I'm not impressed with the Radeon 9800 Pro. What I really want is the Radeon 9500 ASC. The price is steadily coming down. Mmmmm, I can't wait to play Nethack in full 3D:-)
Johnny Quest was the BEST. I still watch it ocassionally. It's great - it was made in the 60's, so it's full of all sorts of inappropriate sexual innuendos and racist aspects that make it fun to watch even as an adult. Today's cartoons just don't have that aspect - they're mildly entertaining to the target age group, but contain nothing that's worth watching for the parents. I remember when parents used to sit down with their kids and watch cartoons like Johnny Quest, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Nowadays the cartoons are so pathetic the parents just plunk the kids down in front of the TV and do something else. I blame it on PCC - Politically Correct Crap.
I wish I had something witty to say, or perhaps insightful, but I don't...
Anyway, this really does seem like the end of an era to me. Admittedly I was a Saturday morning cartoon addict. I liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget, and all those other great cartoons of those days. What happened? This article attempts to explain what, but I just don't buy it. I don't think that there has been a lack of quality television programming these days. I just think that kids are getting involved in something more immersive - for better or worse - that is taking them away from cartoons and thus drying up the market.
What am I talking about? Videogames! In my youth the SNES was the coolest videogame system anyone I knew had. It was also very expensive. I remember how we all congregated at the house of the one kid in my neighborhood who owned it to play Street Fighter. But that wasn't Saturday morning - that was weekdays, after school.
Nowadays, however, videogame systems are cheap and prevalent. Heck, my SIX YEAR OLD nephew has a PlayStation and a GameBoy Advance. I would estimate he plays games at least two hours a day. That's time he probably would've spent watching TV anyway. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? All I know is, kids these days are getting exposed to videogames very early on in life.
I was babysitting my cousin recently. We were playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy together on my PS2. I thought he would suck. I was wrong. He wasn't amazingly good, but he's better than my father. This, from a kid who can't really even read! The kids these days, they're just intuitively "getting" videogames. My dad sucks at action games. He's very good at strategy games though. And this new generation, for better or worse, is highly trained in electronics.
I suppose the electronizing of our nation's youth is a good thing. That's the way the future's headed. I just feel sad, though, that the closest thing they'll experience to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the cheap knock-off games for GameBoy whose sole good quality is the license they obtained. The cartoons, even though non-interactive, were at least better.
Your corporation will always have 24/7 access to tech support on open source solutions. All they need to do is "Ask Slashdot", and within an hour they'll get hundreds of insightful, informative, witty, or (regrettably) flamebait suggestions.
The game that affected me the most was Wolfenstein 3D. I was 7 at the time, and somehow it had appeared on my computer (I guess my dad went out, bought it, and installed it). I figured out the directory where it was stored and played it (this was back on my 386). Never has a game scared me so much. I wasn't even allowed to see PG movies, let alone Nazis and guard dogs and mutants spewing crimson gore! I was mightily afraid of the game, but at the same time, couldn't stop playing it. It taught me an interest in the Nazis and World War II that I would never have acquired otherwise. And I had nightmares for years on end... walking through hallways armed only with a pistol... and then I turn around and a Nazi with a machine gun is shooting at me!! Newer FPS's with more realistic graphics don't scare me as much... for me, the one and only horror game will always be Wolfenstein 3D.
everyone who thinks they'll be able to get their top 100 favorite tracks by buying only 7 cd's please raise your hands... anyone... anyone... bueller...
Hey, I can get my top 100 favorite tracks on 7 CD's... all of Weird Al Yankovic's CDs!
Grub searches the web Sniffing out all the good porn Not just bootloader
I love being a Slashdot subscriber - it gives me fifteen minutes to figure out a good joke before anyone has a chance to post!
Seriously though, shouldn't they change the name? "GRUB" is already a bootloader. They should change the name... and I have a suggestion. Has anyone written a program called "E-Coli" yet? No? I can just imagine my mom...
