I went to a place like that once. Looked like I'd fit right in. Everyone was tall, fat, hairy. Everyone was wearing lots of leather. Some seemed to like leather so much that they didn't even want to wear shirts underneath the vests or pants underneath the chaps. Funny thing though - there weren't any women there the entire night and they played a lot more disco than I'm used to hearing.
The next logical step is to just close the space agencies and start worshipping sun-gods. Seriously, we went to the moon in 1969. As of almost 36 years later, we haven't touched won on any other surface again - including the moon.
Thing of all the advances we've made in 36 years. And in 1969, the advances we'd made since 1933. Sure, we've advanced a few other aspects of space and astronomy - but not the most basic of exploratory measures. Man.
I was born after the moon landing. I currently wonder if I will actually live to see man go anywhere else in my life time. And if I do, will it be a one-shot thing that doesn't happen for the rest of my life time? Considering nothing has happened in almost four decades, what cause is there to believe anything will change in the next four? Especially with the direction, management and attitude by, of and regarding the various space agencies?
In retrospect, it's a bit sad that the biggest moment of the generation or two before me was putting a man on the moon while the biggest moment of mine was watching a bunch of civillians blow up on launch a couple decades ago and a bunch of people blow up on re-entry a couple years ago.
No kidding. The first time I was subjected to Cold Play, I thought it was Radio Head. Neither of which are any good (unless you like the whole slow, whiney thing).
There's some other song they beat to death with repetative play this year, but I don't know who it's by. It's this long half-talking thing with some english guy singing about breaking up or something. He's like "and I'm crying".
Man, I remember when music was more than a bunch of pre-packaged whipped pussies trying to find the right combination of lyrics to look sensitive to girls.
I stopped using them as soon as they went from the "free unlimited" service to one where you could only get liek 50 songs per month (and there was no option to replenish your stock of music - you simply had to wait until the next month).
The main reason I never bothered with an extended warranty on that laptop (aside from the fact that I didn't intend to use it for anything other than somethign to work on in bed) is that buying an extended warranty strikes me much the same way the creeps at Best Buy or Circuit City do when they want to sell you an extra year for $200 on top of the two year warranty your purchase already has. It's usually a rip off, and that's the same way I approached the laptop.
Next time, I probably will go for the best warranty option. Especially since I'll likely go with one of the linux-friendly shops mentioned in the other slashdot article this week. God knows I had a painful enough time trying to get Debian to behave well on that Gateway.
And yes, I'll admit that the laptop was mostly just to surf porn without having to be at my desk. Bastards.
The power cord plugs into the very center of the rear of the laptop.
The laptop was sitting on a little box on my bed, in front of me.
Someone came to sit on the end of the bed; when they did, the laptop slid off the (six inch high) box and the weight of the laptop pushing down on the female part of the adapter that plugs into the laptop caused damage to the pin inside. Having not yet located the proper screw driver to remove the case, I have no idea what kind of damage to the pin is involved here.
Really, it seems like a situation that should not have caused the kind of damage involved. The last laptop I used was a Dell and it had a three-prong (rubber) connector that plugged into a large input on the laptop. Short of pouring a bucket of acid over it, there was no way the connectors were going to be damaged in any way.
Gateway has never responded to my contacts. I do, however, continue to get plenty of email spam from them, wanting to sell me the latest greatest laptops. Go figure!
At least with a desktop, you're unlikely to hose the entire system because of one fuck-up. I can blow the whole motherboard and replace it for $100. With a laptop, blowing the motherboard results in a significant problem of replacing it (if you can find a suitable replacement and afford it).
The laptop world is unfamiliar to a lot of us who only build or own equipment and have never ever bothered to buy a pre-built machine of any sort (including a laptop). Parts are a lot more interdependant and unless you can find someone with another broken version of your laptop, it can be hard to find replacement parts that are still appropriate.
The laptop itself is pretty damn nice for the price. The power input was just very poorly designed. Aside from that, I was kind of impressed by it.
I'm constantly open to new material. I just like to be able to tell that material apart. All pop sounds like all other pop these days. And all *cough* "punk" sounds liek all other new punk these days. And there's not really any metal, rock or industrial that is being put out by big labels or big bands these days.
And I'm not just throwing "new fangeled music from them noisey youngsters" into this. I consider, say, REM and U2 in this category of bland sound-alike drek.
The difference seems to be that bigger risks were taken a decade or two ago. Yes, everything was still calculated, but the chance of something that didn't sound just like everything else getting out was possible. Today, Britney does well, so they want someone who is just like her. So they get that Christina chick. She does well, so they want someone who sounds and looks just like her and because she looks and sounds much like Britney, they all start sounding very similar. Same goes for other venues.
