They are succeeding since the American taxpayers are footing lots of the bill for Israel's defenses.
Yep, to about the tune of $2 Billion With A Capital B in "military aide", and +$700M in economic aide. $3B isn't enough- they want more for "border security" and whatnot.
Think I'm using some nazi group for my figures? Phbt. Try the Haaretz.
None of this counts the billions in defense spending; Israel makes a HUGE number of major and minor systems for virtually every US military vehicle.
Slighty sarcastic view- maybe if we saved that $3B+/yr, we'd solve two problems at once- the Israelis would get a lot more serious about the peace process, and we'd have money to pump into our own economy instead of theirs. Like, say, our crumbling roads/railway system, healthcare/retirement, inadequate community emergency services, etc.
Of course, that will never happen. Any politician who suggests cutting aide to Israel stands to be accused of anti-semetism...
now, if at 100 meters if a laser can damage your eyesight 200 meters it will not. because the amount of laser light entering your eye is dropping extremely fast as the beam spreads further.
On any of the FDA-classed devices below Class 3B, the brain and eyelid react fast enough to prevent eye damage from point-blank range.
By definition 3B or above means the brain/eyelid reaction time is too slow and the eye can't protect itself. 4 means eye/skin/fire danger.
Even a class 4 laser would be unlikely to do anything except be annoying at a couple miles, as everyone has pointed out.
Oh, also- do you know how hard it would be to keep a laser trained on a plane at that distance by hand? Nearly impossible. I strongly suspect that either he or his daughter really WERE just waving it around...and if the class of the device is low enough, he's perfectly within legal FAA limits; only lasers over a certain class being operated outdoors require notifying the FAA.
95% of dynamic websites crumble within the first 15 comments. 50% after subscriber 'preview'. 5% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 3% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 2% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 0% for Timothy; he's too busy ranting about the latest threat to "our rights online" to check the links.
"Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and author of How to Know (Booklocker.com, 2004)"
Don't you think Britannica is just a tad bit unsettled by how wikipedia, in under 5 years, has pretty much revolutionized the concept of an Encyclopedia? They're already beaten and bruised by the internet in general, this is just salt on the wound.
A number of his points aren't terribly valid- go read some encyclopedias from the 50's and 60's and see how fair they are towards women's reproductive rights, and what light the Soviet Union is cast in.
Wikipedia has the same advantages of open-source; faults are caught by the community most of the time, and on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
What Wikipedia DOES need is a better control over accounts. If you're going to contribute something, you need to be held accountable. No posting without logging in, email confirmations for the accounts (they collect your email but do NOTHING to check it!) and the visual verification word thing (sorry, forgot the name for it...captka or whatever it is).
Hello, Wikipedia, 1995 is calling, they want their security back!
I have been wondering if we should do a split now; ie. have separate races for "boosted" athletes and another series for "traditional".
...and who's going to watch the non-boosted events? Will companies choose to sponsor the athletes setting records, or those who "just" take first place? Who will the networks cover?
Do you think that Major League Baseball is asleep at the switch, when they tell their players months in advance about an upcoming drug test, and 50+ players STILL get caught doping, and MLB does nothing? Do you think the government is asleep at the switch when they don't subpoena the hell out of MLB and throw every druggie baseball player into the slammer?
Phhbt. Dream on- MLB is thrilled at the doping. They "hate" it publicly, but privately they squeal like little children when Joe Dope smashes the baseball out of the park. Home runs and high scores bring in the crowds. Singles and scoreless games don't.
...And god forbid the government should interfere with baseball. It's a 'national pasttime'. It'd be like...messing with Apple Pie.
But like the parent said, pump it up 20X in power and you are starting to be able to cause some real damage immediately.
The classifications are based upon wattage levels which will cause damage to the eye before your brain reacts AND the eyelid closes.
Anything over a certain class (II or III, I forget which) falls into the 'damage will happen before you blink" category. That's why they usually require a keylock on a shutter or output control, a lasing indicator light, etc. OSHA regs then mesh in with this- lasers in operation over a certain level mean guards on equipment, goggles for anyone in the room, blah blah.
