Would you be able to tell the difference, from superficial looks, between a Persian, an Arab, a Kurd and a Turk? I'm aware that they are all separate cultural and ethnic groups, with separate histories and sometimes a lot of mutual animosity. And I'm sure the GP is aware of all that too. But I'm kind of ashamed to say, that I can't easily spot the differences visually, unless their clothing or something else gives me clues. If they're all in generic western attire, all I get is that they look vaguely "middle eastern".
Maybe that's just a bad mental block on my part though. For example, I know a whole lot more about China, Japan, and Korea, and the cultural differences between them, than I do about anything middle eastern. Heck, I live in San Francisco and have plenty of friends of various Asian persuasions. But if alllooksame were a school quiz; I'd get a solid F. Again, not proud, and not intentional; but maybe I'm just dense at picking up some of those more subtle visual clues.
> This is about the 5th time you've posted the same kind of message in this thread alone.
Yeah, he just spooged out half a dozen inflammatory messages, saying pretty much exactly the same thing, inside of fifteen minutes; then dropped off the thread entirely. Hmmmm... there's a word for people like that.
> k, we get it, you're against the copying of music. A lot of people aren't. You don't like them.
If I were into betting, I'd bet that he doesn't actually give a rip one way or the other. Right now, he's probably sitting back, reloading his userinfo page, and laughing at all the biters. (Heh... which includes me now, I guess.)
>? If so, it would be the first time they've been so concerned with support costs, > which they effectively externalize to third parties and IT departments. Historically, > they've always been ready to deploy products with inherent support and security > complexities if that product meets their strategic needs.
Since when does microsoft concern themselves with support at all? Historically, microsoft's idea of "support" has been: "Fuck off, wait for the service pack, and prey that it doesn't break more than it fixes.". It's enough to make one want to go work in construction or something...
> I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed > that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop > for anything but wallpaper).
You can take HDs, CDs, iPods, servers, and mounted disc images off the desktop right now, if you're so inclined.
Go to Finder>Preferences, or use command-comma while Finder is the selected app. From there, just uncheck the top three ("Show these items on the Desktop") boxes in the "General" pane. Bamf... nothing on your desktop but what you purposely put there.
I find myself remembering a certain line from Futurama right about now...... the one about how global warming eventually happened, but thank god it was counteracted by nuclear winter.
> So by me using a credit card for everything, I'm essentially forcing > mom-and-pop shops to artificially raise all of their prices %3-5 percent.
That's a noble sentiment. But that's just the cost of doing business these days, for pretty much everyone. You do your community a whole *LOT* more good by shopping at local shops or restaurants, or even local chains, and avoiding the out-of-town corporate retailers and chains in the first place; wether you pay in cash or credit or bullion is kind of irrelevant.
... though *I* had the courtesy to roll up my coins before paying with them. You've got to remember though. A pizza place in a college town, especially one that will deliver to the dorms, EXPECTS that kind of thing. Broke-ass college students scrounging for change on $5 pizza night is the market they've decided to cater to.
(Even after I got out of college, I tried my best to live near universities for that very reason. Hungrie Howies had a large 1-topping carry-out for $5.99 all week long, and $4.99 on wednesdays. Sooo nice to have that sort of deal available, even when you're not reliant on it anymore.)
Go shopping at a nice store in The City, though, and expect to pay with a sack full of pennies; and you'll get a quite different treatment.
Apparently you've not spent enough time here to pick up on West Coast politics. Your proposal would go over quite well here. Aside from maybe the five foot diameters around Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, I don't think you'll find a more anti-bush place ANYWHERE in the country.
The 925 kind of has the "soulless suburban sprawl" thing going on... at least once you get past Lafayette anyway. To this day, I'm still not sure when and where exactly I'm in Walnut Creek vs. Pleasant Hill vs. Concord vs. Martinez. It's just a little bit TOO "perfect". It actually kind of creeps me out a little bit, especially at night. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a hellmouth under there somewhere.
But it's definitely affluent... VERY affluent. This isn't East Oakland we're talking about here.
Not that they deserve to be ripped off though, just for being wealthy... nor even for being on the wrong side of the "Real City Folk" vs. "Bridge and Tunnelers" rivalry. (Funny thing is... quite a lot of people I know who LIVE in CC have a 415 number for their cell. For the kids, it's trendy. For business types.. it's the difference between "415 == San Francisco" and "925 == whereTheFuckIsThat?".)