Really, can you tell the difference between a 3 Doors Down / Maroon 5 / Simple Plan / Puddle of Mud / POD and so forth? I can't.
And I assert that it's more than an age thing, because the same has happened in movies. I remember that even in the 1990s, there were big blockbusters that most people couldn't wait for every summer. Now, it's all the same thing. Over and over and over. How many summers can you have a spiderman and batman movie before that gets old?
Maybe that will change when hollywood gets some fresh, talented, new blood. A lot of those huge blockbuster movies that we waited for every summer came with the likes of Nicholson, Schwarzenegger, Stalone, DiNero, Pacino. But now one is doing dull old-people movies with naked Kathy Bates (shudder), another is governor of California and the other three are doing comedies!
I didn't need an expensive laptop. I wanted low-end. Unfortuantely, their low-end machines come with little to no warranty. Granted, because I paid for it with my Visa, the warranty is doubled (whoo two months). But it was a matter of "pay a couple hundred dollars to extend the warranty for a year" or... not.
Most problems could be taken care of as most of a laptop is modular and replaceable. Never in my wildest dreams did I fathom that the actual power connector would break.
I much prefer the PowerBook I had a couple years ago (during my brief foray into Mac-dome). Next laptop purchase is surely going to be from a non-brand-name company that has tested and supported their machines with linux.
As for Gateway's normal warranties - I'm not sure what they are but I think they're a full year - but that's with the $1500+ versions. I wasn't going to spend $200 or more on a slightly extended warranty for a laptop that itself was only $200. And the laptop was never intended to leave the house so it's not like it'd be dropped, lost, broken, etc.
Oh well. Really, never getting a Gateway again. Especially after that thread regarding refunding WIndows that produced some good links to linux-friendly laptop sellers.
Yeah, I've never done anything more with laptops than changeout the drives and ram. I'd called two local shops and neither was willing to work on it. *grumble*
I wasn't sure what the adapter was like on the board, so wasn't sure if it was a matter of soldering on a module or not. If I can find the right screw driver this week, I'll pull this puppy apart and see what's up.
I'm definitely not buying laptops with this kind of connector ever again though. What a dumb, clumsy idea.
But that's okay. I'll continue to not buy pre-built computers. Doesn't really matter to me either way. Well, unless I owned AMD stock - which I don't.:)
Speaking of pre-built, I have a Gateway M305 laptop that is in perfect condition except that the male part of the power adapter (the part in the laptop that the adapter plugs into) has been pushed back or broken off or otherwise busted. So I can't plug my adapter in. Has anyone fixed this problem before? Gateway only gave me a 30 day warranty and it's an $800 laptop! I don't want to throw it away just because a 20 cent piece of conductive metal bent or broke. And if it broke, I don't want to take a soldering iron to it unless it's certain that it won't cause the adapter to short out or something next time I plug it in.
If anyone could help, I'd appreciate it. Or if you just want to buy it from me and fix it yourself (it has a hard drive full of porn if you're interested), I'd be glad to consider offering it cheaply (half what I paid for it - it's only been used for a month).
The last time I walked into a store and bought a CD was in 1998.
There just isn't anything on FM radio or in music stores that interests me. I'm a little too old (nearing 30) for new stuff that all sounds bland and alike to me - like Maroon, 3 Doors Down, Simple Plan - UGH! And there aren't a lot of widely distributed and advertised albums from genres I do like such as industrial.
Additionally, I'm not interested in owning a case, liner notes and a CD. I listen to music almost exclusively on my desktop computer, on my laptop and on my portable MP3 player. And in the rare instance that I need to listen to a CD in a car - I could just burn a copy of my own music to disc. But I can't recall the last time I did that, either.
This doesn't mean I don't buy music, though. I admit, I do download a lot of less popular things. Mostly classic rock, classical music and a lot of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s. But I also buy a lot of music. For example, I discovered "Sub Dub Micromachine" by listening to their song "Bullshit". I googled for their website, found a link to purchasing a downloadable copy of their album for $7.99 (in euros - about $10 in USD, I believe) and then added it to my collection.
While I was at the site that handled the online distribution of this band's album, I stumbled upon a band called "Hammerfall". They sounded great from the samples. So I bought two of their albums, too.
That's three full album sales that never would have occurred without the existance of P2P. And while I could probably have found their content for free online, I was happy enough to have discovered something new that my ears appreciated, that I gladly handed over about $34 USD.