Damn this DARPA! They only fund stupid projects, and the rare cool project that gets through, gets the can! I mean, look at what they did to the Internet! Ohhh, wait...
But generally I find all the rebates through CompUSA are fine. Some of them are handled through CompUSA itself, but most are handled through the outside manufacturers who make the products you're getting the rebate on. Out of 20 or so rebates I've sent off for (most have been for CD-R media), I've only ever not received 2. That's a pretty good track record... go CompUSA!
It is "Spider-Man". Calling it anything other than "Spider-Man", i.e. Spiderman or Spider Man (please Marvel don't sue me) is considered dilution of their trademark. They will rigorously attack anyone misusing their trademark - like the makers of "Kleen-ex" failed to do.
I do believe this dispute started during the early trailers for the movie "Spider-Man". For awhile there the Sony movie website was spiderman.sony.com... Marvel quickly told them about dilution of trademark and forced them to change the URL to sony.com/Spider-Man/... you can see this is you look at the pre-9/11 trailers (the old URL is at the bottom of the screen), and then the later trailers had the newer URL.
I bought a legitimate version of WarCraft III for the cdkey so I could play online. Then I downloaded a hacked image file I could load up using DAEMON Tools so I didn't have to swap CDs so much.
I call for an immediate ban on all future use of nanotubes by NASA. I don't care about the "performance increases" they claim. All I care about is the health effects of nanotechnology - this must be banned before it gets out of control!
Only $36.2 million? That's really not that much for an entire line of TiVO-like products. It sounds to me like D&M might make a killing off this investment, if they play their cards right.
This whole "there are so and so many particle positions" is crap. If for nothing else then because bosons (like the photon) does not obey the Pauli principle of exclusion. This means that it is possible to have infinitely many photons in the same quantum state.
tkittel, in this house we obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle!
It goes like this. There are approximately 10^120 particle positions (the smallest quantized unit of space) in the observable universe (and there are 10^90 particles in the universe). Assuming each "particle position" is a boolean (either a particle is there or it's not), there are 2^10^120 possible observable universes (a sphere of space 40 billion light-years across). Now, we have cosmological evidence that the entire universe goes on forever... so using simple math we can derive a much larger sphere encompassing so many universes that, at some point, all possible particle position combinations are exhausted and there MUST be another 40-billion-light-years-across universe that is exactly the same as the one we currently inhabit. The distance they've calculated is around 10^42 meters. So, that far away, there should be an exact replicate of you, reading this exact post at this exact same instance, and modding it up as Informative:-)
Currently, if you do a google search on RIAA statistics, I'm number one and two; you are three and four, and your article refers to me, so I know you know who I am.
The article to which you referred was published in December. Since that time, a lot has happened, as I'm sure you are aware, not the least of which being the RIAA's recent lawsuits against college students.
First of all, I am a musician. The only reason I even started researching what the RIAA has to say is because of the problems I had selling my own work at eBay, which were entirely due to RIAA accusations of copyright infringement (it was my own CD).
After looking at the 2002 RIAA data, I also realized that over the last 5 years, the recording industry has shipped out more than 2 billion physical units of product, adding up to a retail value of more than $20 billion. You'd think that they would embrace a free marketing and promotion opportunity like mp3s. Let's face it, an mp3 is an inferior copy. I consider mp3s to be an ad for my actual recording.
My current consternation comes in the form of a letter from my congressional representative, who states that "In 2001, record sales were down 10 percent because of unauthorized music downloads..."
Yes, sales were down. Other than that obvious fact, there is no empirical data to suggest that downloading is the cause of the problem. I've asked the RIAA. In fact, I would go so far as to say I have relentlessly taunted them in hopes of a reasonable explanation. They offer none.
So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.
Because it was engineered.
Here's another interesting point. I can go to www.discmakers.com and order CDs for $1.89 each. Not "replicated" but created from a glass master. As I understand it, the current wholesale price for a CD is about $12.