But it sure doesn't look like IBM is the bad guy here. In fact, they've been *more* than generous with the terms of repayment.
> Well, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi, the Stasi was also a secret
> police force. Also, even if the Stasi were not, the DHS dos not encourage Americans
> to spy on each other. Instead, it is involved in other shady operations, such as
> illegal, warrantless wiretapping, and so on.
You're right. The DHS leaves the effort to turn citizens against each other into an auxiliary secret police to a separate agency: the FBI. So since the FBI falls under the "Justice" Department, instead of fatherland security, technically, you're right.
Myself, I don't care about the specifics of the org chart. The government trying to turn the citizens into spies against each other is QUITE Stasi-esque in my book. And they all fall under the umbrella of the executive branch, (As Harry Truman once said about the presidency: "The buck stops here.".) anyway.
At my college it was simply considered good etiquette, at least among the computer science and various engineering departments (yes, including faculty), to leave pretty much your whole home directory 755'd and 644'd; with the exception of obviously private stuff like.mail or grades and upcoming exams (in the case of said faculty.).
A couple of the higher-up professors in the department were old-school MIT types from the ITS days. Apparently that was the culture and attitude there; it worked successfully for them; and they sought to bring that syatem to us. You know... a culture that fosters openness, support, information sharing, helping each other out, even if only by example instead in-person. Maybe that's the culture not just at MIT, but at Boston universities in general?
Personally, I rather *LIKE* the whole openness and sharing and 644 and 755-ing your home directory thing. It's one of the factors that contributed to a good education for me. It helped me to help others do the same even when I couldn't physically be there. And I know for damn sure no one can challenge its success at MIT.
I understand that after you blow away half a season's effects budget of something as incredible as "Exodus", a handful of bottle shows are inevitable. That's not what I minded. But FFS....even in a bottle show, you ought to be able to find some way to advance the bloody plot! And I'm sorry, but Starbuck and Apollo being all emo over each other over and over and over and over again ain't what I mean by advancing the plot.
And recycling the godawful old "doctor gone evil and killing patients he doesn't think are worthy" cliche was just sad.
Season three gave us a spectacular beginning, a good two-parter in the middle, and a good ending (Right up to the geezer rock at the VERY end, that is. Bob Dylan's a cylon sent ahead to destroy us, I guess.). But almost half the season was just time-wasting filler. It'd almost have been better if they'd only had a twelve episode season to work with, like the first.
Hopefully, knowing EXACTLY how many episodes they have left to wrap everything up, they'll stick to the PLOT in season four.
As a standalone game, D3 holds it's own pretty well. As the successor to Doom and Doom 2... not so much.
In D1 and D2, there were oh so many times you'd be cruising along, pumping some buckshot into the occasional imp, generally making your way from point A to point B with no worries... Then you open the next door, and you're in a room with a few DOZEN imps, a pinky or two, and a cacodeamon or two, firing lost souls at you for good measure. Ohshitohshitohshit... you run for cover, switch to the chain-gun or the plasma... maybe even the BFG if you can spare the cells, and generally hose the MFers every spare second while run and hide and take cover and circle and generally try to survive long enough to pare the odds down to something a little more reasonable, Then, you switch again to the rocket launcher to shoot the cacodeamons out of the sky; and finally to the chain-saw to finish off any surviving pinkies. And if iD were feeling particularly sadistic that day, they'd include someplace for you to step that would spawn an arch-vile or two to start raising everything you just killed. Ohshitohshitohshitgaddamnshithelldamnfuck!
That whole excitement was missing in Doom 3. Okay... it's a different kind of game and all... survival horror. But they marketed it as Doom 3, not "Alone in the Dark on Mars".
If you've just stepped off one aircraft (an international flight, no less) is it not a reasonable assumption that you were screened for security before you got on *THAT* flight, and a second screening is a redundant waste of everyone's time?
> Fortunately for me, customs waved me through without so much as wanding me. > Unfortunately, that isn't what customs is supposed to do.
