There is a clear difference between what most people refer to as "spam" and double opt-in email marketing. The latter means that you actually entereted your email address on some website requesting information and/or email "deals". Then they emailed you and you had to either reply-to or click on some link in the email to confirm your subscription. This isn't the "Get your university diploma" crap that eveyone complains about and then deletes without reading.
Now I don't know about you, but there are actual online copanies that I don't mind getting emails from. Amazon is one of them. I like to know about upcoming DVD releases and if Amazon emails me about them, I will sometimes read them. How many of you are also signed up to receive American Airlines SuperSaver fares or something similar? This is the type of direct marketing email that we are talking about here.
So when someone is truly interested in a company's products enough to signup for and confirm interest in receiving emails, there is a good chance that at some point that person will buy something based on one of the emails.
I used to work for a company that was one of the first companies to make money using direct marketing email. We were a public company (in the dot-com craze, that is) and the direct marketing email part of the company made double what the online banner advertisements made. It was well into the millions of dollars per quarter range. Now that isn't a ton of many, but it was respectable for the number of people it required to run the company and the very lost cost of sending the emails.
I remember spending late nights with my buddies in high school wasting hours and hours battling each other playing Herzog Zwei during the height of the Sega Genesis. Having fond memories of this classic game, I searched google to see if anyone had re-released this game on different platforms or if anyone had tried to recreate it.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this guy working on a recreation of the game he was calling HZ:
It seems to have been in alpha form for over a year now, which is unfortunate, but the source is available and it has been ported to Linux! NOTE: This web site also has a scan of the original manual for the Sega Genesis game.
Also interesting is a site for a Herzog Zwei mod for UT (Unreal Tournament). I'm not sure how that is going to work, but it seems to be under active development:
I find it interesting that if you follow the link in the review to a place where you can preorder one of these devices: www.aquapad.org, the pricing is $700 for both the Midori Linux version and the WinCE version. Doesn't it cost money for the WinCE license? And does it not cost money for the Midori Linux license (GPL)?
I guess this is just one reseller's version of the pricing. Maybe they are just taking a bigger margin on the Linux version. Too bad they don't pass the savings onto the consumer.
If it IS to the death I would love to see Kathy Rogers and the American hosts Tyler Whats-his-face and George Gray compete and lose a horrific, painful, and bloody battle. Then we can go back to the wonderful days of the first season where Robert Llewelyn was the one true host.
A lot of people have the misconception that things online are "a little bit cheaper" but that the shipping cost out-weighs that discount. While this is often true for things like books and CD's, it is not the case for bigger ticket items, espcially if things can be bought online out-of-state so that you don't have to pay sales tax. You forfeit the immediate gratification of buying your product and bringing it home, but sometimes the money you save in not paying sales tax can save you enough that you can get next day delivery and still save money. Plus you don't have to drive your car to the store, find parking, fight through the crowds, wait in line, etc.
I'm not a huge fan of closed-source drivers, but nVidia's closed source drivers kick some serious ass. Not only that, but because of the way nVidia cards work, their drivers work for every card from a TNT to the GeForce3. When the next generation GeForce comes out, the _same_ drivers you use today will work with the new card. Try doing _that_ with the ATI drivers. FWIW, the nVidia drivers are very stable (for me in my limited experience) and I have had no problems with them crashing.
Of course I would rather have them release their specs/docs, whatever so that the open source community could create open source drivers(yes there is the nv driver, but it sucks and doesn't do OpenGL, AFAIK), but as far as closed-source commercial drivers go, they have done a really good job.
I have no idea what you mean by implying that the nVidia cards don't do 2-d well...
For what it's worth, the DirecTivo (DirecTV/Tivo combo box) already has dual tuners and digital optical out.
Also, there are 802.11b USB adapters, so assuming Tivo supports the setup of these (which might be questionable since there is a bit of setup required for them with WEP, etc.), then it is possible that you could have 802.11b wireless ethernet on your Tivo2 box.
I was developing a web application that would serve out a chunk of opaque data for the user to save on their hard drive. So I set the Content-Type to "application/octet-stream" and the "filename" in the URL was foo.yai which is a totally bogus extension, right? Well it just so happened that the actual content of the data was XML. But not only that, it was XML saved as a UTF String so that it had this two-byte header on it which indicated how long the UTF String was.
Clicking on the link that generated this file worked fine on all browsers but IE, of course. You would click on it and all other browsers would properly show the user the "Save As..." dialog. IE looked at the file and determined that it was XML (even without and xml extension!) and not only that, it was so bold as to tell me that my XML was mis-formatted because of this 2-byte header at the beginning of the file! So it started its embedded syntax-highlighted XML viewer that it has and then stops and says "Misformated XML, unknown characters before the <xml> tag...". Gimme a break!