The thing is, because these are smaller bands, with smaller followings (and both bands are from Norway, Sweden or Germany) and they aren't part of the big labels, I suspect that their sales are not tabulated by the industry. I could be wrong, but I would suggest that a lot of the lost sales the major RIAA members are claiming (which of course doesn't seem to be legitimate in the first place) are actually legitimate sales being lost to other, rival, smaller labels and direct band sales.
Another thing to consider is that CDs have been the major medium for some time now. So a lot of their former sales surges were probably by people looking to replenish their collection of 8-tracks and cassettes with CDs. Now that they've done so in the last two decades, they don't need to buy any more CDs. If you're a classic rock fan, there's no more classic rock being produced today - so you're not going to be buying any music. Seems logical enough.
But when they introduce yet another medium and CDs start to fail (or CD players become hard to find), they'll see another uptake in purchases by people who haven't bought music in a decade, replenishing their collection yet again.
Unless, of course, they decide that they're tired of paying for the same song five times over their lifespan and just download it.:D
There is a big world outside of the united states and not all countries or societies have the same values and social concerns. For example, if your site showed a naked bressed in some context in America, it would be abhorent, whereas in Australia, it would just be normal.
And do you really want to begin classifying the internet institutionally based on how relatively appropriate it is for children? The beauty of the net is that you create whatever you want however you want and people can deem for themselves what is or is not appropriate for their own consumption.
And I wouldn't take a drink from a suicide girl bartender anymore than I would let a toddler compile my apache install.
Unfortunately, I have flash and did check out the gallery. I was not impressed. I am moving a couple thousand miles away and considered for a moment that a little wicked videogame related artwork would be interested in my walls. After checking out the gallery, I don't think I'm interested. None of it struck me as much more than the stuff you see at the starving-artist booths at a comic book convention (and no, I haven't been to a comic convention in almost two decades - since I was twelve years old).
I like the idea. Just don't like the execution (that I saw so far, at least).
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand why the lack of Counter-Strike: Source, but I'm surprised that there's no Unreal Tournament 2004.
I went to a place like that once. Looked like I'd fit right in. Everyone was tall, fat, hairy. Everyone was wearing lots of leather. Some seemed to like leather so much that they didn't even want to wear shirts underneath the vests or pants underneath the chaps. Funny thing though - there weren't any women there the entire night and they played a lot more disco than I'm used to hearing.
I wanna be a norwegian! What is your immigration policy with regard to obese biker-looking geeks? And more, how easy are your women?
The next logical step is to just close the space agencies and start worshipping sun-gods. Seriously, we went to the moon in 1969. As of almost 36 years later, we haven't touched won on any other surface again - including the moon.
Thing of all the advances we've made in 36 years. And in 1969, the advances we'd made since 1933. Sure, we've advanced a few other aspects of space and astronomy - but not the most basic of exploratory measures. Man.
I was born after the moon landing. I currently wonder if I will actually live to see man go anywhere else in my life time. And if I do, will it be a one-shot thing that doesn't happen for the rest of my life time? Considering nothing has happened in almost four decades, what cause is there to believe anything will change in the next four? Especially with the direction, management and attitude by, of and regarding the various space agencies?
In retrospect, it's a bit sad that the biggest moment of the generation or two before me was putting a man on the moon while the biggest moment of mine was watching a bunch of civillians blow up on launch a couple decades ago and a bunch of people blow up on re-entry a couple years ago.
No kidding. The first time I was subjected to Cold Play, I thought it was Radio Head. Neither of which are any good (unless you like the whole slow, whiney thing).
There's some other song they beat to death with repetative play this year, but I don't know who it's by. It's this long half-talking thing with some english guy singing about breaking up or something. He's like "and I'm crying".
Man, I remember when music was more than a bunch of pre-packaged whipped pussies trying to find the right combination of lyrics to look sensitive to girls.
I stopped using them as soon as they went from the "free unlimited" service to one where you could only get liek 50 songs per month (and there was no option to replenish your stock of music - you simply had to wait until the next month).
They were pretty cool before that, though.
It's just one review. You know you'll spend your 8 bucks anyway.
Not as long as Bit Torrent is still around, I won't.
The main reason I never bothered with an extended warranty on that laptop (aside from the fact that I didn't intend to use it for anything other than somethign to work on in bed) is that buying an extended warranty strikes me much the same way the creeps at Best Buy or Circuit City do when they want to sell you an extra year for $200 on top of the two year warranty your purchase already has. It's usually a rip off, and that's the same way I approached the laptop.
Next time, I probably will go for the best warranty option. Especially since I'll likely go with one of the linux-friendly shops mentioned in the other slashdot article this week. God knows I had a painful enough time trying to get Debian to behave well on that Gateway.