So how can EMI's Cost of Goods Sold (2001 -- at Hoovers Online) be 71% of their income? BMG's 2001 annual report blames industry shortcomings "long obscured by market success" and Vivendi told its stockholders that an "anticipated lighter release schedule" had something to do with it. BMG is the only one that even mentions file sharing -- as a justification in investing in Napster.
Why does "sales are down 10%" overrule any other explanation for declining sales? A bigger question is -- Why won't anyone in the media even discuss this?
Recently I spoke to the FCC at a public hearing in Tempe (Phoenix area). Next month, I'm going to speak at the DMCA hearings at UCLA Law School.
Additionally, I'm hearing from college kids all over (Duke, Auburn, UCSD, Univ. of North Carolina, Yale Law School, Univ. of Wyoming). They're reading my site and they're using it as background for dissertations and reports. They ask questions. They do not accept vague answers.
Why does the government accept the "sales are down" without any consideration of other, equally plausible explanations? And why does the press?
When the majority of the public is guilty by default, then something is terribly wrong. I'm not sure why I'm even writing to you, except that you seem to be about the fifth person in the country that has applied some logic to this issue.
I've written to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Commerce Committee and Small Business Committee. I've written to Jay Berman, Hilary Rosen and the Recording Artists Coalition. With the lone exception of Janis Ian, absolutely everyone has totally ignored me.
"Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."
Oh darn, I was going to download it, but I really can't spare those 27KB. My hard drive is filled to the brim already with other *data*, yeah, that's the ticket...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not impressed with the Radeon 9800 Pro. What I really want is the Radeon 9500 ASC. The price is steadily coming down. Mmmmm, I can't wait to play Nethack in full 3D :-)
Johnny Quest was the BEST. I still watch it ocassionally. It's great - it was made in the 60's, so it's full of all sorts of inappropriate sexual innuendos and racist aspects that make it fun to watch even as an adult. Today's cartoons just don't have that aspect - they're mildly entertaining to the target age group, but contain nothing that's worth watching for the parents. I remember when parents used to sit down with their kids and watch cartoons like Johnny Quest, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Nowadays the cartoons are so pathetic the parents just plunk the kids down in front of the TV and do something else. I blame it on PCC - Politically Correct Crap.
I wish I had something witty to say, or perhaps insightful, but I don't ...
Anyway, this really does seem like the end of an era to me. Admittedly I was a Saturday morning cartoon addict. I liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget, and all those other great cartoons of those days. What happened? This article attempts to explain what, but I just don't buy it. I don't think that there has been a lack of quality television programming these days. I just think that kids are getting involved in something more immersive - for better or worse - that is taking them away from cartoons and thus drying up the market.
What am I talking about? Videogames! In my youth the SNES was the coolest videogame system anyone I knew had. It was also very expensive. I remember how we all congregated at the house of the one kid in my neighborhood who owned it to play Street Fighter. But that wasn't Saturday morning - that was weekdays, after school.
Nowadays, however, videogame systems are cheap and prevalent. Heck, my SIX YEAR OLD nephew has a PlayStation and a GameBoy Advance. I would estimate he plays games at least two hours a day. That's time he probably would've spent watching TV anyway. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? All I know is, kids these days are getting exposed to videogames very early on in life.
I was babysitting my cousin recently. We were playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy together on my PS2. I thought he would suck. I was wrong. He wasn't amazingly good, but he's better than my father. This, from a kid who can't really even read! The kids these days, they're just intuitively "getting" videogames. My dad sucks at action games. He's very good at strategy games though. And this new generation, for better or worse, is highly trained in electronics.
I suppose the electronizing of our nation's youth is a good thing. That's the way the future's headed. I just feel sad, though, that the closest thing they'll experience to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the cheap knock-off games for GameBoy whose sole good quality is the license they obtained. The cartoons, even though non-interactive, were at least better.
Any thoughts?
This article has been brought to you by a Squadron of Uber Stealth Urinating Monkeys.
