For a Mac, it's cheap. There have been Book PCs in the sub-500$ range for years.
Does the Mac Mini not ship with an OS?
I mean, I know that monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers aren't included. I'd figure they'd at least ship with some sort of crippled version of OSX.
I really don't get Apple zealots. I mean, that big aluminum G5 "mini" tower (mini? wtf?) is about the ugliest thing I've ever seen. That's my opinion, not a troll.
A friend of mine just plunked down about 5 grand for a G5 and one of those super cinerama displays.
Man was he ever pissed off when he found out he can't display a movie fullscreen on his nearly two thousand dollar monitor.
Despite all the jokes, it really is probably the best way to keep the interest of someone who doesn't give a shit about high tech long enough to explain why they want their next drive to be a Hitachi.
-Woah ho ho!! A talking dog!? What were you guys smoking when you thought of that?
-We were eating rotissere chicken.
or
-Something like Poochie, but more pro-active.
-Poochie OK with everyone?
-yep, yep
There's a Simpsons quote for EVERY situation.
Re:Wish they'd end it already
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 1
It's apples and oranges. The Simpsons is just a comedy, there needn't be no continuity, there is no plot carried over from episode to episode. So long as there are things to lampoon, the show can stay fresh.
It's really all about the quality of the writing staff. Not just any bozo with a powerbook can write good comedy. People seem to think the best episodes were all in seasons 3-5, then it got worse. It's not that the show ran too long, it's that Conan O'Brian left.
Re:Defined a generation
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The first season was a big of a dog, they didn't hit their groove until about season 3, when Conan O'Brian was their head writer.
They could always bounce back. I've found the last couple of seasons somewhat hit-and-miss. I thought last weeks episode was pretty good (Homer with his diamond studded "Snitch Life" necklace - "What's the matter, you never seen bling bling before?")
I wish Fox had have given Futurama the same chance, that show had a lot more potential, it seems easier to keep the Futurama world "fresh" than that of the Simpsons. It seems the pulled the plug too early, when the characters and themes were just starting to take shape.
Look up abortion, no matter where you stand on the issue, it's hard to call the Wiki article a simple statement of fact, as it degenerates into a pro-life rant complete with phrases like "baby murderers"
Then you have people who constantly troll and deface wiki articles. They're usually fixed fairly quickly, but its still a PITA. I read the George Bush one before it was fixed, and it was by far a mature dictionary entry. It read like your average slashdot post.
There's a suit in the courts seeking to overhaul the entire justice system, based on the premise of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm not sure how it's going, frankly I hope they win.
Everyone in the Dept. of Corrections knows about the constant rape and torture of inmates, by inmates, and yet have done little to fix the problem in a century.
Sentencing someone to rape is cruel and unusual by any stretch of the term.
At any rate, prison makes bad people worse. There are dangers to society that need to be locked away, but the attitude of "throw everyone in for everything" is really warped. In my state, it's a manditory 10 years for being busted for anything drug related within 5 miles of a school. Get out a map of your city or town - unless you're way out on the farm, EVERYONE lives within 5 miles of a school. Erego, every college kid busted with a half a doobie gets his life ruined.
And then theres the practice of civil forfeiture, a great way to get around the constitutional protection to be able to refuse to testify against your spouse. "Mrs Malda, either you testify that Rob was selling crack to 6 year olds, or we take your home, car, all your money, and then put your kids into protective custody so you'll never see them again"
Cheer all you want about this, slashbots, this just sets a precedent for when you're in front of a Judge for downloading those Metallica mp3s. After all, a computer crime is computer crime to a clueless jury. Hell, the DMCA calls for even stiffer penalties than this, should you dare modify that PS2 to play copied titles.
Barred from owning or using a computer without supervision?
Fines?
America has a "lock everyone up" attitude that's just sickening.
Jail doesn't deter crime, and the "department of corrections" is the biggest misnomer on the planet, they've never corrected anything or anyone.
So take a spammer, annoying but pretty much non-threatening, lock him up for 10 years, and hooray - we have a brand new hardened criminal who can now enter the lucrative field of carjacking, burglary, rape..