Over a certain level in mW also requires approval from the FAA to use outdoors [at night] as it could blind pilots. Sounds silly for a single point source, but it's intended for laser light shows where hundreds or thousands of beams- which often sweep/scan out into the sky- stand an excellent chance of blinding a pilot.
Pretty much all the FAA does is say "sure" and then put out a NOTAM (NOtice to AirMen) saying "there be lasers here". NOTAMs are automatically pulled up if your flight plan crosses through the area the NOTAM applies to.
Walmart is #1, sales next 3-4 retailers combined
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Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
Walmart is the #1 retail chain in the world with sales around $220 Billion; its sales are larger than the next 3-4 retailers combined.
Just because you USED to get my money doesn't mean you'll ALWAYS be able to count on getting that money.
It's called brand loyalty, or customer loyalty; another word is familiarity. Consumers have VERY strong preferences in everything from the underwear they buy to the car they drive to the gas they put in that car.
Decades of research and stats show this to be true- that people tend to be pretty set in their ways as consumers. So, actually, your little rant, while a wonderful bit of wonderful bit of anti-establishment ranting (the reason you were modded up)...couldn't be further from the truth.
If you buy Pepsi and a few months from now switch to Coke (god knows why, but beside the point), Pepsi most certainly considers that "lost" sales.
The real irony is that Craigslist tends to be, like Ebay (which was responsible for 3/4 of ALL internet fraud complaints), something you have to approach EXTREMELY carefully.
People on Craigslist tend to be really flaky- we're talking the stoned kind of flaky, or the "I'm going to try and cheat you because I think I'm clever" kind of flaky; I'm not sure which is worse. Then there are all the wierdos posting in the various personals section- if you want a great laugh (no matter your gender), read those sections; makes you think of someone walking into McDonalds with $2 and expecting a rare Filet Mignon with sauteed mushrooms. Or the ever popular "I'm hot. Send a picture. Sexiest one wins." I laughed for about 5 minutes so hard I couldn't breathe, and resolved never to look in w4m again because it was dangerous to my health, even if it was a fantastic laugh.
Top problem though, is that people are complete IDIOTS when it comes to listing their items. "Printer. Best offer." Inkjet? Laser? Dot matrix? Made this decade? God forbid they tell us what company made it. I also love it when useless, worthless stuff is offered up- like cheapo computer speakers. People, I'm all for the recycling bit, but take that shit to the RECYCLING CENTER, don't waste anyone's time putting it up for sale for $5. Round trip subway fare costs at least half that...
The hysterical bit is that Craiglist supposedly has an "advisory committee" that handles how the site is presented to users. When I complained that even basic instructions were never shown to users as part of the posting procedure and it was clear there was a problem, Craig just replied, "thanks, the committee will think about it".
Then there are the people who post the "free" iPod/plasma/whatever emails (which are usually flagged by the community)...the problem is that there's nothing to keep them from posting over and over, because (to my knowledge) there is no automatic blacklist after X number of posts flagged...so spamming is pretty easy.
Then there are the ripoffs. Go read your city's/sys/ for a few minutes, and see how many times you say "WHAT?!"...like people asking $500 for a Pentium 3 system. Go read/ele/ and see how many times you see "Theater Research" speakers being offered for $500; the more honest (or naive) ones admit to buying it from some guys in a white van...the others just think "oh well, I'll get some other sucker to buy 'em".
Classic example of the try-to-sucker-you-by-omission-and-feined-ignorance approach was a Phaser printer being offered for sale for a few hundred $ with no mention of WHY nobody uses wax printers anymore. In short- you MUST cover your ass like crazy. If it's too good to be true, it most certainly is someone trying to sucker you.
Typical, but when you consider it against Craig's motivations (community building and other crunchy-granola-ness), Craigslist has ultimately been a pretty spectacular failure. I used to report at least 5-6 posts a day to the abuse department for various reasons (all were accepted, and the abuse group IS very nice; they ALWAYS write you back! To the CL abuse staff, you have my sympathies and admiration), and I just got tired of it...it was like throwing a sandbag into a levee break and watching it disappear.