The "workaround" was to set the Content-type to X-Made-Up-Content-Type-To-Fool-Stupid-IE and it decided that this was something that should receive the "Save as..." dialog, as did the other browsers, thankfully.
So I'm not at all surprised that someone found this vulnerability with IE being so bold as to guess the content-type when it is set to application/octet-stream and start doing whatever it wants to based on its guess.
And have you ever noticed that IE get's the extension from the last thing in the URL _even_ if it's a query string? So if you have a URL like http://www.foo.bar/download?e=greg@yahoo.com
then the filename it will try to save is "download.com". And of course.com is an executable as far as Windows is concerned. Brilliant.
So add the cost of 2 120GB HD's (~$250 each) and a DirecTivo for $100 = $600 total for a 230 hour DirecTivo.
The ReplayTV with 320 hours storage (RTV4320) is more like $2000.
And the ReplayTV 320 hours estimate is lowest quality. Assume closer to 100-150 hours at highest quality.
The hacked DirecTivo w/ 230 hours is highest quality (which is your only choice on the DirecTivo as there is no MPEG encoding -- it's straight MPEG-2 from satellite to hard drive)
Of course there are more points to argue like off-the-shelf versus a hack, subscription vs. non-subscription, but I won't get into those.
Circuit City has been selling the Phillips DirecTivo for $99 for a couple of months now (some people have gotten a free dish with it too). Go to your local Circuit City and ask. I don't believe that there is a required contract to go along with it, but it is a DirecTV receiver only, so to get it to work you need to be a DirecTV subscriber. Also, if you want the "cool" Tivo features like the tv schedule, season passes, etc., you are presumably going to become a Tivo subscriber as well. Hence the low price.
OK, so the interface isn't _perfect_ but I found that once you got used to all the buttons, you could make it work. For instance, if you hit L1 while walking or standing still (not in a car), the camera drops directly behind you and you can see what is directly in front of you. Also, the second analog stick drops you into first-person mode. It doesn't stay in first person mode while you walk, which would be nice sometimes, but it can be useful too.
I have no problems while driving. In GTA1 and 2 I would just run into buildings ALL the time because I couldn't see far enough in front of me. GTA3 has a pretty standard "racing game" type view when you are driving cars that I think works. There is a learning curve for doing the drive-by shootings in your car while trying to drive at the same time.
CmdrTaco already mentioned this game, but he didn't give enough detail on it to convince people why it is such a great game.
Unfortunately it is only out for the PS2, but for those of you with a PS2 should seriously think about getting this game. The complexity and depth of this game is pretty amazing. And the graphics are a huge improvement from GTA1 and 2. That silly low-detail overhead view made playing the game too cumbersome. GTA3 got the graphics/interface right.
I have been playing it every spare second I have for the last month, and I am still only 36% through it according to the stats. And I believe that only relates to the missions. If you are bored with the missions you can always:
1) Try to get "stunt" bonuses by stealing fast cars, boats, or airplanes and driving them off ramps, bridges, buildings, etc.
2) Steal a taxi cab and play a little Crazy Taxi-esque game to earn a little side money
3) Steal a fire engine and go around the citty putting out fires for $$. I hear if you put out 10 in a row you get the flame thrower. (How does that work?)
4) Steal an ambulance and drive people to the hospital.
5) Steal a police car and go on "Vigilante Missions" where you track down criminals around the city and get cash for killing them.
Oh did I mention that this game is very non-PC and not recommended for people under 17? But man is it a lot of fun for those of us who are over 17.
I was trapped in a yearly contract with both Sprint PCS and Cingular desperately contimplating paying the $150-200 "get-out-early" fees just to drop them ASAP. Both gave me very poor coverage (in the San Francisco, Bay Area) and would drop calls _all the time_ even when I wasn't moving! Cingular was the worst, though, because I couldn't even dream about making an outgoing phone call around 8-9pm every night because I would instead get "System Busy" instead of a completed call.
So these are the 2 wireless carries who are going to roll out 3G? No thank you. I have serious doubts that the rollout of 3G will be any better than the crap they are forcing people to deal with today.
BTW, I have AT&T now and am much happier. Much better coverage and I can make outgoing phone calls at night. Amazing.
The way things work here on Slashdot is that when you see an article and it starts out with:
So-and-so states: "I hate Microsoft". How about that.
