Why can't the government just use Linux and Staroffice instead of wasting a crapload of taxpayer money on Microsoft products? If Denmark's entire school system can do it, so can NASA. There might be other products out there that Microsoft writes for the average desktop PC which become "government-mandated", but I'm sure it's no big deal to find cheap or free alternatives.
This is involving a physical RJ45 cable connection, not Wi Fi, but I believe this example is telling of what you can expect from Marriott. I stayed at the Greenbelt Marriott in Greenbelt, Maryland recently, and had my laptop.. a Dell Inspiron 8000, with Windows XP installed on it and a 100Mb NIC. Runs fine, and I use it on my home network usually. So anyway, I go to the desk initially, and ask them if they provide internet access. The woman at the desk said they did, and that it was $12 for 24 hours of access. I ask when the 24 hours started.. and she replied it started when I first used the connection. Well, I connect my computer to the unmarked LAN cable leading from the back of the TV.. When I open my web browser it gives me a page effectively saying "Network access is charged in blocks, from noon to noon. If you agree to pay $9.95 for access up till the next 12pm, click here!".. Well, it was about 12:30pm or so, so I figured it wasn't too bad and I agreed. I didn't like the fact that I would be charged for time I was away at a conference and not using the laptop, but $10 is not that big a deal for a nice T1 connection while I'm bored. I started using it.. the network was rather slow. It felt like I was using a 56k modem. So I messed around for 8 minutes and went off to my conference. I got back about 9pm later that night and started using my laptop again. The network connection no longer worked! I was about to release and renew my DHCP address, and ping the gateway, but otherwise, I had no internet access! I saw a number in the hotel room.. "call this for any networking problems!"..I end up talking to some guy who tried a lot of very basic troubleshooting tactics on my computer, and eventually gave up after about 2 hours, just telling me to go to another room. Mind you, I liked the 14th floor room I was on..nice view, and everything else was satisfactory. I didn't want to risk a crappy room on the 8th floor, but they assured me it was the same, just lower down, and I figured I'd be too distracted with the internet to notice the view, so I agreed. I asked the desk clerk to not be charged for my internet usage for this "24 hour period" as at most I'd be getting 15 minutes of usage in. After a few more painful minutes of waiting for the manager, he gladly said I could use the internet for free and then I hung up and waited for my new room key to be delivered.
Same exact problem happened in that other room too. I call up the front desk (they forgot the shampoo in the second room, plus a lamp's bulb needed replacement as well) and told them of my frustrations. The desk clerk told me I should refer my networking problems to the front desk and they could send up their "engineer". I was relieved, saying how tired I was, and they end up sending in this kid who seemed like he barely made it through high school and maybe played Everquest for a while. He was clueless. After letting him mess around with my laptop for half an hour and complain on the phone to someone, I kicked him out and went to sleep. I tried restarting the internet connection repeatedly during my 3 day/2 night stay. It started working again a few minutes before I was about to leave. Grrrr. Other problems during my hotel stay... they're not that great at hosting a conference. The conference rooms were cold till the last hour or two of seminars, and the food catered to us was always the same, each of the three days. They also leave a nice looking, refreshing bottle of Evian spring water in your room, with a little tag on it saying "drink me and pay $4.50".. fortunately the tap water was drinkable. I did not appreciate being teased. Also, although they gave me tasty little chocolates in the first room, I did not get another two tasty little chocolates when they moved me to the second room. As I left my problems I had with the hotel chain in their "feedback box", the girl at the desk said "I hope those are good comments!" I smirked and hit the road.
I know no one wants to give the phone company more money, but my parents finally decided to go for Verizon's "call-intercept" after enough debate, at $5 a month. Incoming callers who block their numbers from being identified are screened..here's the description:
"Screens unidentified calls and lets you handle them however you like. Works with Caller ID, prompting unidentified callers to announce who they are before your phone rings."
So anyway, it's apparently been working great. They used to get 5-10 calls a day at all hours. It's been a month since they signed up, and so far they get none from what I've heard. Could be a solution to telemarketing, although I don't like the fact that we have to pay for protection. I'd rather let the telemarketers pay fines, and maybe throw them in jail.