Your corporation will always have 24/7 access to tech support on open source solutions. All they need to do is "Ask Slashdot", and within an hour they'll get hundreds of insightful, informative, witty, or (regrettably) flamebait suggestions.
Wow, a wireless hard drive and pocket warmer, all in one!
The game that affected me the most was Wolfenstein 3D. I was 7 at the time, and somehow it had appeared on my computer (I guess my dad went out, bought it, and installed it). I figured out the directory where it was stored and played it (this was back on my 386). Never has a game scared me so much. I wasn't even allowed to see PG movies, let alone Nazis and guard dogs and mutants spewing crimson gore! I was mightily afraid of the game, but at the same time, couldn't stop playing it. It taught me an interest in the Nazis and World War II that I would never have acquired otherwise. And I had nightmares for years on end ... walking through hallways armed only with a pistol ... and then I turn around and a Nazi with a machine gun is shooting at me!! Newer FPS's with more realistic graphics don't scare me as much ... for me, the one and only horror game will always be Wolfenstein 3D.
Two of the links of papers on your resumé you've written are to Slashdot features. Dude, that's just sick.
everyone who thinks they'll be able to get their top 100 favorite tracks by buying only 7 cd's please raise your hands... anyone... anyone... bueller...
... all of Weird Al Yankovic's CDs!
Hey, I can get my top 100 favorite tracks on 7 CD's
Shouts out to all my peeps in tha house! ... Sorry
Grub searches the web
... and I have a suggestion. Has anyone written a program called "E-Coli" yet? No? I can just imagine my mom ...
Sniffing out all the good porn
Not just bootloader
I love being a Slashdot subscriber - it gives me fifteen minutes to figure out a good joke before anyone has a chance to post!
Seriously though, shouldn't they change the name? "GRUB" is already a bootloader. They should change the name
"Agh! You have E-Coli on your computer!"
I have a great idea for the next Slashdot poll. Here we go ...
My computer password is:
- 12345
- jennajameson
- password
- Other, type here: _____________
- cowboyneal
Damn this DARPA! They only fund stupid projects, and the rare cool project that gets through, gets the can! I mean, look at what they did to the Internet! Ohhh, wait ...
But generally I find all the rebates through CompUSA are fine. Some of them are handled through CompUSA itself, but most are handled through the outside manufacturers who make the products you're getting the rebate on. Out of 20 or so rebates I've sent off for (most have been for CD-R media), I've only ever not received 2. That's a pretty good track record ... go CompUSA!
It is "Spider-Man". Calling it anything other than "Spider-Man", i.e. Spiderman or Spider Man (please Marvel don't sue me) is considered dilution of their trademark. They will rigorously attack anyone misusing their trademark - like the makers of "Kleen-ex" failed to do.
... Marvel quickly told them about dilution of trademark and forced them to change the URL to sony.com/Spider-Man/ ... you can see this is you look at the pre-9/11 trailers (the old URL is at the bottom of the screen), and then the later trailers had the newer URL.
I do believe this dispute started during the early trailers for the movie "Spider-Man". For awhile there the Sony movie website was spiderman.sony.com
I bought a legitimate version of WarCraft III for the cdkey so I could play online. Then I downloaded a hacked image file I could load up using DAEMON Tools so I didn't have to swap CDs so much.
I call for an immediate ban on all future use of nanotubes by NASA. I don't care about the "performance increases" they claim. All I care about is the health effects of nanotechnology - this must be banned before it gets out of control!
/. article
-Crazy researcher from other recent
Only $36.2 million? That's really not that much for an entire line of TiVO-like products. It sounds to me like D&M might make a killing off this investment, if they play their cards right.
This whole "there are so and so many particle positions" is crap. If for nothing else then because bosons (like the photon) does not obey the Pauli principle of exclusion. This means that it is possible to have infinitely many photons in the same quantum state.
tkittel, in this house we obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle!
(Apologies to Mr. Matt Groening).
So, that far away, there should be an exact replicate of you, reading this exact post at this exact same instance, and modding it up as Informative :-)
... as am I.