Prison is like a university where you learn to be a better, more ruthless criminal.
Slashbots are real quick to defend Mitnick, and frankly I see them both in about the same light: assholes who shouldn't be allowed to use a computer, but don't necessarily deserve "hard time" either.
Nope, I want the box, dead-tree manual, and the original game disc to play, even 10 years after valve has gone bankrupt.
SNK is dead and gone. My Neo Geo still works great. 3DO is dead and gone, my 3DO still works great (well insomuch as you can call 3DO great). Sega's feeding tube will be removed any time soon, but my Master System, Genesis-voltron, Saturn and Dreamcast will all still work.
I play a pretty even mix between "hot new latest and greatest", and older "classics", or even not-so-classics that I enjoyed.
I find that good video games age well. I recently replayed Crystalis for the NES, for example, and found it every bit as good as when I was 10.
My 10 year old bugs me every day to let him play Samurai Shodown on the Neo Geo, despite the fact that he has brand new copies of Dead or Alive Ultimate, Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 300, etc.. He's also logged more time playing Yoshi's Island on my SNES than I have.
I'm sure the industry hates that. I'll go into EB or Babbages and drop 50 bucks, and rather than one overpriced new release, I'll come home with an assload of older SNES, Genesis, or whatever they have.
A store bought copy of HL2 won't work when Valve is gone, or else they've decided not to support it anymore. It seems to me, that's the whole point of Steam, that's the only thing it offers over another delivery vehicle like HTTP for instance.
The lack of steam didn't stop them from making 12 million addons for Half Life, and it surely didn't take six years for Blue Shit to hit the shelves for the low low price of exactly as much as Half Life.
Valve is all about milking the cow until it implodes.
You don't need steam to download content, we have a million different protocols called funny names like HTTP or FTP to do that.
Steam is all about control; being able to click a button, and make Half Life 2 unplayable because it's cutting into the sales of Half Life 2.5.
I want a guarantee that I will be able to play Half Life 2 if Valve goes under, and I want a physical copy on real pressed media that will work when I pull it out 10 years from now for a bit of nostalgia.
The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now...
They managed to release about 900 jillion addons for the first Half Life, even without Steam, and they didn't take 6 years to hit the shelves. They hardly took 6 weeks.
See how much you love Steam when they decide people shouldn't play Half Life 2 or it's addons anymore, because it'll cut into the market for Half Life 3.
Just say no to crappy schemes like that. Sorry, I want to know the game will be playable 10, 20 years from now, provided I still have the right hardware to play it on.
What with MSFT spending 2 million dollars to release on open source tool to catch paedophiles, and promising to put their foot down WRT security in Longhorn, I'm sure plenty of slashbot zealots were feeling frightened and alone.
But now, thanks to J, we know that "evil microsoft" won't let you plaigarize others work into Encarta, and that by giving an article to Encarta, the artcle becomes property of Encarta!
Those bastards! THANKS J FOR YOUR BRILLIANT INSIGHT!
Who the fuck would think that if you submit an article to a commercial encyclopedia, that it would be any different?
Sheesh. Wikipedia pretty much demands the same thing. Can I demand that a wiki article I wrote be taken down, or that everyone who reads it gives me a nickel? Nope, you click submit, and it's NOT YOURS ANYMORE.
As for the "no plagairism", well duh, that's just common sense.
Sheesh. Shouldnt you be watching Sailor Moon about this time?
I think an encyclopaedia should stick to factual information, and not philosophical or political rants.
I sure hope they wouldn't put any of the type of drivel slashbots spew into Encarta.
There's too much of it in Wikipedia, which is good, because it guarantee's that anyone with a brain reading it will never, ever, forget that it's an amateur hack-job.
Never will (or should) you be able to cite Wikipedia in, say, your Master's thesis, and expect to pass.
I wasn't the least bit interested in debugging Comcast's problem. I thought it was something borked on the linux box, which is really very common. For instance, sleepycat DB, the ubiquitous backend for everything on linux, is notorious for just deciding to be corrupt all of a sudden.