And for that matter, the customs types aren't there to make sure you don't smuggle a gun or a bomb onto a plane at all, are they? Maybe something's changed since the last time *I* left the country (pre-9/11, granted), but from what I recall, customs are a bunch of wastes of flesh and oxygen who are there mainly to have a stick up their asses about making sure you've paid any tariff or duty on any souvenirs or shopping you've done while you were overseas.
Something I think a lot of people who chatter on about Linux gaming fail to remember is its history.
Remember several years ago? Remember when Apple was struggling to break even every quarter? Remember when they were "beleaguered", if you will; and they were reduced to selling computers based on fruity flavors instead of features and performance? Linux was hot shit then... the "next great new thing" that EVERYBODY wanted a piece of. Even outside of slashdot, you could hardly go ten minutes without hearing something or another about how great Linux was and how it was going to make everyone's live better.
Linux HAD all of the best of the new releases ported to it then. A company down in SoCal by the name of Loki was doing it. They were porting, supporting, and selling them like crazy... I was actually able to get the Linux version of Quake 3 Arena from them (mail order) before the PC or Mac versions showed up in stores. They even got shelf space for a while in the local CompUSA. And they eventually failed miserably and went bankrupt. Seems that the Linux community, used to getting everything for free and with the source code, turned out to be unwilling to buy commercial and closed-source games in the volume necessary to financially support even a small start-up.
Oops.
Look at the situation now. Apple is madly profitable and growing its market share again. Everyone but everyone has or wants a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone. Apple users, by and large, have never had a problem buying their software, and supporting the companies that support their platform. And Steve Jobs can hardly take a dump without the press rushing to collect it and inspect it for the gold he must have crapped out. Linus, ESR and RMS hardly *get* press anymore. And Linux is mostly regarded as "that OS that runs on the servers", not something that's going to take over the world and cast out OS X and Vista into the forgotten dustbin of history.
And then there's the lesson to be learned from Loki.
I think, for simple and sound business reasons, it will be quite a while before anyone major takes a risk on Linux gaming again.
> but then I realize that it's being produced by spielberg,
If Spielberg were directing instead of producing, and michael bay were in no way whatsoever involved; I might agree. I have too much of a suspicion that, even with Spielberg looking over his shoulder, michael bay will find some way to royally fuck it up. This is a wait-for-HBO one for me.
> Same thing with pirates of the caribbean...I hate most jerry bruckheimer > movies, but johnny depp sort of cancels him out too.
Meh. I must be one of the freak few who didn't care for POTC. Not that it was appallingly bad; but I don't think it was anything special. And even Johnny Depp couldn't change that. Maybe if they'd had Tim Burton direct...
I'm sorry, buy as much as I liked Myth and Marathon, they're both... what... over ten years old now? You really can't harken back to those old days and honestly say they have any bearing on what bungie's become NOW. Oni was a withered shell compared to what was promised. And Halo? If you remember the MacWorld demos of what Halo was going to be like before before they sold out to the gates and gutted it for the xbox, and compare to what was finally actually released.... you'd happily feed the entire bungie team through a wood-chipper.
Being bought out by microsoft, for a game studio, appears to have pretty much the same consequences as being bought out by EA.
> I'd suggest against ruling out all non-japanese cars. I'd make the Japanese > earn my business against all the other competitors personally. Eliminating > choices out of hand isn't good for competition.
The first two cars I owned, before the Subaru, were a chrysler and then a ford. I plan never to make either mistake again in my life.
Granted, that leaves GM. But their reputation for quality and reliability is right down there with the other two. (I did a *LOT* of research, both online and via print resources such as Consumer Reports, when I was planning my last purchase, before deciding on my Subaru.) And the performance of the company, in general, does not exactly inspire confidence of late. Maybe if GM is still selling re-badged Toyota's as Geos, I might consider one in the future. But I don't think that's the case anymore.
So that just about does it for american cars. That leaves Japan and Europe. And quite frankly, I don't need to pay an extra 5-10K for the "prestige of driving a european automobile". So that leaves the Japanese.
> Break even point, assuming 0% interest? ~10 years. I usually assume a car's lifespan > at 10 years. Many last longer, but many die earlier.
Remember though, those numbers change when you separate out the Japanese cars designed and legitimately built in Japan from the fords, chevys, and chryslers; designed and built by those monkeys in detroit. Most of the hybrids that are on the market now are Hondas and Toyotas. So their lasting well past ten years can safely be assumed to be the rule, not the exception.