The very success of the United States proves that capitalism is the only answer. Compare the exponential advancement of computer technology to the thirty year old space shuttle technology. If NASA worked 98% to inspire commercial space ventures, working to help the nation's state of space technology rather than focusing on discovering if life ever existed on Mars, then we'd soon see space hotels orbiting between Earth and Mars, colonies on other planets, etc. Research would be far easier to manage given a better platform, rather than this "smarter, cheaper, faster" stuff that NASA and it's international counterparts are trying to come up with together. The average American says "Wow, space, that'd be a wild experience." That's how to get the public funding, and once you get public funding, and by public I mean general public, not crazy millionaires, then the sky is the limit, as computer technology has discovered. The X-prize is a very nice start towards this way of thinking, but we'll need much more focus on manned space technology and space tourism before we have serious competition in orbit.
I ordered a book from an Amazon "zShop".. these zShops.. aka 3rd party sellers... are rated by customers and given comments. Well, I ordered a used book and apparently somewhere in the text description was "This book is not the one listed!" and it mentioned a different title. I just saw the picture which was the book I wanted, saw the condition as "Like new".. and ordered it. To cut to the chase, after I got the wrong book, I demanded they refund shipping as well as the price of the book. They refused. I gave them a horrible review on Amazon. Amazon only shows the 10 most recent reviews on the individual "zShop page" unless you "click for more reviews"... Mind you, for this particular zShop.. lastpagebooks specifically, the last review on them was quite some time ago. The next day, I see my review is suddenly #30 or so, with a bunch of one line "This store is great! A++++++++!" comments, 5 stars for each. And my comment is suddenly lost in obscurity. Apparently Amazon has no problem with this, or at the very least, no solution.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs.
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?
To truly supplant the existing music distribution system, any replacement must develop its own mechanisms for marketing and recommendation of new music.... File sharing services rely heavily on that most effective of marketing techniques: word of mouth.
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.
The current experience of online file sharing services is mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired, with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent availability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song, and many other quality problems.
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.
I'm not proposing solutions. I'm just trying to be more realistic.
Since IDE HD manufacturers recently decreased their warranty period, I'd be *really* reluctant to trust 'em 10 years from now.
My personal experience leads me to believe that hard drive volatility is exaggerated lately. Old Western Digital drives that I had in my 386 over 10 years ago had bad sectors every so often, but since then, my high speed hard drives run fine. I ain't advocating using a hard drive as a backup medium just yet, but for personal use, I'm running 3 hard drives in a parallel RAID setup without fear.
While this is an interesting idea, I can see filters being set up to auto-trash email while a computer is idle (I'm away)... then I just sell a ton of advertising and get much more than my bandwidth costs in return, not having to even read a word. This being used in common practice could easily overload the internet and spammers will soon realize that they're much better off spamming those who only want normal mail to go to their Inboxes.
The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.
Any corporation or even small business I've known has no problem getting CPU power, you're right. If things are desperate, they can hook up a bunch of old monitor-less pentium 1's and 2's as a Beowulf cluster and use that. Aside from those processing weather and DNA data, what the world is truly hungry for is bandwidth.
Before this is considered a Utility? Everyone in the city will pay a monthly wi-fi bill, right along with gas, water and electric?
Cable is already considered a utility by many. Soon part of cable will be replaced by wi fi. I wonder when Wi-Fi will support TV traffic, and of course VoIP from the home becomes feasible. This will obviously be pretty widespread, and the price of $30 a month I'm sure will go down to probably $20 a month in time. And how about Wi-Fi enabled cars and trains? Good possibilities for this technology, and it'll allow high speed internet to finally be cheap enough for my mother to bother with it.
I've determined the best thing you can do to fight spam is to get "open relays" (which allow spammers to anonymously send mail through their computer) to fix their security problems, and if all else fails, send a report to the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) and get them put on the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), basically a widely used realtime updated list that networks use to block spammers. Visit their web site, and to see steps you should take to get in touch with and educate an owner of an open relay on how to make it secure.
High level Rangers in the game (and druids for that matter) have the ability (in-game) to see every monster in the zone, sorted by how difficult it would be to fight them. Sony *has* to send this data to the client. Its called "Tracking".
