I dunno, I got an Antec 900 case for $80 (goes for about $150 on newegg) and a 500gb drive for $65 (goes for about $100 in most reliable online sources) through someone who has an employee discount. That's a pretty sweet deal.
What I wonder is, what happens if you bought an actual computer or other serviceable item from them? (I don't know why you would, but whatever). If you bought a $2000 laptop at CompUSA last week, are you screwed now? Even if you paid the $300 or whatever for the extended warranty BS? Or are those warranties and product services provided through third party contracts?
What's stupid is that I'm told by an employee of CompUSA that they've been working on opening a new store in Colorado this coming week. Only, now instead of having a grand opening, the first day the store opens will also be a liquidation day.
It's kind of amazing how fast they did all this. Management got the news Friday afternoon, via telephone. Within a couple hours, there were a couple of guards on premises to make sure employees did not steel anything. Employees were forbidden from buying anything "at cost" which employees apparently have always been allowed to do. By the end of the night, liquidation guys had arrived from corporate and were going through the process of taking inventory and repricing so they could (presumably) begin actual liquidation sales this weekend.
It's just damn crazy. I've never cared for CompUSA except that since there are no longer any real mom and pop independent computer stores around, your choice is between CompUSA and Fry's. And Fry's isn't available in most places (which is a shock to those of us from the west coast when we visit other parts of the country). Without even a CompUSA around anymore, I don't know where you're going to pick up hardware in person? It was always nice to have a place you could go to as a last resort if you needed to replace a mobo RIGHT NOW.
Remember, educational institutions depend on a perception of sub-par education when it's acquired through any means other than them and their material. Not entirely unlike the RIAA and the DRM infatuation. If it's not learned through their facilities and one of their "trained educators", it can't possibly be real knowledge!
Street renaming isn't the problem. The entire point of having a proper administrative process for applying for, approving and processing a street name change request is that everyone gets to voice their opinion, it's voted on, money is paid to cover the cost of paperwork and signs, people have fair warning to change their signs and business cards and Thomas Guide can update their maps, etc.
When you encounter the confusion and glitches is when the city council shows utter disregard for this process in some needless and (as you pointed out) empty gesture. Maybe if we name enough streets after someone that isn't in recognition of "The White Man", we can just forget about that whole wiping out the indians and enslaving africans and interring asians thing. Right?
I'm all for the advancement of robotics and if that means reaching the general public through consumer devices as a means to an end, then so be it.
However, these "robots" that we keep seeing are entirely pointless and ridiculous. They tend to be at least $300 or $400 and they're nothing more than slightly beefed up versions of the little remote control robot you got under the christmas tree as a little kid that beeped and flashed lights. They do nothing useful, are glitchy and . . . talk about "uncanny valley".
The Pleo seems like something that is briefly amusing, but for $350 I could buy a couple Roombas and they actually perform a useful function other than looking cute.
Are we supposed to be impressed by a goofy looking dino robot, just because it can detect when another pleo is around it and it can sense when someone is petting it versus choking it? How can this even qualify as a "robot"? If you have money to burn and your child is likely to be suckered into the cheap gimmicks that form these types of robots, then I guess go for it. . . . I've seen the pleo in action and if the idea is that you buy one or two of these to substitute for pets, then . . . well - let's just say having a pleo for a pet is like having blow up doll for a girlfriend. Not that I know from personal experience.
Don't forget that we also have more strip clubs per capita than any other city (I think), an abundance of coffee shops, used bookstores, microbreweries, an attorney general that is fighting the RIAA, Reed College (where Steve Jobs attended), FreeGeek.org, Chuck Palahniuk, Bruce Campbell (not far from Portland) and geek pied-piper Rick Emerson. Also, I believe Randall Schwartz (of Perl and Intel persecution fame) lives here.
I'm so damn glad this finally made it to Slashdot! Very cool!
It should be pointed out that the Aaron Duran (the main guy behind the project) is going about this street renaming the proper way. He is raising money for the $1,000 fee, filling out the paper work, seeking support of Douglas Adams' surviving family, seeking comment from local public and businesses. Meanwhile, the Cesar Chavez rename was being ramrodded through by the city council without any of the necessary legal bureaucracy. I can see why some people might not like the idea of renaming a street after Cesar Chavez, but I think the main problem a lot of people had with it is not the idea, but the way it was being pursued.