Lo and behold, I was right. 10^42 meters away from here my exact duplicate is laughing about how his plot to be modded up was successful
If the new version played SVCDs and DVDs, it'd be worth it. If it played DivX, even better. Otherwise, I don't quite see the reason to upgrade ...
It goes like this. There are approximately 10^120 particle positions (the smallest quantized unit of space) in the observable universe (and there are 10^90 particles in the universe). Assuming each "particle position" is a boolean (either a particle is there or it's not), there are 2^10^120 possible observable universes (a sphere of space 40 billion light-years across). Now, we have cosmological evidence that the entire universe goes on forever ... so using simple math we can derive a much larger sphere encompassing so many universes that, at some point, all possible particle position combinations are exhausted and there MUST be another 40-billion-light-years-across universe that is exactly the same as the one we currently inhabit. The distance they've calculated is around 10^42 meters. So, that far away, there should be an exact replicate of you, reading this exact post at this exact same instance, and modding it up as Informative :-)
Currently, if you do a google search on RIAA statistics, I'm number one and two; you are three and four, and your article refers to me, so I
know you know who I am.
The article to which you referred was published in December. Since that time, a lot has happened, as I'm sure you are aware, not the least of
which being the RIAA's recent lawsuits against college students.
First of all, I am a musician. The only reason I even started researching what the RIAA has to say is because of the problems I had
selling my own work at eBay, which were entirely due to RIAA accusations of copyright infringement (it was my own CD).
After looking at the 2002 RIAA data, I also realized that over the last
5 years, the recording industry has shipped out more than 2 billion physical units of product, adding up to a retail value of more than $20
billion. You'd think that they would embrace a free marketing and promotion opportunity like mp3s. Let's face it, an mp3 is an inferior
copy. I consider mp3s to be an ad for my actual recording.
My current consternation comes in the form of a letter from my congressional representative, who states that "In 2001, record sales
were down 10 percent because of unauthorized music downloads..."
Yes, sales were down. Other than that obvious fact, there is no empirical data to suggest that downloading is the cause of the problem.
I've asked the RIAA. In fact, I would go so far as to say I have relentlessly taunted them in hopes of a reasonable explanation. They
offer none.
So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels
began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary
Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.
Because it was engineered.
Here's another interesting point. I can go to www.discmakers.com and order CDs for $1.89 each. Not "replicated" but created from a glass
master. As I understand it, the current wholesale price for a CD is about $12.
So how can EMI's Cost of Goods Sold (2001 -- at Hoovers Online) be 71% of their income? BMG's 2001 annual report blames industry shortcomings
"long obscured by market success" and Vivendi told its stockholders that an "anticipated lighter release schedule" had something to do with it.
BMG is the only one that even mentions file sharing -- as a justification in investing in Napster.
Why does "sales are down 10%" overrule any other explanation for declining sales?
A bigger question is -- Why won't anyone in the media even discuss this?
Recently I spoke to the FCC at a public hearing in Tempe (Phoenix area). Next month, I'm going to speak at the DMCA hearings at UCLA Law School.
Additionally, I'm hearing from college kids all over (Duke, Auburn, UCSD, Univ. of North Carolina, Yale Law School, Univ. of Wyoming).
They're reading my site and they're using it as background for dissertations and reports. They ask questions. They do not accept vague
answers.
Why does the government accept the "sales are down" without any consideration of other, equally plausible explanations? And why does the
press?
When the majority of the public is guilty by default, then something is terribly wrong. I'm not sure why I'm even writing to you, except that you seem to be about the fifth person in the country that has applied some logic to this issue.
I've written to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Commerce Committee and Small Business Committee. I've written to Jay Berman,
Hilary Rosen and the Recording Artists Coalition. With the lone exception of Janis Ian, absolutely everyone has totally ignored me.
What can we do?
April Fools!!!!
"Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."
...
Oh darn, I was going to download it, but I really can't spare those 27KB. My hard drive is filled to the brim already with other *data*, yeah, that's the ticket