I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).
Seriously, what kind of commentary is this, especially with the FCC giving unprecedented amounts of frequency bandwidth back to the public?
If it can tune in cellular frequencies, sorry, it's already illegal in the US and pretty much any other developed nation. Various dictatorship-countries would probably instantly declare anyone they found owning this kind of thing to be a 'spy'.
I imagine this scares the crap out of the FCC. , because prior to this the only thing that stood between your phone call and...well..anyone...was that they had a leash on all the companies that could make such devices.
The fantastic acceleration that in line wheel electric drive can potentialy deliver would make for some very exciting racing.
Do you know how much an F1 car weighs? About a half ton.
Do you know how much horsepower an F1 car has, from a few litres displacement V10? 900hp...or more. Why is such staggering performance possible? Because simply put, gasolene has one of the highest energy capacities known to man aside from nuclear fuel. A cup of gasolene contains enough energy to lift 1 ton 1,000 feet in one second, if mixed with air at the right ratio.
There isn't a vehicle in the world except a funnycar that can go as fast- and a funny car can only do it about...ONCE, maybe twice; it pushes so much fuel and air into the engine that if it misses one combustion cycle in any one cylinder, it will hydrolock and explode on the next compression cycle. An F1 engine tears itself apart too, but it lasts (hopefully) a few hundred hours tops.
Watching an electric "F1" would be about as exciting as watching paint dry.
I often wounder if games on Mac would be at all if not for Marathon. I still remember my first glips of the Marathon demo and really thoght that, for the first time, there was hope for Mac.
Eh?
Brickles
Bolo (damn awesome tank game, still on InfoMac)
Canon Fodder (simple, but addictive- don't blow up the hospitals!)
Ottomatic(I think? Multilevel 2D ladders+levels, with a unicycle-robot)
RoboWar, a complex program-your-own-robot game which was very addictive
(forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
(forgot the name) line-art 3D space-age-ish tank game that performed really, really well even on older machines. Collected flags, biased your tank(which was red) in terms of ammo/speed/armour, etc. Came in a really weird box.
NetTrek
Solarian II (STILL my favorite. Write Ben Hall and help me pester him into porting it to OS X, he's told me he wants to if only for fun, but never gets around to it. I think it does run under Classic)
Some sort of dungeon game, I think the premise was exploring a pyramid. You found scrolls, rings, and potions...objects could be cursed...my favorite was when you picked up a cursed object, a little high pitched voice would go "oh no!":-)
Glider
Given enough time, or a drive that could read 3.5" HFS floppies, I could think of/find even more.
All fantastic, superb games, and I'd love to see source released on those which were not open, so that they can be updated for OS X. All caused me to waste far too much of my early high school years. All blew away their PC counterparts which were DOS and at best could go "bip" or "bop" and draw a square in one of 16 colors. Then the PowerPC came along, and Marathon knocked everyone's socks off. I damn near shit myself the first time I played Infinity when the aliens came out of the dark, and the space ship creaked and moaned...
Oh, and Hypercard Kicked Ass compared to ANYTHING on the PC.
Infomac seems to be missing a lot of the REALLY good, old stuff. Anyone know if there's a true historical archive of any of this stuff?
Despite the fact that they're speakeasy's customers- they'll probably still come to you first. That means less calls for "oh, wait, the cord popped out". $.
They only have to run one circuit to service multiple customers; so less money to Verizon/whoever, more to them. $$.
They don't have to run wires, buy equipment, install any of it. $$$.
I also highly doubt it's a 'linear' discount, either...and even a linear discount wouldn't be 'fair' given how much money they're saving.
Most cases are pilot errors, ie. flying in a cloud without instruments.
Parachutes are hailed as the save-all for pilots. Except:
Nobody has addressed issues where the pilot thinks nothing is wrong until he/she crashes. A fair number of cases are related to VFR pilots flying in IFR conditions- the Kennedy plane crash a few years ago into LI Sound is a perfect example. Often in such cases the pilot has not realized anything is wrong because he is disoriented. Same with inexperienced IFR pilots who do not follow the cardinal rule- never trust ONE instrument. Ok, the altimeter says 6,123 feet steady- does GPS agree? Simplified example, but often faulty equipment is not trusted, or worse, with VFR pilots, thought to be broken.