It should also be noted that should the rename fail, the money donated to the effort will be re-directed to a fund for saving Rhinos (which Adams was a big fan of).
As a native Portlander, I truly hope this succeeds. If any city embraces his mentality and his work, it has to be Portland. Even though some business guy commented in a news article about the difference between renaming a street after "galaxies and space and stuff" and suggesting that Douglas Adams was not a real person. Seriously . . . WTF?
If you're interested in keeping informed, there's also a MySpace page for the effort:
How many signatures did they get on their little petition thing? 50,000? Out of at least 50,000,000 members?
And these are the people who are handing over their email and communications to some web based central entity to begin with?
The fact that almost none of them will delete their facebook accounts and never return over this extremely offensive and inexcusable violation only further proves my point. Anyone who would give a company like this a second chance after this kind of incident is a fool. This is no small violation and regardless of how swiftly the company responded in changing it, it is so egregious that once-is-enough.
If you get your medical information from the same place teenage girls shake their ass to hip hop for attention from older men and guys post videos of themselves running and slamming into fences, you deserve to die from all sorts of horrible preventable diseases.
Adding a delay to Silver members is providing "additional value" to Gold members? How so? As a Gold member, I get games on release day right now. With this change, I *still* get games on release day.
There is no value added to the gold account. The only change in value is some being stripped from the Silver accounts. If he were being honest, he'd have said "This is not mean to annoy users, but to provide INCENTIVE to subscribe to gold accounts".
Additional value would be free downloadable content or discounts on the games for gold members.
People in this country always tout their freedom as the single greatest thing that differentiates them from many other countries. What we filter isn't so much important as the fact that we might filter at all. And if we filter the internet on a corporate or government level, how are we any different from countries like China?
And if ISPs should filter our content, then why shouldn't other service and content providers outside of the internet be responsible for censoring what we consume, say, do as well? Parents can filter what their children consume. I can filter what I can consume. It should stop there.
Like the kind of people that flock to these types of social networks give two shits about privacy. They'd probably give it up for a tootsie roll in-between clicking on the dancing monkey banners.
Today, a garage developer can - at best - hope to create a quirky new style of game that is little more than a trinket game (flow, etc). The only way it'll become truly huge is typically if you then gain the attention of an established game studio.
Back in the day, one single person could literally create, write, develop, manufacture, market and distribute a game that was as popular and top of the line as any other game out there.
If it's fun, it's a game. Otherwise, it's a simulation.
Both serve their purposes and I don't much see the point of merging the two, unless you are looking to use a massive population of real time "players" (which you would entice to participate in a FUN GAME) so that you can gather data and interact with an overall larger-scoped SIMULATION.
Now, if they somehow tied everything to a breast-based set of incentives, they would probably increase the acceptance factor and have a large enough population for their system. There's a reason Night Elfs look like a branchless douglass fir with a pair of enormous christmas ornaments at the top.
Unfortunately, the day of the garage game developer are over. With very rare exception (and those exceptions typically being limited to your tetris-y newcomer twist on genres), games require large budgets and sizable, dedicated teams. Sure, you can use open-source or cheaply licensed tools to create a game in your spare time over five or ten years, but if you want to create something people might actually play, you're looking at a heavy investment. Perhaps tens of thousands for a high quality engine and then tens of thousands more if you want to develop for a console (just for the dev hardware).
People say "you don't need a $50million budget to make a good game" and that's true, just like you don't need $250million to make a good movie. But in an area of such large economy, a "cheap" game (like a "cheap" movie) is still beyond the reach of almost everyone. There's a reason people used to start very successful game companies in their garges on a shoestring budget, but today have little option other than a four year education followed by shopping themselves around to billion dollar grunt-works.
BioShock was an enjoyable game, but what in the hell are they smoking?! I've already beat the game. Do they really think I'm going to return to play it again just because they add a few things to the game that perhaps could or should have been added in the first place, so I could have enjoyed them the first time around?