There's a general rule here that applies. The data can be queried over a network, or from the local computer memory. If it's queried from the memory, it's much faster, but a packet sniffer combined with client-reverse engineering can see it. If it's queried from a remote server, it can be secure, but there would be added delay for this druid's tracking ability to work. Perhaps if Sony coded things cleverly, they could keep everything on the remote side, adding in delays for walking over terrain (allowing time for new terrain info to be retrieved), and making druids take time to sense the extra monster location information. But no, you're mistaken when you imply that this tracking ability is some sort of exception to the general problem.
I can see Sony sending the entire map for performance reasons, however. While it's true, it might be more secure for the client to only receive the information currently revealed to the player (thus no extra information available via packet-sniffing), there's a lot to be said for the aspect of running around an area and not needing to access the server for every new square foot revealed to the user. Accessing the CPU and memory is much faster than querying the server for each square foot. On top of all this, I'm okay with the aspect of hacking the protocol, cause you have a right to. What you don't have a right to do, at least morally, is to use this information to reduce the challenges in the game. People pay hard earned money for a subscription to Everquest, and while I avoid it like the plague, they should not be put at an unfair advantage. Everyone should be given the same advantages/disadvantages that Sony intended to put in the game, the game that people bought and carried out of the store, not the "game" that's a mutation of the store-bought version, afflicted with hacks available from cryptography experts.
I've worked in the whole Bell Labs chain of companies (AT&T, Lucent, AT&T again, Lucent again, Avaya) for 10 years already and as of last August I've been laid off. There are some obvious pros and cons:
Good points:
The money
Clean environment
Respect of occupation
Being encouraged to constantly learn new technologies
Career growth potential
Bad points:
Hours can range between 50 to 100 per week
There's always pressure to get a product out yesterday
Having to learn new things constantly, often outside of work
Job insecurity
Not nearly enough women
Let's face it, it's a toss up when you talk about the pros and cons, but ya get a CS/CompEng/IT/IS degree because you're interested in computers, so that really tips the scales. The cons may be significant now, but the fact that I can say the pros and cons balance out even when the economy is so horrible tells us really how good the jobs are when the economy is good.. you can't tell me you had it that bad before the recession, when companies left a dozen job offers on your answering machine every day. I won't believe it. You see blue collar workers working multiple jobs all the time anyway, these days, so while you might say "Money isn't everything," I would disagree when you're talking about the nasty hours.
That "74 games" link to the list of games available only lists 54 games.. I have to believe if these guys knew anything about Sega's legacy, they'd put Phantasy Star on there.
Personally, I liked Phantasy Star II for the Sega Genesis the best. Genesis games are considered classics too. The Sega Genesis was able to run old Sega games with an extra attachment. Surely this company could have supported both without much extra cost. Other nifty Genesis games that people would love to see included are Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Thunderforce III, Strider, Revenge of Shinobi, Shadowdancer.. need I go on?
Anyone have a clue as to what the price for this is?
So for those who don't know what a Swedish Krona is (SEK), the full price ticket of 600 SEK is a bit over $55. There's a visitor price ticket which is a fourth of the price, valid for a day, unless you're a girl, which makes it valid for the full event. Furthermore, they provide a WLAN, so if you park your car just outside the building, you can probably join in for free with a laptop. Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.
4 days?? Is this as scary as it sounds?
on
DreamHack Winter 2002
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Do you think any of the thousands of geeks bother to shower?
I'm not sure how Warcraft Adventure would've turned out, but after seeing side scrolling action/adventure type games that I grew up on like The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne, two very nicely done games, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it too. As a side note though, for those that agree with my opinion of how great those two games are, here's an announcement detailing their rerelease for the Game Boy Advance. GBA's run only 60-70 or even cheaper on eBay, last I checked, so this might actually convince me to pick one up. It does not take movie-like graphics and a huge staff to come up with a highly addicting, amusing/entertaining, well-done game.
Ignore it, destroy it if you can't stand it and get on with life outside spam.
Wait just a second there. I hate spam! Don't assume I'm a spam supporter like that. I think there should be Federal laws where people can't send you advertising unless you signed for it..and not just some warranty registration card or fine print on a receipt. You should have to fill out a paper form asking a company to send you its advertising. Maybe there should be companies to send you info from a specified number of companies for a certain type of product, for a specified time. However, if I get woken up by a telemarketing call, or not receiving mail because my mailbox is full of spam.. I get really disturbed. I hope this spam archive is unsuccessful, so people are forced to support laws outright against spam. Or, if they have to allow it, you should have to send your address and a way to easily contact you along with your advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't the government just use Linux and Staroffice instead of wasting a crapload of taxpayer money on Microsoft products? If Denmark's entire school system can do it, so can NASA. There might be other products out there that Microsoft writes for the average desktop PC which become "government-mandated", but I'm sure it's no big deal to find cheap or free alternatives.