Nobody has addressed escape from a plane in water surrounded by a parachute 'the size of a house'
Nobody has addressed escape from a burning plane surrounded by a parachute 'the size of a house'
Parachutes do nothing for cases where the pilot does not realize he's about to hit something (terrain or another plane for example)
Parachutes do nothing for a plane in a spin, as the parachute gets tangled
No one has addressed issues with accidental deployment of the parachute- at cruising speed deploying the parachute could result in a lot of nasty problems.
Parachutes are useless below a certain altitude because they can't 'fill' before the plane smashes into the ground. A huge slew of accidents occur during landing or takeoff
The pilot is completely out of control of the direction of the plane, whereas a pilot gliding a plane that has run out of fuel has some choice in where the plane goes (glide ratios mean even at 5,000 feet, most planes can glide at LEAST few miles). What happens when the first single-engine plane parachutes into a school gymnasium roof and kills a couple hundred children, instead of making a mess of the soccer field? All because the pilot panicked and instead of gliding the plane, he just reached up and yanked the chute lever?
Repeat after me. Calendaring. Calendaring. Calendaring.
Only the execs rally care about syncing to their PDAs/Treos/whatevers, and that CAN be done server side these days. What is much more of a deal-breaker is Outlook's meeting scheduling. Everyone I know in the company here uses it. Everyone in every company I've ever worked at has used Outlook to schedule meetings and confirm people can make it.
I have never understood what is so mind-bendingly complex about it. When I used to use a POP/IMAP client to get my mail, meeting invitations from an Outlook/Exchange user looked to be a set of key/value items, one per line, with all the data necessary for a client (such as Mozilla with the calendaring plugin) to parse it handily, ask the user if they want to add it/see their calendar/whatever, etc.
I honestly think that open-source developers resent Outlook so much, they can't bring themselves to do what those of us trying to use open source in corporate environments have been dying for- interworking with Outlook's meeting notifications and some form of well-integrated calendaring.
So far, I've yet to come across another office suite that renders the documents the same way word does
Where I work, we're on Office 2001, because 2003/2004 both screw up all our templates for Powerpoint, among other problems. Seriously- even Microsoft can't get it straight.
The worst is when someone comes in with a 2003/2004 file, and someone bitches that it doesn't look right.
I don't see any MacOS X packages on their site, or any mention of improvements in that area.
Anyone have news on this?
Also curious....because the OpenOffice team said OS X support was "never going to happen" in 1.x, not worth their time, wasted effort since 2.0 is around the corner, blah blah..."wait until 2.0".
MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now, and Apple's developer documentation is first class. Can we please get support for OS X? Pretty please?
$650 is nothing if it's faster
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The only reason Adobe charges so damn much is because they know a certain number of people will buy it regardless.
Sorry, I use photoshop quite often, and GIMP is, among other things, exceedingly slow; filters that take a second or two in Photoshop CS take a half minute in GIMP. I got tired of watching the filter progress bar all the time, and switched right back.
Professionals buy new $3k Macs when there's a new model out if there is even 2-3 seconds difference in how long a task takes. Why should they "save" $650 on something that will take them ten times as long?
Nevermind that macros in GIMP are a royal pain in the ass. In Photoshop, you just do the action while recording it, and Photoshop makes the macro for you. You can then apply the macro to images in the image browser instantly, control where things go, have a report generated on failures/successes, the whole nine yards.
If the GIMP team wants Photoshop market share(which I don't think they do), then repeat after me: productivity, productivity, productivity. They'd do well to sit down with a bunch of pros and write down everything they say, and weigh it very heavily into future plans.
Well, if I were you, I would take a half-way decent case and mod it. Chop off the back if it is too long, put some plexiglass on the side, stencil on the side, whatever floats your boat. Much more unique than the standard Mac
So, let me translate. "Do what every male 16-25 has been doing with his PC for several years now- making a box with a window in the side of an ugly box, because it was "cool", so mainstream that now Dell and everybody else will sell you a machine with a window in the side. That will be more original than buying a Macintosh which is actually cutting edge design".