That stuff in italics is actually what the submitter wrote. So Hemos himself isn't actually responsible for the statement "It seems they can't understand why the industry would sue them," the submitter of the article is. Now Hemos could have possibly corrected the submitter in the part after the italics, but he didn't. I don't know that I would say that he was being subjective by not taking the time to correct the subjective statement of the submitter...
While some of your points are valid, point #2 is dead wrong. "Virtually no PC game allows head-to-head play without everyone owning their own PC and then networking them together". Have you ever played an EA Sports game for the PC? They let you play head-to-head with someone else on the same computer. I play NHL 2001 with my brother-in-law all the time on the same PC. You just need 2 game pads. Or they will even allow you to use the keyboard, but that is not the preferred controller for sports games. I'm not sure how many people you can play head-to-head on the same PC, but I bet it will suport at least 4, if not 6.
You might be thinking how you hook up 4 game pads/joysticks to your computer? Some (if not all) game pads allow you to daisy chain them together and you can hook up a bunch of them to your computer without needing 4 game ports.
Please enlighten us, oh Anonymous Coward as to what the simple answer is. I did some googling and didn't find anything about a release of the Tick cartoon series on DVD.
I would be very interested to see some backing up of your numbers regarding the Ping Of Death patches. From what I remember, the Linux patch was issued in about 4 hours. Actually just looked it up on google from a fairly reliable-looking source (http://flowserv.teco.uni-karlsruhe.de/ping/) which says "Patches are coming out extremely fast - the award did go to the Linux community for getting a patch out within three hours (well, 2 hours 35 minutes 10 seconds if you must know)". So your 8 hour number is completely wrong. Also, from what I remember, the Microsoft patch was issued in more like 4 days. I have no data to back up my claim on Microsoft, but then again either do you.
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There is a clear difference between what most people refer to as "spam" and double opt-in email marketing. The latter means that you actually entereted your email address on some website requesting information and/or email "deals". Then they emailed you and you had to either reply-to or click on some link in the email to confirm your subscription. This isn't the "Get your university diploma" crap that eveyone complains about and then deletes without reading.
Now I don't know about you, but there are actual online copanies that I don't mind getting emails from. Amazon is one of them. I like to know about upcoming DVD releases and if Amazon emails me about them, I will sometimes read them. How many of you are also signed up to receive American Airlines SuperSaver fares or something similar? This is the type of direct marketing email that we are talking about here.
So when someone is truly interested in a company's products enough to signup for and confirm interest in receiving emails, there is a good chance that at some point that person will buy something based on one of the emails.
I used to work for a company that was one of the first companies to make money using direct marketing email. We were a public company (in the dot-com craze, that is) and the direct marketing email part of the company made double what the online banner advertisements made. It was well into the millions of dollars per quarter range. Now that isn't a ton of many, but it was respectable for the number of people it required to run the company and the very lost cost of sending the emails.
I remember spending late nights with my buddies in high school wasting hours and hours battling each other playing Herzog Zwei during the height of the Sega Genesis. Having fond memories of this classic game, I searched google to see if anyone had re-released this game on different platforms or if anyone had tried to recreate it.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this guy working on a recreation of the game he was calling HZ:
http://pulp.fiction.net/~jeske/Projects/HZ/
It seems to have been in alpha form for over a year now, which is unfortunate, but the source is available and it has been ported to Linux! NOTE: This web site also has a scan of the original manual for the Sega Genesis game.
Also interesting is a site for a Herzog Zwei mod for UT (Unreal Tournament). I'm not sure how that is going to work, but it seems to be under active development:
http://mep.beyondunreal.com/hz/
This could be great. Herzog in a 3D world with online playing capabilities...
I heard it is supposed to come out on April 16. This was listed on some Grand Theft Auto 3 site. Don't know how reliable it is.
According to the description is does come with Pocket Word. I am curious what the licensing cost for Pocket Word + WinCE is.
Yeah I know free beer vs. free speech, but Midori Linux appears to be the free beer kind of free as well.
I find it interesting that if you follow the link in the review to a place where you can preorder one of these devices: www.aquapad.org, the pricing is $700 for both the Midori Linux version and the WinCE version. Doesn't it cost money for the WinCE license? And does it not cost money for the Midori Linux license (GPL)?
I guess this is just one reseller's version of the pricing. Maybe they are just taking a bigger margin on the Linux version. Too bad they don't pass the savings onto the consumer.
If it IS to the death I would love to see Kathy Rogers and the American hosts Tyler Whats-his-face and George Gray compete and lose a horrific, painful, and bloody battle. Then we can go back to the wonderful days of the first season where Robert Llewelyn was the one true host.