Granted, a lot of people don't *KEEP* their cars for their entire lifespan. But some of us do. I've had my Subaru for almost eight years now, and, excepting the possibility of accidents or moving overseas, I expect to put at least another 200K miles on it before I need to even think about replacing it. When I do so, the plan is to get a hybrid (Or, by then the NEXT next-big-thing might be available.), which I will ALSO keep for the lifespan of the (yes, it WILL be Japanese) car.
> You mean the energy efficient bulbs with all the mercury in them > and that require a hazmat team to dispose of? Hmmm... I dunno.
On the way from my gym to the Transbay Terminal, where I catch my bus home every day, I walk past a place where one can drop off their used electronics (Yes, including those mercury-laden compact fluorescent bulbs.) for proper disposal and/or recycling. Next time I have a CF* bulb crap out on me, I don't think it'll be too much effort to stop in and drop it off in the appropriate bin. If that measly half-minute is too much of a detour for me, forking out a slightly larger initial investment and using LEDs for lighting is always an option.
( * It's been ages since I HAVE had one die. But when I moved into this house, I replaced all the regular bulbs with CFs in one go, so they're probably all due to fail together. But by the time that happens though, LED fixtures probably WILL have matured to a decent replacement price.)
So, thanks for the concern and all. But I think my present fluorescent bulbs are still a winning solution.
Oh... don't forget the other two major pains-in-the-ass when it comes to flying:
1) No need to book your ticket a month in advance if you don't want to get absolutely raped on the fare. Just show up, buy your ticket, and hop on the next train to Osaka (Every fifteen minutes, IIRC.)
2) Okay, this one is related to #1, but applies more here in the US... There's none of this: "Arrive three hours before your departure time, check in, and wait in line for some TSA knuckledragger to feel you up, ransack your belongings, and accuse you of everything from terrorism to drug running to money laundering to prostitution to communism, then wait some more so the flight crew can stock the plane with lemon-soaked paper napkins, and remove a "suspicious" (too brown-looking) passenger." bullshit. With the Shinkansen, you just show up... maybe five or ten minutes before your departure... get on your train, and go.
I swear... I'm not *afraid* of flying by a long shot. But it's turned into such a major pain in the ass here, that I've actually seriously considered taking Amtrack next time I travel domestically.
> I might be wrong, but I will reserve my doubts about Apple products gaining
> popularity in the world in general. There is still a vast European and Asian market.
.... if you go to some of the danker pits of Tokyo at 2am, there is the very real danger that your shoes will get vomited upon by some drunk salariman staggering out of a bar because he can't even sit vertically anymore. The smell (booze plus smoke plus BO plus vomit) could also count as an assault on the senses. If you're a cute female, you might even get groped on the subway in the morning.
> Yes, it is. No matter what Xiph says, I've never managed to get the Ogg Vorbis QT > component to work reliably. iTunes can read the metadata just fine, but playing a > file often results in a crash.
That's odd. The ogg plugin for QuickTime works just fine for me. ranted, that's in iTunes, and not on my iPod. But, as I understand it, that's more a hardware thing than anything else. Or did they ever create an all-interger version of vorbis? In any event though, I don't know what could be wrong with yours, but one simple download, and vorbis works fine in iTunes, and all of QuickTime, for me.
> By the way, where have you managed to find other codecs? I'd really like stuff like > Modplug or a SID codec for QT, so I can listen to chiptunes on the Mac. Google > searches for "quicktime codecs" or something similar obviously don't return anything useful.
I dunno about Modplug or SID, but in addition to ogg vorbis, I have 3vix, AC3, DivX, FFusion, Flip4Mac, and Theora; all sitting around making QuickTime work seamlessly for me. I think I found them all by searching on versiontracker.com over the years. But I'm not 100% sure on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be able to tell the difference, from superficial looks, between a Persian, an Arab, a Kurd and a Turk? I'm aware that they are all separate cultural and ethnic groups, with separate histories and sometimes a lot of mutual animosity. And I'm sure the GP is aware of all that too. But I'm kind of ashamed to say, that I can't easily spot the differences visually, unless their clothing or something else gives me clues. If they're all in generic western attire, all I get is that they look vaguely "middle eastern".