This is involving a physical RJ45 cable connection, not Wi Fi, but I believe this example is telling of what you can expect from Marriott. I stayed at the Greenbelt Marriott in Greenbelt, Maryland recently, and had my laptop.. a Dell Inspiron 8000, with Windows XP installed on it and a 100Mb NIC. Runs fine, and I use it on my home network usually. So anyway, I go to the desk initially, and ask them if they provide internet access. The woman at the desk said they did, and that it was $12 for 24 hours of access. I ask when the 24 hours started.. and she replied it started when I first used the connection. Well, I connect my computer to the unmarked LAN cable leading from the back of the TV.. When I open my web browser it gives me a page effectively saying "Network access is charged in blocks, from noon to noon. If you agree to pay $9.95 for access up till the next 12pm, click here!" .. Well, it was about 12:30pm or so, so I figured it wasn't too bad and I agreed. I didn't like the fact that I would be charged for time I was away at a conference and not using the laptop, but $10 is not that big a deal for a nice T1 connection while I'm bored. I started using it.. the network was rather slow. It felt like I was using a 56k modem. So I messed around for 8 minutes and went off to my conference. I got back about 9pm later that night and started using my laptop again. The network connection no longer worked! I was about to release and renew my DHCP address, and ping the gateway, but otherwise, I had no internet access! I saw a number in the hotel room.. "call this for any networking problems!" ..I end up talking to some guy who tried a lot of very basic troubleshooting tactics on my computer, and eventually gave up after about 2 hours, just telling me to go to another room. Mind you, I liked the 14th floor room I was on..nice view, and everything else was satisfactory. I didn't want to risk a crappy room on the 8th floor, but they assured me it was the same, just lower down, and I figured I'd be too distracted with the internet to notice the view, so I agreed. I asked the desk clerk to not be charged for my internet usage for this "24 hour period" as at most I'd be getting 15 minutes of usage in. After a few more painful minutes of waiting for the manager, he gladly said I could use the internet for free and then I hung up and waited for my new room key to be delivered.
.. fortunately the tap water was drinkable. I did not appreciate being teased. Also, although they gave me tasty little chocolates in the first room, I did not get another two tasty little chocolates when they moved me to the second room. As I left my problems I had with the hotel chain in their "feedback box", the girl at the desk said "I hope those are good comments!" I smirked and hit the road.
Same exact problem happened in that other room too. I call up the front desk (they forgot the shampoo in the second room, plus a lamp's bulb needed replacement as well) and told them of my frustrations. The desk clerk told me I should refer my networking problems to the front desk and they could send up their "engineer". I was relieved, saying how tired I was, and they end up sending in this kid who seemed like he barely made it through high school and maybe played Everquest for a while. He was clueless. After letting him mess around with my laptop for half an hour and complain on the phone to someone, I kicked him out and went to sleep. I tried restarting the internet connection repeatedly during my 3 day/2 night stay. It started working again a few minutes before I was about to leave. Grrrr. Other problems during my hotel stay... they're not that great at hosting a conference. The conference rooms were cold till the last hour or two of seminars, and the food catered to us was always the same, each of the three days. They also leave a nice looking, refreshing bottle of Evian spring water in your room, with a little tag on it saying "drink me and pay $4.50"
"Screens unidentified calls and lets you handle them however you like. Works with Caller ID, prompting unidentified callers to announce who they are before your phone rings."
So anyway, it's apparently been working great. They used to get 5-10 calls a day at all hours. It's been a month since they signed up, and so far they get none from what I've heard. Could be a solution to telemarketing, although I don't like the fact that we have to pay for protection. I'd rather let the telemarketers pay fines, and maybe throw them in jail.The perfect gift for any geek is a slashdotting of his puny webserver, just like I saw viewing this article.