New content (actual story, etc) is one thing. Sticking in some random crap is irrelevant. There are too many awesome games out there to play and only so much time in which to do it.
On one hand, I'm not sure what the big deal is. Are people not supposed to discuss wiki-related things anywhere but in a wiki "discussions" page or something? As long as the reasons for the final decision are documented publicly as is fair for every other person, then what is the big deal?
On the other hand, I remember a popular sub-culture oriented usenet group about a decade ago that had what one might term a "secret cabal". They discussed the goings-on of the channel in a separate secret mailing list that only "the cool kids" were in on. While this might seem innocent enough, it became a problem in that it allowed the formation of lynch-mobs against individual users that were often unjustified, but against which one could rarely ever reasonably defend themselves. It created a separate class of participants above and beyond everyone else, fostered a constant atmosphere of distrust and eventually lead to a number of people both in and out of the "cabaal" leaving everything altogether out of disgust.
And, of course, those within who remained within smarmily regarded the whole issue with "there is no secret cabaal, so shut the fuck up!" style comments kind of like Big Brother standing in the corner of your bedroom, ominously, while telling you "I'm not here" the whole time.
And that is why it is just a generally good idea to do things out in the open. You might discuss in private or via a side-channel what leads up to an official push or request for action, discussion or consideration but you must use care to avoid the impression of unfair wrangling tactics. Otherwise, you're just ganging up on someone without giving them the advantage of knowing it's coming and being able to fairly engage in this discussion.
The music industry doesn't want you to have digital music. Period. But if they have to relent, they'd rather give you content that they can make "go bad" every ten years, so you have to re-purchase it. Otherwise they feel they are losing out on the record to 8-track, 8-track to cassette, cassette to CD, CD to digital money.
How is the music industry supposed to survive if they can't rely on every person buying the same music six or seven times over the period of their life?
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I got an Antec 900 case for $80 (goes for about $150 on newegg) and a 500gb drive for $65 (goes for about $100 in most reliable online sources) through someone who has an employee discount. That's a pretty sweet deal.
What I wonder is, what happens if you bought an actual computer or other serviceable item from them? (I don't know why you would, but whatever). If you bought a $2000 laptop at CompUSA last week, are you screwed now? Even if you paid the $300 or whatever for the extended warranty BS? Or are those warranties and product services provided through third party contracts?
What's stupid is that I'm told by an employee of CompUSA that they've been working on opening a new store in Colorado this coming week. Only, now instead of having a grand opening, the first day the store opens will also be a liquidation day.
It's kind of amazing how fast they did all this. Management got the news Friday afternoon, via telephone. Within a couple hours, there were a couple of guards on premises to make sure employees did not steel anything. Employees were forbidden from buying anything "at cost" which employees apparently have always been allowed to do. By the end of the night, liquidation guys had arrived from corporate and were going through the process of taking inventory and repricing so they could (presumably) begin actual liquidation sales this weekend.
It's just damn crazy. I've never cared for CompUSA except that since there are no longer any real mom and pop independent computer stores around, your choice is between CompUSA and Fry's. And Fry's isn't available in most places (which is a shock to those of us from the west coast when we visit other parts of the country). Without even a CompUSA around anymore, I don't know where you're going to pick up hardware in person? It was always nice to have a place you could go to as a last resort if you needed to replace a mobo RIGHT NOW.
Remember, educational institutions depend on a perception of sub-par education when it's acquired through any means other than them and their material. Not entirely unlike the RIAA and the DRM infatuation. If it's not learned through their facilities and one of their "trained educators", it can't possibly be real knowledge!
Street renaming isn't the problem. The entire point of having a proper administrative process for applying for, approving and processing a street name change request is that everyone gets to voice their opinion, it's voted on, money is paid to cover the cost of paperwork and signs, people have fair warning to change their signs and business cards and Thomas Guide can update their maps, etc.
When you encounter the confusion and glitches is when the city council shows utter disregard for this process in some needless and (as you pointed out) empty gesture. Maybe if we name enough streets after someone that isn't in recognition of "The White Man", we can just forget about that whole wiping out the indians and enslaving africans and interring asians thing. Right?
One of his middle names?!
Jesus, how many names does the kid have?!