Maybe that's just a bad mental block on my part though. For example, I know a whole lot more about China, Japan, and Korea, and the cultural differences between them, than I do about anything middle eastern. Heck, I live in San Francisco and have plenty of friends of various Asian persuasions. But if alllooksame were a school quiz; I'd get a solid F. Again, not proud, and not intentional; but maybe I'm just dense at picking up some of those more subtle visual clues.
cya,
john
> This is about the 5th time you've posted the same kind of message in this thread alone.
Yeah, he just spooged out half a dozen inflammatory messages, saying pretty much exactly the same thing, inside of fifteen minutes; then dropped off the thread entirely. Hmmmm... there's a word for people like that.
> k, we get it, you're against the copying of music. A lot of people aren't. You don't like them.
If I were into betting, I'd bet that he doesn't actually give a rip one way or the other. Right now, he's probably sitting back, reloading his userinfo page, and laughing at all the biters. (Heh... which includes me now, I guess.)
cya,
john
>? If so, it would be the first time they've been so concerned with support costs,
> which they effectively externalize to third parties and IT departments. Historically,
> they've always been ready to deploy products with inherent support and security
> complexities if that product meets their strategic needs.
Since when does microsoft concern themselves with support at all? Historically, microsoft's idea of "support" has been: "Fuck off, wait for the service pack, and prey that it doesn't break more than it fixes.". It's enough to make one want to go work in construction or something...
cya,
john
> I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed
> that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop
> for anything but wallpaper).
You can take HDs, CDs, iPods, servers, and mounted disc images off the desktop right now, if you're so inclined.
Go to Finder>Preferences, or use command-comma while Finder is the selected app. From there, just uncheck the top three ("Show these items on the Desktop") boxes in the "General" pane. Bamf... nothing on your desktop but what you purposely put there.
cya,
john
I find myself remembering a certain line from Futurama right about now... ... the one about how global warming eventually happened, but thank god it was counteracted by nuclear winter.
cya,
john
> So by me using a credit card for everything, I'm essentially forcing
> mom-and-pop shops to artificially raise all of their prices %3-5 percent.
That's a noble sentiment. But that's just the cost of doing business these days, for pretty much everyone. You do your community a whole *LOT* more good by shopping at local shops or restaurants, or even local chains, and avoiding the out-of-town corporate retailers and chains in the first place; wether you pay in cash or credit or bullion is kind of irrelevant.
cya,
john
... though *I* had the courtesy to roll up my coins before paying with them. You've got to remember though. A pizza place in a college town, especially one that will deliver to the dorms, EXPECTS that kind of thing. Broke-ass college students scrounging for change on $5 pizza night is the market they've decided to cater to.
(Even after I got out of college, I tried my best to live near universities for that very reason. Hungrie Howies had a large 1-topping carry-out for $5.99 all week long, and $4.99 on wednesdays. Sooo nice to have that sort of deal available, even when you're not reliant on it anymore.)
Go shopping at a nice store in The City, though, and expect to pay with a sack full of pennies; and you'll get a quite different treatment.
cya,
john
> We should deed you over to Canada.
Apparently you've not spent enough time here to pick up on West Coast politics. Your proposal would go over quite well here. Aside from maybe the five foot diameters around Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, I don't think you'll find a more anti-bush place ANYWHERE in the country.
cya,
john
The 925 kind of has the "soulless suburban sprawl" thing going on... at least once you get past Lafayette anyway. To this day, I'm still not sure when and where exactly I'm in Walnut Creek vs. Pleasant Hill vs. Concord vs. Martinez. It's just a little bit TOO "perfect". It actually kind of creeps me out a little bit, especially at night. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a hellmouth under there somewhere.
But it's definitely affluent... VERY affluent. This isn't East Oakland we're talking about here.
Not that they deserve to be ripped off though, just for being wealthy... nor even for being on the wrong side of the "Real City Folk" vs. "Bridge and Tunnelers" rivalry. (Funny thing is... quite a lot of people I know who LIVE in CC have a 415 number for their cell. For the kids, it's trendy. For business types.. it's the difference between "415 == San Francisco" and "925 == whereTheFuckIsThat?".)