A lot of people have the misconception that things online are "a little bit cheaper" but that the shipping cost out-weighs that discount. While this is often true for things like books and CD's, it is not the case for bigger ticket items, espcially if things can be bought online out-of-state so that you don't have to pay sales tax. You forfeit the immediate gratification of buying your product and bringing it home, but sometimes the money you save in not paying sales tax can save you enough that you can get next day delivery and still save money. Plus you don't have to drive your car to the store, find parking, fight through the crowds, wait in line, etc.
I'm not a huge fan of closed-source drivers, but nVidia's closed source drivers kick some serious ass. Not only that, but because of the way nVidia cards work, their drivers work for every card from a TNT to the GeForce3. When the next generation GeForce comes out, the _same_ drivers you use today will work with the new card. Try doing _that_ with the ATI drivers. FWIW, the nVidia drivers are very stable (for me in my limited experience) and I have had no problems with them crashing.
Of course I would rather have them release their specs/docs, whatever so that the open source community could create open source drivers(yes there is the nv driver, but it sucks and doesn't do OpenGL, AFAIK), but as far as closed-source commercial drivers go, they have done a really good job.
I have no idea what you mean by implying that the nVidia cards don't do 2-d well...
In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it set off some sort of alarm. Or made your computer explode.
It can happen. It was reported in the Weekly World News
For what it's worth, the DirecTivo (DirecTV/Tivo combo box) already has dual tuners and digital optical out.
Also, there are 802.11b USB adapters, so assuming Tivo supports the setup of these (which might be questionable since there is a bit of setup required for them with WEP, etc.), then it is possible that you could have 802.11b wireless ethernet on your Tivo2 box.
-2 Troll? Man there is a serious dearth of sense of humor on here.
You're afraid of stupid people being stupid? You must spend a whole lot of time being afraid.
Yeah I'm sure the DrinkOrDie 1337 WaReZ kiddies were pirating a bunch of Fortran compilers. Definitely.
I was developing a web application that would serve out a chunk of opaque data for the user to save on their hard drive. So I set the Content-Type to "application/octet-stream" and the "filename" in the URL was foo.yai which is a totally bogus extension, right? Well it just so happened that the actual content of the data was XML. But not only that, it was XML saved as a UTF String so that it had this two-byte header on it which indicated how long the UTF String was.
.com is an executable as far as Windows is concerned. Brilliant.
Clicking on the link that generated this file worked fine on all browsers but IE, of course. You would click on it and all other browsers would properly show the user the "Save As..." dialog. IE looked at the file and determined that it was XML (even without and xml extension!) and not only that, it was so bold as to tell me that my XML was mis-formatted because of this 2-byte header at the beginning of the file! So it started its embedded syntax-highlighted XML viewer that it has and then stops and says "Misformated XML, unknown characters before the <xml> tag...". Gimme a break!
The "workaround" was to set the Content-type to X-Made-Up-Content-Type-To-Fool-Stupid-IE and it decided that this was something that should receive the "Save as..." dialog, as did the other browsers, thankfully.
So I'm not at all surprised that someone found this vulnerability with IE being so bold as to guess the content-type when it is set to application/octet-stream and start doing whatever it wants to based on its guess.
And have you ever noticed that IE get's the extension from the last thing in the URL _even_ if it's a query string? So if you have a URL like http://www.foo.bar/download?e=greg@yahoo.com
then the filename it will try to save is "download.com". And of course
So add the cost of 2 120GB HD's (~$250 each) and a DirecTivo for $100 = $600 total for a 230 hour DirecTivo.
The ReplayTV with 320 hours storage (RTV4320) is more like $2000.
And the ReplayTV 320 hours estimate is lowest quality. Assume closer to 100-150 hours at highest quality.
The hacked DirecTivo w/ 230 hours is highest quality (which is your only choice on the DirecTivo as there is no MPEG encoding -- it's straight MPEG-2 from satellite to hard drive)
Of course there are more points to argue like off-the-shelf versus a hack, subscription vs. non-subscription, but I won't get into those.
Circuit City has been selling the Phillips DirecTivo for $99 for a couple of months now (some people have gotten a free dish with it too). Go to your local Circuit City and ask. I don't believe that there is a required contract to go along with it, but it is a DirecTV receiver only, so to get it to work you need to be a DirecTV subscriber. Also, if you want the "cool" Tivo features like the tv schedule, season passes, etc., you are presumably going to become a Tivo subscriber as well. Hence the low price.
Yes I did mean non-politically correct. I guess here on Slashdot non-politically correct shouldn't be abbreviated.