The very success of the United States proves that capitalism is the only answer. Compare the exponential advancement of computer technology to the thirty year old space shuttle technology. If NASA worked 98% to inspire commercial space ventures, working to help the nation's state of space technology rather than focusing on discovering if life ever existed on Mars, then we'd soon see space hotels orbiting between Earth and Mars, colonies on other planets, etc. Research would be far easier to manage given a better platform, rather than this "smarter, cheaper, faster" stuff that NASA and it's international counterparts are trying to come up with together. The average American says "Wow, space, that'd be a wild experience." That's how to get the public funding, and once you get public funding, and by public I mean general public, not crazy millionaires, then the sky is the limit, as computer technology has discovered. The X-prize is a very nice start towards this way of thinking, but we'll need much more focus on manned space technology and space tourism before we have serious competition in orbit.
I ordered a book from an Amazon "zShop".. these zShops.. aka 3rd party sellers... are rated by customers and given comments. Well, I ordered a used book and apparently somewhere in the text description was "This book is not the one listed!" and it mentioned a different title. I just saw the picture which was the book I wanted, saw the condition as "Like new".. and ordered it. To cut to the chase, after I got the wrong book, I demanded they refund shipping as well as the price of the book. They refused. I gave them a horrible review on Amazon. Amazon only shows the 10 most recent reviews on the individual "zShop page" unless you "click for more reviews"... Mind you, for this particular zShop.. lastpagebooks specifically, the last review on them was quite some time ago. The next day, I see my review is suddenly #30 or so, with a bunch of one line "This store is great! A++++++++!" comments, 5 stars for each. And my comment is suddenly lost in obscurity. Apparently Amazon has no problem with this, or at the very least, no solution.
I bet Windows mysteriously loaded up just as fast on that computer.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs.
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?
To truly supplant the existing music distribution system, any replacement must develop its own mechanisms for marketing and recommendation of new music. ... File sharing services rely heavily on that most effective of marketing techniques: word of mouth.
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.
The current experience of online file sharing services is mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired, with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent availability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song, and many other quality problems.
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.
I'm not proposing solutions. I'm just trying to be more realistic.
Since IDE HD manufacturers recently decreased their warranty period, I'd be *really* reluctant to trust 'em 10 years from now.
My personal experience leads me to believe that hard drive volatility is exaggerated lately. Old Western Digital drives that I had in my 386 over 10 years ago had bad sectors every so often, but since then, my high speed hard drives run fine. I ain't advocating using a hard drive as a backup medium just yet, but for personal use, I'm running 3 hard drives in a parallel RAID setup without fear.While this is an interesting idea, I can see filters being set up to auto-trash email while a computer is idle (I'm away)... then I just sell a ton of advertising and get much more than my bandwidth costs in return, not having to even read a word. This being used in common practice could easily overload the internet and spammers will soon realize that they're much better off spamming those who only want normal mail to go to their Inboxes.
The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.
Any corporation or even small business I've known has no problem getting CPU power, you're right. If things are desperate, they can hook up a bunch of old monitor-less pentium 1's and 2's as a Beowulf cluster and use that. Aside from those processing weather and DNA data, what the world is truly hungry for is bandwidth.Before this is considered a Utility? Everyone in the city will pay a monthly wi-fi bill, right along with gas, water and electric?
Cable is already considered a utility by many. Soon part of cable will be replaced by wi fi. I wonder when Wi-Fi will support TV traffic, and of course VoIP from the home becomes feasible. This will obviously be pretty widespread, and the price of $30 a month I'm sure will go down to probably $20 a month in time. And how about Wi-Fi enabled cars and trains? Good possibilities for this technology, and it'll allow high speed internet to finally be cheap enough for my mother to bother with it.I've determined the best thing you can do to fight spam is to get "open relays" (which allow spammers to anonymously send mail through their computer) to fix their security problems, and if all else fails, send a report to the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) and get them put on the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), basically a widely used realtime updated list that networks use to block spammers. Visit their web site, and to see steps you should take to get in touch with and educate an owner of an open relay on how to make it secure.
I want to make a map of my life travels :-)
Possible uses for tracking your life adventures:
The more environmental preservationalists that take to the road in their tiny, super-efficient cars, the more of them I run over with my SUV.
High level Rangers in the game (and druids for that matter) have the ability (in-game) to see every monster in the zone, sorted by how difficult it would be to fight them. Sony *has* to send this data to the client. Its called "Tracking".