But it sure doesn't look like IBM is the bad guy here. In fact, they've been *more* than generous with the terms of repayment.
cya,
john
> police force. Also, even if the Stasi were not, the DHS dos not encourage Americans
> to spy on each other. Instead, it is involved in other shady operations, such as
> illegal, warrantless wiretapping, and so on.
You're right. The DHS leaves the effort to turn citizens against each other into an auxiliary secret police to a separate agency: the FBI. So since the FBI falls under the "Justice" Department, instead of fatherland security, technically, you're right.
Myself, I don't care about the specifics of the org chart. The government trying to turn the citizens into spies against each other is QUITE Stasi-esque in my book. And they all fall under the umbrella of the executive branch, (As Harry Truman once said about the presidency: "The buck stops here.".) anyway.
cya,
john
At my college it was simply considered good etiquette, at least among the computer science and various engineering departments (yes, including faculty), to leave pretty much your whole home directory 755'd and 644'd; with the exception of obviously private stuff like .mail or grades and upcoming exams (in the case of said faculty.).
A couple of the higher-up professors in the department were old-school MIT types from the ITS days. Apparently that was the culture and attitude there; it worked successfully for them; and they sought to bring that syatem to us. You know... a culture that fosters openness, support, information sharing, helping each other out, even if only by example instead in-person. Maybe that's the culture not just at MIT, but at Boston universities in general?
Personally, I rather *LIKE* the whole openness and sharing and 644 and 755-ing your home directory thing. It's one of the factors that contributed to a good education for me. It helped me to help others do the same even when I couldn't physically be there. And I know for damn sure no one can challenge its success at MIT.
cya,
john
Exactly.
I understand that after you blow away half a season's effects budget of something as incredible as "Exodus", a handful of bottle shows are inevitable. That's not what I minded. But FFS....even in a bottle show, you ought to be able to find some way to advance the bloody plot! And I'm sorry, but Starbuck and Apollo being all emo over each other over and over and over and over again ain't what I mean by advancing the plot.
And recycling the godawful old "doctor gone evil and killing patients he doesn't think are worthy" cliche was just sad.
Season three gave us a spectacular beginning, a good two-parter in the middle, and a good ending (Right up to the geezer rock at the VERY end, that is. Bob Dylan's a cylon sent ahead to destroy us, I guess.). But almost half the season was just time-wasting filler. It'd almost have been better if they'd only had a twelve episode season to work with, like the first.
Hopefully, knowing EXACTLY how many episodes they have left to wrap everything up, they'll stick to the PLOT in season four.
Well... yeah.
As a standalone game, D3 holds it's own pretty well. As the successor to Doom and Doom 2... not so much.
In D1 and D2, there were oh so many times you'd be cruising along, pumping some buckshot into the occasional imp, generally making your way from point A to point B with no worries... Then you open the next door, and you're in a room with a few DOZEN imps, a pinky or two, and a cacodeamon or two, firing lost souls at you for good measure. Ohshitohshitohshit... you run for cover, switch to the chain-gun or the plasma... maybe even the BFG if you can spare the cells, and generally hose the MFers every spare second while run and hide and take cover and circle and generally try to survive long enough to pare the odds down to something a little more reasonable, Then, you switch again to the rocket launcher to shoot the cacodeamons out of the sky; and finally to the chain-saw to finish off any surviving pinkies. And if iD were feeling particularly sadistic that day, they'd include someplace for you to step that would spawn an arch-vile or two to start raising everything you just killed. Ohshitohshitohshitgaddamnshithelldamnfuck!
That whole excitement was missing in Doom 3. Okay... it's a different kind of game and all... survival horror. But they marketed it as Doom 3, not "Alone in the Dark on Mars".
cya,
john
If you've just stepped off one aircraft (an international flight, no less) is it not a reasonable assumption that you were screened for security before you got on *THAT* flight, and a second screening is a redundant waste of everyone's time?
> Fortunately for me, customs waved me through without so much as wanding me.
> Unfortunately, that isn't what customs is supposed to do.
And for that matter, the customs types aren't there to make sure you don't smuggle a gun or a bomb onto a plane at all, are they? Maybe something's changed since the last time *I* left the country (pre-9/11, granted), but from what I recall, customs are a bunch of wastes of flesh and oxygen who are there mainly to have a stick up their asses about making sure you've paid any tariff or duty on any souvenirs or shopping you've done while you were overseas.
cya,
john
Something I think a lot of people who chatter on about Linux gaming fail to remember is its history.