If XP didn't work by simply plugging it in and hitting repair, it's a comcast problem. That should have been the first thing I looked at, really.
Used as a simple cache/proxy/dhcp server on a properly firewalled private LAN, which is how I use it, is dnsmasq a threat?
I mean, an attacker would actually have to be able to hit it from the outside, right?
Also, if say my upstream DNS servers were "poisoned", could my caching DNS proxy/server detect this, and thus protect all the boxes on my LAN from evildoers?
I'm a comcast customer, and fucked with my linux router for about an hour last night trying to figure out what the blue hell was going on.
It has a habit of just shitting out every time my dhcp lease expires, rather than refreshing it and moving on with life, so I figured that was it, or perhaps dnsmasq (which I use to proxy for my lan) got fubared.
Eventually I just plugged my cablemodem into a windows box, since they "just work" without fighting a bunch of resolv.conf or/etc/conf.d crap, and it had the same problem.
At that point I realized it was their DNS servers, since I could ping them, but they wouldn't resolve queries, and I just waited it out.
Interesting. Do you know for a fact that it was because of this poisoning stuff, and not because the new guy tripped over the cords?
They could have had their dhcp servers send out, at least temporarily, a good upstream DNS server, rather than piss off umpteen billion customers.
Slashdot Mirror
For a Mac, it's cheap. There have been Book PCs in the sub-500$ range for years.
Does the Mac Mini not ship with an OS?
I mean, I know that monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers aren't included. I'd figure they'd at least ship with some sort of crippled version of OSX.
I really don't get Apple zealots. I mean, that big aluminum G5 "mini" tower (mini? wtf?) is about the ugliest thing I've ever seen. That's my opinion, not a troll.
A friend of mine just plunked down about 5 grand for a G5 and one of those super cinerama displays.
Man was he ever pissed off when he found out he can't display a movie fullscreen on his nearly two thousand dollar monitor.
Despite all the jokes, it really is probably the best way to keep the interest of someone who doesn't give a shit about high tech long enough to explain why they want their next drive to be a Hitachi.
No PHB is going to sit and read a whitepaper.
-Woah ho ho!! A talking dog!? What were you guys smoking when you thought of that?
-We were eating rotissere chicken.
or
-Something like Poochie, but more pro-active.
-Poochie OK with everyone?
-yep, yep
There's a Simpsons quote for EVERY situation.
It's apples and oranges. The Simpsons is just a comedy, there needn't be no continuity, there is no plot carried over from episode to episode. So long as there are things to lampoon, the show can stay fresh.
It's really all about the quality of the writing staff. Not just any bozo with a powerbook can write good comedy. People seem to think the best episodes were all in seasons 3-5, then it got worse. It's not that the show ran too long, it's that Conan O'Brian left.
The first season was a big of a dog, they didn't hit their groove until about season 3, when Conan O'Brian was their head writer.
They could always bounce back. I've found the last couple of seasons somewhat hit-and-miss. I thought last weeks episode was pretty good (Homer with his diamond studded "Snitch Life" necklace - "What's the matter, you never seen bling bling before?")
I wish Fox had have given Futurama the same chance, that show had a lot more potential, it seems easier to keep the Futurama world "fresh" than that of the Simpsons. It seems the pulled the plug too early, when the characters and themes were just starting to take shape.
Just my opinion though.
Once supporting HL2, or any other title, on Steam start's *costing* them money, watch the rules change.
You're probably quick to accept the scenario if I replace Half Life 2 with Windows XP and Half Life 3 with Longhorn.
Look up abortion, no matter where you stand on the issue, it's hard to call the Wiki article a simple statement of fact, as it degenerates into a pro-life rant complete with phrases like "baby murderers"
Then you have people who constantly troll and deface wiki articles. They're usually fixed fairly quickly, but its still a PITA. I read the George Bush one before it was fixed, and it was by far a mature dictionary entry. It read like your average slashdot post.
There's a suit in the courts seeking to overhaul the entire justice system, based on the premise of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm not sure how it's going, frankly I hope they win.