However, I did mention at the top of my comment that it was only available for the PS2, so his reply was warranted, he just sort-of mis-quoted.
OK, so the interface isn't _perfect_ but I found that once you got used to all the buttons, you could make it work. For instance, if you hit L1 while walking or standing still (not in a car), the camera drops directly behind you and you can see what is directly in front of you. Also, the second analog stick drops you into first-person mode. It doesn't stay in first person mode while you walk, which would be nice sometimes, but it can be useful too.
I have no problems while driving. In GTA1 and 2 I would just run into buildings ALL the time because I couldn't see far enough in front of me. GTA3 has a pretty standard "racing game" type view when you are driving cars that I think works. There is a learning curve for doing the drive-by shootings in your car while trying to drive at the same time.
CmdrTaco already mentioned this game, but he didn't give enough detail on it to convince people why it is such a great game.
Unfortunately it is only out for the PS2, but for those of you with a PS2 should seriously think about getting this game. The complexity and depth of this game is pretty amazing. And the graphics are a huge improvement from GTA1 and 2. That silly low-detail overhead view made playing the game too cumbersome. GTA3 got the graphics/interface right.
I have been playing it every spare second I have for the last month, and I am still only 36% through it according to the stats. And I believe that only relates to the missions. If you are bored with the missions you can always:
1) Try to get "stunt" bonuses by stealing fast cars, boats, or airplanes and driving them off ramps, bridges, buildings, etc.
2) Steal a taxi cab and play a little Crazy Taxi-esque game to earn a little side money
3) Steal a fire engine and go around the citty putting out fires for $$. I hear if you put out 10 in a row you get the flame thrower. (How does that work?)
4) Steal an ambulance and drive people to the hospital.
5) Steal a police car and go on "Vigilante Missions" where you track down criminals around the city and get cash for killing them.
Oh did I mention that this game is very non-PC and not recommended for people under 17? But man is it a lot of fun for those of us who are over 17.
I was trapped in a yearly contract with both Sprint PCS and Cingular desperately contimplating paying the $150-200 "get-out-early" fees just to drop them ASAP. Both gave me very poor coverage (in the San Francisco, Bay Area) and would drop calls _all the time_ even when I wasn't moving! Cingular was the worst, though, because I couldn't even dream about making an outgoing phone call around 8-9pm every night because I would instead get "System Busy" instead of a completed call.
So these are the 2 wireless carries who are going to roll out 3G? No thank you. I have serious doubts that the rollout of 3G will be any better than the crap they are forcing people to deal with today.
BTW, I have AT&T now and am much happier. Much better coverage and I can make outgoing phone calls at night. Amazing.
The way things work here on Slashdot is that when you see an article and it starts out with:
So-and-so states: "I hate Microsoft". How about that.
That stuff in italics is actually what the submitter wrote. So Hemos himself isn't actually responsible for the statement "It seems they can't understand why the industry would sue them," the submitter of the article is. Now Hemos could have possibly corrected the submitter in the part after the italics, but he didn't. I don't know that I would say that he was being subjective by not taking the time to correct the subjective statement of the submitter...
While some of your points are valid, point #2 is dead wrong. "Virtually no PC game allows head-to-head play without everyone owning their own PC and then networking them together". Have you ever played an EA Sports game for the PC? They let you play head-to-head with someone else on the same computer. I play NHL 2001 with my brother-in-law all the time on the same PC. You just need 2 game pads. Or they will even allow you to use the keyboard, but that is not the preferred controller for sports games. I'm not sure how many people you can play head-to-head on the same PC, but I bet it will suport at least 4, if not 6.
You might be thinking how you hook up 4 game pads/joysticks to your computer? Some (if not all) game pads allow you to daisy chain them together and you can hook up a bunch of them to your computer without needing 4 game ports.
Please enlighten us, oh Anonymous Coward as to what the simple answer is. I did some googling and didn't find anything about a release of the Tick cartoon series on DVD.
I would be very interested to see some backing up of your numbers regarding the Ping Of Death patches. From what I remember, the Linux patch was issued in about 4 hours. Actually just looked it up on google from a fairly reliable-looking source (http://flowserv.teco.uni-karlsruhe.de/ping/) which says "Patches are coming out extremely fast - the award did go to the Linux community for getting a patch out within three hours (well, 2 hours 35 minutes 10 seconds if you must know)". So your 8 hour number is completely wrong. Also, from what I remember, the Microsoft patch was issued in more like 4 days. I have no data to back up my claim on Microsoft, but then again either do you.