Remember several years ago? Remember when Apple was struggling to break even every quarter? Remember when they were "beleaguered", if you will; and they were reduced to selling computers based on fruity flavors instead of features and performance? Linux was hot shit then... the "next great new thing" that EVERYBODY wanted a piece of. Even outside of slashdot, you could hardly go ten minutes without hearing something or another about how great Linux was and how it was going to make everyone's live better.
Linux HAD all of the best of the new releases ported to it then. A company down in SoCal by the name of Loki was doing it. They were porting, supporting, and selling them like crazy... I was actually able to get the Linux version of Quake 3 Arena from them (mail order) before the PC or Mac versions showed up in stores. They even got shelf space for a while in the local CompUSA. And they eventually failed miserably and went bankrupt. Seems that the Linux community, used to getting everything for free and with the source code, turned out to be unwilling to buy commercial and closed-source games in the volume necessary to financially support even a small start-up.
Oops.
Look at the situation now. Apple is madly profitable and growing its market share again. Everyone but everyone has or wants a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone. Apple users, by and large, have never had a problem buying their software, and supporting the companies that support their platform. And Steve Jobs can hardly take a dump without the press rushing to collect it and inspect it for the gold he must have crapped out. Linus, ESR and RMS hardly *get* press anymore. And Linux is mostly regarded as "that OS that runs on the servers", not something that's going to take over the world and cast out OS X and Vista into the forgotten dustbin of history.
And then there's the lesson to be learned from Loki.
I think, for simple and sound business reasons, it will be quite a while before anyone major takes a risk on Linux gaming again.
cya,
john
> but then I realize that it's being produced by spielberg,
If Spielberg were directing instead of producing, and michael bay were in no way whatsoever involved; I might agree. I have too much of a suspicion that, even with Spielberg looking over his shoulder, michael bay will find some way to royally fuck it up. This is a wait-for-HBO one for me.
> Same thing with pirates of the caribbean...I hate most jerry bruckheimer
> movies, but johnny depp sort of cancels him out too.
Meh. I must be one of the freak few who didn't care for POTC. Not that it was appallingly bad; but I don't think it was anything special. And even Johnny Depp couldn't change that. Maybe if they'd had Tim Burton direct...
cya,m
john
Bungie USED TO MAKE very good games.
I'm sorry, buy as much as I liked Myth and Marathon, they're both... what... over ten years old now? You really can't harken back to those old days and honestly say they have any bearing on what bungie's become NOW. Oni was a withered shell compared to what was promised. And Halo? If you remember the MacWorld demos of what Halo was going to be like before before they sold out to the gates and gutted it for the xbox, and compare to what was finally actually released.... you'd happily feed the entire bungie team through a wood-chipper.
Being bought out by microsoft, for a game studio, appears to have pretty much the same consequences as being bought out by EA.
cya,
john
> I'd suggest against ruling out all non-japanese cars. I'd make the Japanese
> earn my business against all the other competitors personally. Eliminating
> choices out of hand isn't good for competition.
The first two cars I owned, before the Subaru, were a chrysler and then a ford. I plan never to make either mistake again in my life.
Granted, that leaves GM. But their reputation for quality and reliability is right down there with the other two. (I did a *LOT* of research, both online and via print resources such as Consumer Reports, when I was planning my last purchase, before deciding on my Subaru.) And the performance of the company, in general, does not exactly inspire confidence of late. Maybe if GM is still selling re-badged Toyota's as Geos, I might consider one in the future. But I don't think that's the case anymore.
So that just about does it for american cars. That leaves Japan and Europe. And quite frankly, I don't need to pay an extra 5-10K for the "prestige of driving a european automobile". So that leaves the Japanese.
cya,
john
> Break even point, assuming 0% interest? ~10 years. I usually assume a car's lifespan
> at 10 years. Many last longer, but many die earlier.
Remember though, those numbers change when you separate out the Japanese cars designed and legitimately built in Japan from the fords, chevys, and chryslers; designed and built by those monkeys in detroit. Most of the hybrids that are on the market now are Hondas and Toyotas. So their lasting well past ten years can safely be assumed to be the rule, not the exception.