Everyone in the Dept. of Corrections knows about the constant rape and torture of inmates, by inmates, and yet have done little to fix the problem in a century.
Sentencing someone to rape is cruel and unusual by any stretch of the term.
At any rate, prison makes bad people worse. There are dangers to society that need to be locked away, but the attitude of "throw everyone in for everything" is really warped. In my state, it's a manditory 10 years for being busted for anything drug related within 5 miles of a school. Get out a map of your city or town - unless you're way out on the farm, EVERYONE lives within 5 miles of a school. Erego, every college kid busted with a half a doobie gets his life ruined.
And then theres the practice of civil forfeiture, a great way to get around the constitutional protection to be able to refuse to testify against your spouse. "Mrs Malda, either you testify that Rob was selling crack to 6 year olds, or we take your home, car, all your money, and then put your kids into protective custody so you'll never see them again"
Cheer all you want about this, slashbots, this just sets a precedent for when you're in front of a Judge for downloading those Metallica mp3s. After all, a computer crime is computer crime to a clueless jury. Hell, the DMCA calls for even stiffer penalties than this, should you dare modify that PS2 to play copied titles.
Barred from owning or using a computer without supervision?
Fines?
America has a "lock everyone up" attitude that's just sickening.
Jail doesn't deter crime, and the "department of corrections" is the biggest misnomer on the planet, they've never corrected anything or anyone.
So take a spammer, annoying but pretty much non-threatening, lock him up for 10 years, and hooray - we have a brand new hardened criminal who can now enter the lucrative field of carjacking, burglary, rape..
Prison is like a university where you learn to be a better, more ruthless criminal.
Slashbots are real quick to defend Mitnick, and frankly I see them both in about the same light: assholes who shouldn't be allowed to use a computer, but don't necessarily deserve "hard time" either.
But then again, they don't cost the almighty corporations any money, so it's a much lesser offense.
Nope, I want the box, dead-tree manual, and the original game disc to play, even 10 years after valve has gone bankrupt.
SNK is dead and gone. My Neo Geo still works great. 3DO is dead and gone, my 3DO still works great (well insomuch as you can call 3DO great). Sega's feeding tube will be removed any time soon, but my Master System, Genesis-voltron, Saturn and Dreamcast will all still work.
I play a pretty even mix between "hot new latest and greatest", and older "classics", or even not-so-classics that I enjoyed.
I find that good video games age well. I recently replayed Crystalis for the NES, for example, and found it every bit as good as when I was 10.
My 10 year old bugs me every day to let him play Samurai Shodown on the Neo Geo, despite the fact that he has brand new copies of Dead or Alive Ultimate, Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 300, etc.. He's also logged more time playing Yoshi's Island on my SNES than I have.
I'm sure the industry hates that. I'll go into EB or Babbages and drop 50 bucks, and rather than one overpriced new release, I'll come home with an assload of older SNES, Genesis, or whatever they have.
A store bought copy of HL2 won't work when Valve is gone, or else they've decided not to support it anymore. It seems to me, that's the whole point of Steam, that's the only thing it offers over another delivery vehicle like HTTP for instance.
Oh please, that's such a load of shit.
The lack of steam didn't stop them from making 12 million addons for Half Life, and it surely didn't take six years for Blue Shit to hit the shelves for the low low price of exactly as much as Half Life.
Valve is all about milking the cow until it implodes.
You don't need steam to download content, we have a million different protocols called funny names like HTTP or FTP to do that.
Steam is all about control; being able to click a button, and make Half Life 2 unplayable because it's cutting into the sales of Half Life 2.5.
I want a guarantee that I will be able to play Half Life 2 if Valve goes under, and I want a physical copy on real pressed media that will work when I pull it out 10 years from now for a bit of nostalgia.
It's been done already.
See Alien vs Predator 2, playing as the Alien.
The headcrab was always just a cheesy ripoff of the facehugger.
The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now...
They managed to release about 900 jillion addons for the first Half Life, even without Steam, and they didn't take 6 years to hit the shelves. They hardly took 6 weeks.
See how much you love Steam when they decide people shouldn't play Half Life 2 or it's addons anymore, because it'll cut into the market for Half Life 3.