Portland is also fairly unfriendly to the small business person.
But we do have perhaps the best public transit and light rail system in the country. I've found nothing like it elsewhere.
I'm all for the advancement of robotics and if that means reaching the general public through consumer devices as a means to an end, then so be it.
However, these "robots" that we keep seeing are entirely pointless and ridiculous. They tend to be at least $300 or $400 and they're nothing more than slightly beefed up versions of the little remote control robot you got under the christmas tree as a little kid that beeped and flashed lights. They do nothing useful, are glitchy and . . . talk about "uncanny valley".
The Pleo seems like something that is briefly amusing, but for $350 I could buy a couple Roombas and they actually perform a useful function other than looking cute.
Are we supposed to be impressed by a goofy looking dino robot, just because it can detect when another pleo is around it and it can sense when someone is petting it versus choking it? How can this even qualify as a "robot"? If you have money to burn and your child is likely to be suckered into the cheap gimmicks that form these types of robots, then I guess go for it. . . . I've seen the pleo in action and if the idea is that you buy one or two of these to substitute for pets, then . . . well - let's just say having a pleo for a pet is like having blow up doll for a girlfriend. Not that I know from personal experience.
Don't forget that we also have more strip clubs per capita than any other city (I think), an abundance of coffee shops, used bookstores, microbreweries, an attorney general that is fighting the RIAA, Reed College (where Steve Jobs attended), FreeGeek.org, Chuck Palahniuk, Bruce Campbell (not far from Portland) and geek pied-piper Rick Emerson. Also, I believe Randall Schwartz (of Perl and Intel persecution fame) lives here.
I'm so damn glad this finally made it to Slashdot! Very cool!
It should be pointed out that the Aaron Duran (the main guy behind the project) is going about this street renaming the proper way. He is raising money for the $1,000 fee, filling out the paper work, seeking support of Douglas Adams' surviving family, seeking comment from local public and businesses. Meanwhile, the Cesar Chavez rename was being ramrodded through by the city council without any of the necessary legal bureaucracy. I can see why some people might not like the idea of renaming a street after Cesar Chavez, but I think the main problem a lot of people had with it is not the idea, but the way it was being pursued.
It should also be noted that should the rename fail, the money donated to the effort will be re-directed to a fund for saving Rhinos (which Adams was a big fan of).
As a native Portlander, I truly hope this succeeds. If any city embraces his mentality and his work, it has to be Portland. Even though some business guy commented in a news article about the difference between renaming a street after "galaxies and space and stuff" and suggesting that Douglas Adams was not a real person. Seriously . . . WTF?
If you're interested in keeping informed, there's also a MySpace page for the effort:
http://www.myspace.com/rename42nd
But they *don't* care about it.
How many signatures did they get on their little petition thing? 50,000? Out of at least 50,000,000 members?
And these are the people who are handing over their email and communications to some web based central entity to begin with?
The fact that almost none of them will delete their facebook accounts and never return over this extremely offensive and inexcusable violation only further proves my point. Anyone who would give a company like this a second chance after this kind of incident is a fool. This is no small violation and regardless of how swiftly the company responded in changing it, it is so egregious that once-is-enough.
If you get your medical information from the same place teenage girls shake their ass to hip hop for attention from older men and guys post videos of themselves running and slamming into fences, you deserve to die from all sorts of horrible preventable diseases.
Major Nelson is full of shit.
Adding a delay to Silver members is providing "additional value" to Gold members? How so? As a Gold member, I get games on release day right now. With this change, I *still* get games on release day.
There is no value added to the gold account. The only change in value is some being stripped from the Silver accounts. If he were being honest, he'd have said "This is not mean to annoy users, but to provide INCENTIVE to subscribe to gold accounts".
Additional value would be free downloadable content or discounts on the games for gold members.
People in this country always tout their freedom as the single greatest thing that differentiates them from many other countries. What we filter isn't so much important as the fact that we might filter at all. And if we filter the internet on a corporate or government level, how are we any different from countries like China?
And if ISPs should filter our content, then why shouldn't other service and content providers outside of the internet be responsible for censoring what we consume, say, do as well? Parents can filter what their children consume. I can filter what I can consume. It should stop there.