Granted, a lot of people don't *KEEP* their cars for their entire lifespan. But some of us do. I've had my Subaru for almost eight years now, and, excepting the possibility of accidents or moving overseas, I expect to put at least another 200K miles on it before I need to even think about replacing it. When I do so, the plan is to get a hybrid (Or, by then the NEXT next-big-thing might be available.), which I will ALSO keep for the lifespan of the (yes, it WILL be Japanese) car.
cya,
john
> You mean the energy efficient bulbs with all the mercury in them
> and that require a hazmat team to dispose of? Hmmm... I dunno.
On the way from my gym to the Transbay Terminal, where I catch my bus home every day, I walk past a place where one can drop off their used electronics (Yes, including those mercury-laden compact fluorescent bulbs.) for proper disposal and/or recycling. Next time I have a CF* bulb crap out on me, I don't think it'll be too much effort to stop in and drop it off in the appropriate bin. If that measly half-minute is too much of a detour for me, forking out a slightly larger initial investment and using LEDs for lighting is always an option.
( * It's been ages since I HAVE had one die. But when I moved into this house, I replaced all the regular bulbs with CFs in one go, so they're probably all due to fail together. But by the time that happens though, LED fixtures probably WILL have matured to a decent replacement price.)
So, thanks for the concern and all. But I think my present fluorescent bulbs are still a winning solution.
cya,
john
> We should have a virtual congress and a virtual Constitution for the internet.
> I vote 4chan to write our Constitution.
Great.
Amendment #1 will be: "d is for dickgirls.".
Amendment #2 will be: "White women make me sick. Asian hawties only plz.".
Amendment #3 will be" "Make no post without including sauce.".
Well... It'd be an entertaining and *interesting* form of government, to be sure.
cya,
john
Oh... don't forget the other two major pains-in-the-ass when it comes to flying:
1) No need to book your ticket a month in advance if you don't want to get absolutely raped on the fare. Just show up, buy your ticket, and hop on the next train to Osaka (Every fifteen minutes, IIRC.)
2) Okay, this one is related to #1, but applies more here in the US... There's none of this: "Arrive three hours before your departure time, check in, and wait in line for some TSA knuckledragger to feel you up, ransack your belongings, and accuse you of everything from terrorism to drug running to money laundering to prostitution to communism, then wait some more so the flight crew can stock the plane with lemon-soaked paper napkins, and remove a "suspicious" (too brown-looking) passenger." bullshit. With the Shinkansen, you just show up... maybe five or ten minutes before your departure... get on your train, and go.
I swear... I'm not *afraid* of flying by a long shot. But it's turned into such a major pain in the ass here, that I've actually seriously considered taking Amtrack next time I travel domestically.
cya,
john
> popularity in the world in general. There is still a vast European and Asian market.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TyR3fyLO_I
Somehow, I suspect that Apple is doing much better at making inroads in those markets than you think.
cya,
john
.... if you go to some of the danker pits of Tokyo at 2am, there is the very real danger that your shoes will get vomited upon by some drunk salariman staggering out of a bar because he can't even sit vertically anymore. The smell (booze plus smoke plus BO plus vomit) could also count as an assault on the senses. If you're a cute female, you might even get groped on the subway in the morning.
cya,
john
> Yes, it is. No matter what Xiph says, I've never managed to get the Ogg Vorbis QT
> component to work reliably. iTunes can read the metadata just fine, but playing a
> file often results in a crash.
That's odd. The ogg plugin for QuickTime works just fine for me. ranted, that's in iTunes, and not on my iPod. But, as I understand it, that's more a hardware thing than anything else. Or did they ever create an all-interger version of vorbis? In any event though, I don't know what could be wrong with yours, but one simple download, and vorbis works fine in iTunes, and all of QuickTime, for me.
> By the way, where have you managed to find other codecs? I'd really like stuff like
> Modplug or a SID codec for QT, so I can listen to chiptunes on the Mac. Google
> searches for "quicktime codecs" or something similar obviously don't return anything useful.
I dunno about Modplug or SID, but in addition to ogg vorbis, I have 3vix, AC3, DivX, FFusion, Flip4Mac, and Theora; all sitting around making QuickTime work seamlessly for me. I think I found them all by searching on versiontracker.com over the years. But I'm not 100% sure on that.
cya,
john