Everyone seems to be suggesting to go with a Mac.
I'm suggesting he go with a Mac keyboard. I've seen tons of PC keyboards just die- Mac keyboards just keep going, no matter what you dish out. The latest Pro keyboard is also pretty stylish and does not feel even remotely "plasticky" and cheap...cause it isn't. I remember when the original Extended II Pro keyboard was still around- mine lasted for years until ADB was finally not supported by Apple anymore. Those things were damn tanks!
As for a mouse, if you manage to break a Logitech optical, you're insane...I've had the same one for years, and I've never had to replace one in a work environment. Seen plenty of those shitty Microsoft mice die ugly deaths though.
Diebold made changes to their systems after being certified.
That goes beyond incompetence - I'm sure they understood and knew full well what they were doing.
I hate Diebold as much as the next person and think their CEO is a slimy Republican asshat...
...but never underestimate incompetence or "left hand does not know what the right hand is doing" problems in a large corporation, or what they can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly a 'stream', now is it?
I didn't read the article (this IS slashdot), but I suspect the feed will only be available in stores.
Yep, to about the tune of $2 Billion With A Capital B in "military aide", and +$700M in economic aide. $3B isn't enough- they want more for "border security" and whatnot.
Think I'm using some nazi group for my figures? Phbt. Try the Haaretz.
None of this counts the billions in defense spending; Israel makes a HUGE number of major and minor systems for virtually every US military vehicle.
Slighty sarcastic view- maybe if we saved that $3B+/yr, we'd solve two problems at once- the Israelis would get a lot more serious about the peace process, and we'd have money to pump into our own economy instead of theirs. Like, say, our crumbling roads/railway system, healthcare/retirement, inadequate community emergency services, etc.
Of course, that will never happen. Any politician who suggests cutting aide to Israel stands to be accused of anti-semetism...
What neighborhood do you live in, and can I get an apartment? Because around here, it'd be a really, really BAD thing.
On any of the FDA-classed devices below Class 3B, the brain and eyelid react fast enough to prevent eye damage from point-blank range.
By definition 3B or above means the brain/eyelid reaction time is too slow and the eye can't protect itself. 4 means eye/skin/fire danger.
Even a class 4 laser would be unlikely to do anything except be annoying at a couple miles, as everyone has pointed out.
Oh, also- do you know how hard it would be to keep a laser trained on a plane at that distance by hand? Nearly impossible. I strongly suspect that either he or his daughter really WERE just waving it around...and if the class of the device is low enough, he's perfectly within legal FAA limits; only lasers over a certain class being operated outdoors require notifying the FAA.
95% of dynamic websites crumble within the first 15 comments. 50% after subscriber 'preview'. 5% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 3% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 2% when Cmdr Taco tries to click on the link before posting the story. 0% for Timothy; he's too busy ranting about the latest threat to "our rights online" to check the links.
I give up. Spinner rims?
He's also just a tad biased:
"Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and author of How to Know (Booklocker.com, 2004)"
Don't you think Britannica is just a tad bit unsettled by how wikipedia, in under 5 years, has pretty much revolutionized the concept of an Encyclopedia? They're already beaten and bruised by the internet in general, this is just salt on the wound.
A number of his points aren't terribly valid- go read some encyclopedias from the 50's and 60's and see how fair they are towards women's reproductive rights, and what light the Soviet Union is cast in.
Wikipedia has the same advantages of open-source; faults are caught by the community most of the time, and on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
What Wikipedia DOES need is a better control over accounts. If you're going to contribute something, you need to be held accountable. No posting without logging in, email confirmations for the accounts (they collect your email but do NOTHING to check it!) and the visual verification word thing (sorry, forgot the name for it...captka or whatever it is).
Hello, Wikipedia, 1995 is calling, they want their security back!
