homebase
b) Establishing a PPP/Dialup connection to a monitored line, providing phone # info
c) Sending IP/username info the homebase
d) Sending info on cookies, checking for variables indicating names - to homebase
e) Checks for new email accounts on PC, sends email from them to homebase
f) Pop up forms with "you won" asking for personal info
Eventually, with enough tricks, homebase should be able to gather enough intel to track said computer. If not, then perhaps homebase can send a type of "timed destruction" sequence to the PC, which will result in erasure and whatever damage is necessary to disable it.
Considering the amount of crap that goes into cookies, I wouldn't be surprised if one of these - or situation (f) - turns up personal info enough to track said machine.
I used this site "eopinions.com" to check for reviews when I was looking for a new (well, used, but new to me) car. It came up fairly accurately towards what I've heard. My current car, a '91 Accord, fit most of the reviews very well (excellent body/speed/reliability, a little underpowered on hills, plastic in the interior breaks).
These tend to be best for older products, since they've got more time to be reviewed, but you could probably check out that new PC/printer/etc based on prior models.
Are these coupled with burn-ins? If it had a partially programmable BIOS coupled with a fixed one, it would be fine so long as you could boot in the CSOM settings to reconfigure everything after the decade is up.
CMOS batteries don't last that long anyways though.
Yeah, getting it to recognise your/my handwriting might take awhile... especially when considering the time involved in getting a good font set in linux.
Half the time it doesn't even print text nicely, how's it going to recognise it!
What about MP3 players? Surely piracy ensures one never has to spend a dime on their favorite music. Just because they haven't caught on as much doesn't mean eventually they won't. When was the last time you bought a record or an 8 track cassette?
And your point is??? Perhaps if they had a properly legitimate and convenient method for getting these songs on a mp3 player, they'd make money. Instead, they copy-protect CD's, which means that only those who pirate the songs can actually use them on the new technology.
Think about it, if you couldn't buy cassettes with music, and you couldn't copy from another source to cassette, how many cassettes would have sold?
Last I checked, pirates can hear what songs they like on the radio, and the TV, via MTV and VH1, then download them for free. Despite what this article claims, pirates really can get away with music for free and it's only through advertising to those ignorant of how to pirate music, and to honest people, that the industry is, for now, not be seriously hurt.
And if they couldn't pirate said music via internet, they wouldn't have just recorded it off of the radio, MTV, or from a friend? Nahhhhh, they definately would have bought that $20 label for the one good song on it.
As the industry improves, so will the solutions of the underground. I remember when you would have to connect every day for a month to a 2400 BBS to download a 4 meg file via Zmodem. Now you're able to go to Kazaa and type in a keyword or two for your favorite song and artist, and even select the bit rate you want, almost every time able to get a high quality copy of every song on a CD. Might have to let the thing download for a bit, but all the MP3's are piled onto your hard drive in an easy, automated process. Especially with broadband. It's going to get even easier in time. Soon we'll have high enough speed connections where instead of a song by song distribution, you just download the entire collection of songs from an artist off Kazaa in one ZIP file.
And there's the problem. It's too convienient, and the alternatives are lacking.
How about this: how about if mp3's were just as convenient, but you could only get them in crappy bitrates. You get to heard to songs you want and get a preview (to wet your palette for them), but because of inferior quality you still buy the CD.
Honestly, when I see a DVD and a VHS movie, the VHS is still significantly cheaper at times, but I buy the DVD because (even on my crappy TV) the picture is better and the surfing easier.
If all mp3's were only low bitrate, suddenly you've got the advertising equivilent of radio (yes, I know radio stations pay, but they advertise too) and MTV but on a much more global scale.
How we'd get rid of the high-rate MP3's I don't know, other than perhaps flooding the filesharing services with servicable, but lower-quality copies.
Yes, but when it's just plain-text anyways, that makes it no less inconvenient. Especially if I'm on my 'nix box, using links.
StartX
Open browser
View document in Acrobat-decoder, with crappy X-windows fonts...
A few things that should be considered along with the lifetime of current PC's
a) Heat and dissipation: They run hot as hell. Yeah, this was filled with Vacuum tubes and probably got fairly warm as wellone probably got fairly warm as well, but in modern PC's the heat tends to be focussed over particular components, leading to detioration over time.
b) Moving parts: Fast-spinning hard drives, fans (see heat, above), etc. The more moving parts you have the greater chance of failure. It also takes more power impulses to start a motor spinning up (hard drive, CD-ROM).
c) Expected time of usage: We're going through PC's a lot faster than we used to. How long was CSIRAC in use? For most home users, you can usually expect an upgrade at least every 5 years. Perhaps not a new PC, but at least a component. Why build a PC that's going to last forever if it's going to be obsolete very soon - except for consideration to servers, etc.
But sometimes it's a major pain to allow you to backtrack through the whole game. A lot of RPG's use limiting points to trash out junk data that would otherwise take savespace.
E.G. if you get dropped into section 2 of the game, then no longer do you need to keep track of all the treasure chests open in section 1.
But yeah, it always sucks when you miss that one thing, but it does give you sometime to play for in a few months when you have no new RPG's
I've often wondered about this in records. I know in most old Vinyl systems, the sounded has degraded so it's hard to tell what it "used to" sound like at it's best. I've also heard a complaint that because CD's are digital they sometimes sound too "electronic" or "filtered" (coming from musicians).
Do records really sound better in some situations, or perhaps it's just that CD's of old records suck because of crossover issues?