Just say no to crappy schemes like that. Sorry, I want to know the game will be playable 10, 20 years from now, provided I still have the right hardware to play it on.
Kudos to "J" for fixing that!
What with MSFT spending 2 million dollars to release on open source tool to catch paedophiles, and promising to put their foot down WRT security in Longhorn, I'm sure plenty of slashbot zealots were feeling frightened and alone.
But now, thanks to J, we know that "evil microsoft" won't let you plaigarize others work into Encarta, and that by giving an article to Encarta, the artcle becomes property of Encarta!
Those bastards! THANKS J FOR YOUR BRILLIANT INSIGHT!
Who the fuck would think that if you submit an article to a commercial encyclopedia, that it would be any different?
Sheesh. Wikipedia pretty much demands the same thing. Can I demand that a wiki article I wrote be taken down, or that everyone who reads it gives me a nickel? Nope, you click submit, and it's NOT YOURS ANYMORE.
As for the "no plagairism", well duh, that's just common sense.
Sheesh. Shouldnt you be watching Sailor Moon about this time?
Know what?
I think an encyclopaedia should stick to factual information, and not philosophical or political rants.
I sure hope they wouldn't put any of the type of drivel slashbots spew into Encarta.
There's too much of it in Wikipedia, which is good, because it guarantee's that anyone with a brain reading it will never, ever, forget that it's an amateur hack-job.
Never will (or should) you be able to cite Wikipedia in, say, your Master's thesis, and expect to pass.
Except they actually have editors that validate the information and do some basic fact-checking.
Something that wiki and slashdot both lack.
What do you mean debug?
I wasn't the least bit interested in debugging Comcast's problem. I thought it was something borked on the linux box, which is really very common. For instance, sleepycat DB, the ubiquitous backend for everything on linux, is notorious for just deciding to be corrupt all of a sudden.
If XP didn't work by simply plugging it in and hitting repair, it's a comcast problem. That should have been the first thing I looked at, really.
And only on Windows if the Admin was clueless enough to deselect the "protect against cache poisoning" box.
Yep, as with everything else, lousy admins = MSFT's fault.
Then they all hop on slashdot and start screaming racist bunk against Indians when they find themselves unemployed.
Used as a simple cache/proxy/dhcp server on a properly firewalled private LAN, which is how I use it, is dnsmasq a threat?
I mean, an attacker would actually have to be able to hit it from the outside, right?
Also, if say my upstream DNS servers were "poisoned", could my caching DNS proxy/server detect this, and thus protect all the boxes on my LAN from evildoers?
I'm a comcast customer, and fucked with my linux router for about an hour last night trying to figure out what the blue hell was going on.
/etc/conf.d crap, and it had the same problem.
It has a habit of just shitting out every time my dhcp lease expires, rather than refreshing it and moving on with life, so I figured that was it, or perhaps dnsmasq (which I use to proxy for my lan) got fubared.
Eventually I just plugged my cablemodem into a windows box, since they "just work" without fighting a bunch of resolv.conf or
At that point I realized it was their DNS servers, since I could ping them, but they wouldn't resolve queries, and I just waited it out.
Interesting. Do you know for a fact that it was because of this poisoning stuff, and not because the new guy tripped over the cords?
They could have had their dhcp servers send out, at least temporarily, a good upstream DNS server, rather than piss off umpteen billion customers.
huh? Why not?
Sounds like the perfect application for it.
Bush is a big dumbhead and thsi is all because of Bill Gates cant make a good operating system!
Buy an iPod and a PSP, and whatever else we're supposed to be hocking this week!
Boycott NASA or something!
Why did zonk squeeze this into the "hardware" department, and not politics or YRO?
I have slashdots "politics" section blocked for a reason. I don't care about your whiney "me hatey boosh" flamefests.
I want to read about neat hardware, and hear some discussion about things technical.
Categorizing this news as "hardware" is pretty much akin to circumventing spam filters.
In the future, don't try to trick me into reading about your political views.
I am not intrigued, and would not like to subscribe to your newsletter.