...and who's going to watch the non-boosted events? Will companies choose to sponsor the athletes setting records, or those who "just" take first place? Who will the networks cover?
Do you think that Major League Baseball is asleep at the switch, when they tell their players months in advance about an upcoming drug test, and 50+ players STILL get caught doping, and MLB does nothing? Do you think the government is asleep at the switch when they don't subpoena the hell out of MLB and throw every druggie baseball player into the slammer?
Phhbt. Dream on- MLB is thrilled at the doping. They "hate" it publicly, but privately they squeal like little children when Joe Dope smashes the baseball out of the park. Home runs and high scores bring in the crowds. Singles and scoreless games don't.
...And god forbid the government should interfere with baseball. It's a 'national pasttime'. It'd be like...messing with Apple Pie.
The classifications are based upon wattage levels which will cause damage to the eye before your brain reacts AND the eyelid closes.
Anything over a certain class (II or III, I forget which) falls into the 'damage will happen before you blink" category. That's why they usually require a keylock on a shutter or output control, a lasing indicator light, etc. OSHA regs then mesh in with this- lasers in operation over a certain level mean guards on equipment, goggles for anyone in the room, blah blah.
Over a certain level in mW also requires approval from the FAA to use outdoors [at night] as it could blind pilots. Sounds silly for a single point source, but it's intended for laser light shows where hundreds or thousands of beams- which often sweep/scan out into the sky- stand an excellent chance of blinding a pilot.
Pretty much all the FAA does is say "sure" and then put out a NOTAM (NOtice to AirMen) saying "there be lasers here". NOTAMs are automatically pulled up if your flight plan crosses through the area the NOTAM applies to.
Walmart is the #1 retail chain in the world with sales around $220 Billion; its sales are larger than the next 3-4 retailers combined.
OneDay shopping. You don't tell anyone about something you're patenting until AFTER you patent it! Jeez, pay attention.
Meanwhile, let's get some prior art going, people! I've got Monday.
It's called brand loyalty, or customer loyalty; another word is familiarity. Consumers have VERY strong preferences in everything from the underwear they buy to the car they drive to the gas they put in that car.
Decades of research and stats show this to be true- that people tend to be pretty set in their ways as consumers. So, actually, your little rant, while a wonderful bit of wonderful bit of anti-establishment ranting (the reason you were modded up)...couldn't be further from the truth.
If you buy Pepsi and a few months from now switch to Coke (god knows why, but beside the point), Pepsi most certainly considers that "lost" sales.
The real irony is that Craigslist tends to be, like Ebay (which was responsible for 3/4 of ALL internet fraud complaints), something you have to approach EXTREMELY carefully.
People on Craigslist tend to be really flaky- we're talking the stoned kind of flaky, or the "I'm going to try and cheat you because I think I'm clever" kind of flaky; I'm not sure which is worse. Then there are all the wierdos posting in the various personals section- if you want a great laugh (no matter your gender), read those sections; makes you think of someone walking into McDonalds with $2 and expecting a rare Filet Mignon with sauteed mushrooms. Or the ever popular "I'm hot. Send a picture. Sexiest one wins." I laughed for about 5 minutes so hard I couldn't breathe, and resolved never to look in w4m again because it was dangerous to my health, even if it was a fantastic laugh.
Top problem though, is that people are complete IDIOTS when it comes to listing their items. "Printer. Best offer." Inkjet? Laser? Dot matrix? Made this decade? God forbid they tell us what company made it. I also love it when useless, worthless stuff is offered up- like cheapo computer speakers. People, I'm all for the recycling bit, but take that shit to the RECYCLING CENTER, don't waste anyone's time putting it up for sale for $5. Round trip subway fare costs at least half that...
The hysterical bit is that Craiglist supposedly has an "advisory committee" that handles how the site is presented to users. When I complained that even basic instructions were never shown to users as part of the posting procedure and it was clear there was a problem, Craig just replied, "thanks, the committee will think about it".
Then there are the people who post the "free" iPod/plasma/whatever emails (which are usually flagged by the community)...the problem is that there's nothing to keep them from posting over and over, because (to my knowledge) there is no automatic blacklist after X number of posts flagged...so spamming is pretty easy.