There's a general rule here that applies. The data can be queried over a network, or from the local computer memory. If it's queried from the memory, it's much faster, but a packet sniffer combined with client-reverse engineering can see it. If it's queried from a remote server, it can be secure, but there would be added delay for this druid's tracking ability to work. Perhaps if Sony coded things cleverly, they could keep everything on the remote side, adding in delays for walking over terrain (allowing time for new terrain info to be retrieved), and making druids take time to sense the extra monster location information. But no, you're mistaken when you imply that this tracking ability is some sort of exception to the general problem.I can see Sony sending the entire map for performance reasons, however. While it's true, it might be more secure for the client to only receive the information currently revealed to the player (thus no extra information available via packet-sniffing), there's a lot to be said for the aspect of running around an area and not needing to access the server for every new square foot revealed to the user. Accessing the CPU and memory is much faster than querying the server for each square foot. On top of all this, I'm okay with the aspect of hacking the protocol, cause you have a right to. What you don't have a right to do, at least morally, is to use this information to reduce the challenges in the game. People pay hard earned money for a subscription to Everquest, and while I avoid it like the plague, they should not be put at an unfair advantage. Everyone should be given the same advantages/disadvantages that Sony intended to put in the game, the game that people bought and carried out of the store, not the "game" that's a mutation of the store-bought version, afflicted with hacks available from cryptography experts.
I've worked in the whole Bell Labs chain of companies (AT&T, Lucent, AT&T again, Lucent again, Avaya) for 10 years already and as of last August I've been laid off. There are some obvious pros and cons:
Good points:
Bad points:
Let's face it, it's a toss up when you talk about the pros and cons, but ya get a CS/CompEng/IT/IS degree because you're interested in computers, so that really tips the scales. The cons may be significant now, but the fact that I can say the pros and cons balance out even when the economy is so horrible tells us really how good the jobs are when the economy is good.. you can't tell me you had it that bad before the recession, when companies left a dozen job offers on your answering machine every day. I won't believe it. You see blue collar workers working multiple jobs all the time anyway, these days, so while you might say "Money isn't everything," I would disagree when you're talking about the nasty hours.
No Phantasy Star?
That "74 games" link to the list of games available only lists 54 games.. I have to believe if these guys knew anything about Sega's legacy, they'd put Phantasy Star on there.
Personally, I liked Phantasy Star II for the Sega Genesis the best. Genesis games are considered classics too. The Sega Genesis was able to run old Sega games with an extra attachment. Surely this company could have supported both without much extra cost. Other nifty Genesis games that people would love to see included are Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Thunderforce III, Strider, Revenge of Shinobi, Shadowdancer.. need I go on?
Anyone have a clue as to what the price for this is?
So for those who don't know what a Swedish Krona is (SEK), the full price ticket of 600 SEK is a bit over $55. There's a visitor price ticket which is a fourth of the price, valid for a day, unless you're a girl, which makes it valid for the full event. Furthermore, they provide a WLAN, so if you park your car just outside the building, you can probably join in for free with a laptop. Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.
Do you think any of the thousands of geeks bother to shower?
I'm sure he's just reenacting the even-numbered movies.
I'm not sure how Warcraft Adventure would've turned out, but after seeing side scrolling action/adventure type games that I grew up on like The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne, two very nicely done games, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it too. As a side note though, for those that agree with my opinion of how great those two games are, here's an announcement detailing their rerelease for the Game Boy Advance. GBA's run only 60-70 or even cheaper on eBay, last I checked, so this might actually convince me to pick one up. It does not take movie-like graphics and a huge staff to come up with a highly addicting, amusing/entertaining, well-done game.
Ignore it, destroy it if you can't stand it and get on with life outside spam.
Wait just a second there. I hate spam! Don't assume I'm a spam supporter like that. I think there should be Federal laws where people can't send you advertising unless you signed for it..and not just some warranty registration card or fine print on a receipt. You should have to fill out a paper form asking a company to send you its advertising. Maybe there should be companies to send you info from a specified number of companies for a certain type of product, for a specified time. However, if I get woken up by a telemarketing call, or not receiving mail because my mailbox is full of spam.. I get really disturbed. I hope this spam archive is unsuccessful, so people are forced to support laws outright against spam. Or, if they have to allow it, you should have to send your address and a way to easily contact you along with your advertising.Wouldn't this spam archive be a form of free advertising?