Like the kind of people that flock to these types of social networks give two shits about privacy. They'd probably give it up for a tootsie roll in-between clicking on the dancing monkey banners.
Today, a garage developer can - at best - hope to create a quirky new style of game that is little more than a trinket game (flow, etc). The only way it'll become truly huge is typically if you then gain the attention of an established game studio.
Back in the day, one single person could literally create, write, develop, manufacture, market and distribute a game that was as popular and top of the line as any other game out there.
If it's fun, it's a game.
Otherwise, it's a simulation.
Both serve their purposes and I don't much see the point of merging the two, unless you are looking to use a massive population of real time "players" (which you would entice to participate in a FUN GAME) so that you can gather data and interact with an overall larger-scoped SIMULATION.
Now, if they somehow tied everything to a breast-based set of incentives, they would probably increase the acceptance factor and have a large enough population for their system. There's a reason Night Elfs look like a branchless douglass fir with a pair of enormous christmas ornaments at the top.
Unfortunately, the day of the garage game developer are over. With very rare exception (and those exceptions typically being limited to your tetris-y newcomer twist on genres), games require large budgets and sizable, dedicated teams. Sure, you can use open-source or cheaply licensed tools to create a game in your spare time over five or ten years, but if you want to create something people might actually play, you're looking at a heavy investment. Perhaps tens of thousands for a high quality engine and then tens of thousands more if you want to develop for a console (just for the dev hardware).
People say "you don't need a $50million budget to make a good game" and that's true, just like you don't need $250million to make a good movie. But in an area of such large economy, a "cheap" game (like a "cheap" movie) is still beyond the reach of almost everyone. There's a reason people used to start very successful game companies in their garges on a shoestring budget, but today have little option other than a four year education followed by shopping themselves around to billion dollar grunt-works.
BioShock was an enjoyable game, but what in the hell are they smoking?! I've already beat the game. Do they really think I'm going to return to play it again just because they add a few things to the game that perhaps could or should have been added in the first place, so I could have enjoyed them the first time around?
New content (actual story, etc) is one thing. Sticking in some random crap is irrelevant. There are too many awesome games out there to play and only so much time in which to do it.
Verizon Embraces Google's Android
Too bad androids are only able to return the gesture of affection with a cold, dead indifference.
On one hand, I'm not sure what the big deal is. Are people not supposed to discuss wiki-related things anywhere but in a wiki "discussions" page or something? As long as the reasons for the final decision are documented publicly as is fair for every other person, then what is the big deal?
On the other hand, I remember a popular sub-culture oriented usenet group about a decade ago that had what one might term a "secret cabal". They discussed the goings-on of the channel in a separate secret mailing list that only "the cool kids" were in on. While this might seem innocent enough, it became a problem in that it allowed the formation of lynch-mobs against individual users that were often unjustified, but against which one could rarely ever reasonably defend themselves. It created a separate class of participants above and beyond everyone else, fostered a constant atmosphere of distrust and eventually lead to a number of people both in and out of the "cabaal" leaving everything altogether out of disgust.
And, of course, those within who remained within smarmily regarded the whole issue with "there is no secret cabaal, so shut the fuck up!" style comments kind of like Big Brother standing in the corner of your bedroom, ominously, while telling you "I'm not here" the whole time.
And that is why it is just a generally good idea to do things out in the open. You might discuss in private or via a side-channel what leads up to an official push or request for action, discussion or consideration but you must use care to avoid the impression of unfair wrangling tactics. Otherwise, you're just ganging up on someone without giving them the advantage of knowing it's coming and being able to fairly engage in this discussion.
The article said the guy was being critical. Critique is not the same as libel or slander at all.
The music industry doesn't want you to have digital music. Period. But if they have to relent, they'd rather give you content that they can make "go bad" every ten years, so you have to re-purchase it. Otherwise they feel they are losing out on the record to 8-track, 8-track to cassette, cassette to CD, CD to digital money.
How is the music industry supposed to survive if they can't rely on every person buying the same music six or seven times over the period of their life?
The only difference between Slashdot and, say, Digg is that when your view doesn't agree with the masses on Slashdot, you go to -1 instead of -842.
Heh.