Then there are the ripoffs. Go read your city's /sys/ for a few minutes, and see how many times you say "WHAT?!"...like people asking $500 for a Pentium 3 system. Go read /ele/ and see how many times you see "Theater Research" speakers being offered for $500; the more honest (or naive) ones admit to buying it from some guys in a white van...the others just think "oh well, I'll get some other sucker to buy 'em".
Classic example of the try-to-sucker-you-by-omission-and-feined-ignorance approach was a Phaser printer being offered for sale for a few hundred $ with no mention of WHY nobody uses wax printers anymore. In short- you MUST cover your ass like crazy. If it's too good to be true, it most certainly is someone trying to sucker you.
Typical, but when you consider it against Craig's motivations (community building and other crunchy-granola-ness), Craigslist has ultimately been a pretty spectacular failure. I used to report at least 5-6 posts a day to the abuse department for various reasons (all were accepted, and the abuse group IS very nice; they ALWAYS write you back! To the CL abuse staff, you have my sympathies and admiration), and I just got tired of it...it was like throwing a sandbag into a levee break and watching it disappear.
I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).
If it can tune in cellular frequencies, sorry, it's already illegal in the US and pretty much any other developed nation. Various dictatorship-countries would probably instantly declare anyone they found owning this kind of thing to be a 'spy'.
I imagine this scares the crap out of the FCC. , because prior to this the only thing that stood between your phone call and...well..anyone...was that they had a leash on all the companies that could make such devices.
PS: Coral links, people? Universal Software Radio Peripheral
Do you know how much an F1 car weighs? About a half ton.
Do you know how much horsepower an F1 car has, from a few litres displacement V10? 900hp...or more. Why is such staggering performance possible? Because simply put, gasolene has one of the highest energy capacities known to man aside from nuclear fuel. A cup of gasolene contains enough energy to lift 1 ton 1,000 feet in one second, if mixed with air at the right ratio.
There isn't a vehicle in the world except a funnycar that can go as fast- and a funny car can only do it about...ONCE, maybe twice; it pushes so much fuel and air into the engine that if it misses one combustion cycle in any one cylinder, it will hydrolock and explode on the next compression cycle. An F1 engine tears itself apart too, but it lasts (hopefully) a few hundred hours tops.
Watching an electric "F1" would be about as exciting as watching paint dry.
Eh?
- Brickles
- Bolo (damn awesome tank game, still on InfoMac)
- Canon Fodder (simple, but addictive- don't blow up the hospitals!)
- Ottomatic(I think? Multilevel 2D ladders+levels, with a unicycle-robot)
- RoboWar, a complex program-your-own-robot game which was very addictive
- (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
- (forgot the name) line-art 3D space-age-ish tank game that performed really, really well even on older machines. Collected flags, biased your tank(which was red) in terms of ammo/speed/armour, etc. Came in a really weird box.
- NetTrek
- Solarian II (STILL my favorite. Write Ben Hall and help me pester him into porting it to OS X, he's told me he wants to if only for fun, but never gets around to it. I think it does run under Classic)
- Some sort of dungeon game, I think the premise was exploring a pyramid. You found scrolls, rings, and potions...objects could be cursed...my favorite was when you picked up a cursed object, a little high pitched voice would go "oh no!"
:-)
- Glider
Given enough time, or a drive that could read 3.5" HFS floppies, I could think of/find even more.All fantastic, superb games, and I'd love to see source released on those which were not open, so that they can be updated for OS X. All caused me to waste far too much of my early high school years. All blew away their PC counterparts which were DOS and at best could go "bip" or "bop" and draw a square in one of 16 colors. Then the PowerPC came along, and Marathon knocked everyone's socks off. I damn near shit myself the first time I played Infinity when the aliens came out of the dark, and the space ship creaked and moaned...
Oh, and Hypercard Kicked Ass compared to ANYTHING on the PC.
Infomac seems to be missing a lot of the REALLY good, old stuff. Anyone know if there's a true historical archive of any of this stuff?
It's a fantastic deal- for them.
Despite the fact that they're speakeasy's customers- they'll probably still come to you first. That means less calls for "oh, wait, the cord popped out". $.
They only have to run one circuit to service multiple customers; so less money to Verizon/whoever, more to them. $$.
They don't have to run wires, buy equipment, install any of it. $$$.
I also highly doubt it's a 'linear' discount, either...and even a linear discount wouldn't be 'fair' given how much money they're saving.
Parachutes are hailed as the save-all for pilots. Except:
Eh?
Not unless it syncs with a PDA
Repeat after me. Calendaring. Calendaring. Calendaring.
Only the execs rally care about syncing to their PDAs/Treos/whatevers, and that CAN be done server side these days. What is much more of a deal-breaker is Outlook's meeting scheduling. Everyone I know in the company here uses it. Everyone in every company I've ever worked at has used Outlook to schedule meetings and confirm people can make it.
I have never understood what is so mind-bendingly complex about it. When I used to use a POP/IMAP client to get my mail, meeting invitations from an Outlook/Exchange user looked to be a set of key/value items, one per line, with all the data necessary for a client (such as Mozilla with the calendaring plugin) to parse it handily, ask the user if they want to add it/see their calendar/whatever, etc.
I honestly think that open-source developers resent Outlook so much, they can't bring themselves to do what those of us trying to use open source in corporate environments have been dying for- interworking with Outlook's meeting notifications and some form of well-integrated calendaring.
AOL has always been trying to become something which it is not. Fast. Reliable. Relevant.
They gave up- now their commercials just sell AOL as easy to use and "the 'in' thing".
Where I work, we're on Office 2001, because 2003/2004 both screw up all our templates for Powerpoint, among other problems. Seriously- even Microsoft can't get it straight.
The worst is when someone comes in with a 2003/2004 file, and someone bitches that it doesn't look right.
Also curious....because the OpenOffice team said OS X support was "never going to happen" in 1.x, not worth their time, wasted effort since 2.0 is around the corner, blah blah..."wait until 2.0".
MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now, and Apple's developer documentation is first class. Can we please get support for OS X? Pretty please?
Sorry, I use photoshop quite often, and GIMP is, among other things, exceedingly slow; filters that take a second or two in Photoshop CS take a half minute in GIMP. I got tired of watching the filter progress bar all the time, and switched right back.
Professionals buy new $3k Macs when there's a new model out if there is even 2-3 seconds difference in how long a task takes. Why should they "save" $650 on something that will take them ten times as long?
Nevermind that macros in GIMP are a royal pain in the ass. In Photoshop, you just do the action while recording it, and Photoshop makes the macro for you. You can then apply the macro to images in the image browser instantly, control where things go, have a report generated on failures/successes, the whole nine yards.
If the GIMP team wants Photoshop market share(which I don't think they do), then repeat after me: productivity, productivity, productivity. They'd do well to sit down with a bunch of pros and write down everything they say, and weigh it very heavily into future plans.
So, let me translate. "Do what every male 16-25 has been doing with his PC for several years now- making a box with a window in the side of an ugly box, because it was "cool", so mainstream that now Dell and everybody else will sell you a machine with a window in the side. That will be more original than buying a Macintosh which is actually cutting edge design".
Everyone seems to be suggesting to go with a Mac.
I'm suggesting he go with a Mac keyboard. I've seen tons of PC keyboards just die- Mac keyboards just keep going, no matter what you dish out. The latest Pro keyboard is also pretty stylish and does not feel even remotely "plasticky" and cheap...cause it isn't. I remember when the original Extended II Pro keyboard was still around- mine lasted for years until ADB was finally not supported by Apple anymore. Those things were damn tanks!
As for a mouse, if you manage to break a Logitech optical, you're insane...I've had the same one for years, and I've never had to replace one in a work environment. Seen plenty of those shitty Microsoft mice die ugly deaths though.
I hate Diebold as much as the next person and think their CEO is a slimy Republican asshat...
...but never underestimate incompetence or "left hand does not know what the right hand is doing" problems in a large corporation, or what they can do.