And yes, I'll admit that the laptop was mostly just to surf porn without having to be at my desk. Bastards.
Actually, the way mine broke was this:
The power cord plugs into the very center of the rear of the laptop.
The laptop was sitting on a little box on my bed, in front of me.
Someone came to sit on the end of the bed; when they did, the laptop slid off the (six inch high) box and the weight of the laptop pushing down on the female part of the adapter that plugs into the laptop caused damage to the pin inside. Having not yet located the proper screw driver to remove the case, I have no idea what kind of damage to the pin is involved here.
Really, it seems like a situation that should not have caused the kind of damage involved. The last laptop I used was a Dell and it had a three-prong (rubber) connector that plugged into a large input on the laptop. Short of pouring a bucket of acid over it, there was no way the connectors were going to be damaged in any way.
"HHGTTG:The Movie is going to be bad"...
WOW! Who saw that coming?! *cough*
Gateway has never responded to my contacts. I do, however, continue to get plenty of email spam from them, wanting to sell me the latest greatest laptops. Go figure!
At least with a desktop, you're unlikely to hose the entire system because of one fuck-up. I can blow the whole motherboard and replace it for $100. With a laptop, blowing the motherboard results in a significant problem of replacing it (if you can find a suitable replacement and afford it).
The laptop world is unfamiliar to a lot of us who only build or own equipment and have never ever bothered to buy a pre-built machine of any sort (including a laptop). Parts are a lot more interdependant and unless you can find someone with another broken version of your laptop, it can be hard to find replacement parts that are still appropriate.
The laptop itself is pretty damn nice for the price. The power input was just very poorly designed. Aside from that, I was kind of impressed by it.
I'm constantly open to new material. I just like to be able to tell that material apart. All pop sounds like all other pop these days. And all *cough* "punk" sounds liek all other new punk these days. And there's not really any metal, rock or industrial that is being put out by big labels or big bands these days.
And I'm not just throwing "new fangeled music from them noisey youngsters" into this. I consider, say, REM and U2 in this category of bland sound-alike drek.
The difference seems to be that bigger risks were taken a decade or two ago. Yes, everything was still calculated, but the chance of something that didn't sound just like everything else getting out was possible. Today, Britney does well, so they want someone who is just like her. So they get that Christina chick. She does well, so they want someone who sounds and looks just like her and because she looks and sounds much like Britney, they all start sounding very similar. Same goes for other venues.
Really, can you tell the difference between a 3 Doors Down / Maroon 5 / Simple Plan / Puddle of Mud / POD and so forth? I can't.
And I assert that it's more than an age thing, because the same has happened in movies. I remember that even in the 1990s, there were big blockbusters that most people couldn't wait for every summer. Now, it's all the same thing. Over and over and over. How many summers can you have a spiderman and batman movie before that gets old?
Maybe that will change when hollywood gets some fresh, talented, new blood. A lot of those huge blockbuster movies that we waited for every summer came with the likes of Nicholson, Schwarzenegger, Stalone, DiNero, Pacino. But now one is doing dull old-people movies with naked Kathy Bates (shudder), another is governor of California and the other three are doing comedies!
Of course, if you used your cellphone without talking (just mouthing the words), you'd look stupider than ever.
I didn't need an expensive laptop. I wanted low-end. Unfortuantely, their low-end machines come with little to no warranty. Granted, because I paid for it with my Visa, the warranty is doubled (whoo two months). But it was a matter of "pay a couple hundred dollars to extend the warranty for a year" or ... not.
Most problems could be taken care of as most of a laptop is modular and replaceable. Never in my wildest dreams did I fathom that the actual power connector would break.
I much prefer the PowerBook I had a couple years ago (during my brief foray into Mac-dome). Next laptop purchase is surely going to be from a non-brand-name company that has tested and supported their machines with linux.
As for Gateway's normal warranties - I'm not sure what they are but I think they're a full year - but that's with the $1500+ versions. I wasn't going to spend $200 or more on a slightly extended warranty for a laptop that itself was only $200. And the laptop was never intended to leave the house so it's not like it'd be dropped, lost, broken, etc.
Oh well. Really, never getting a Gateway again. Especially after that thread regarding refunding WIndows that produced some good links to linux-friendly laptop sellers.
Yeah, I've never done anything more with laptops than changeout the drives and ram. I'd called two local shops and neither was willing to work on it. *grumble*
I wasn't sure what the adapter was like on the board, so wasn't sure if it was a matter of soldering on a module or not. If I can find the right screw driver this week, I'll pull this puppy apart and see what's up.
I'm definitely not buying laptops with this kind of connector ever again though. What a dumb, clumsy idea.
"They have fairly good technology".
:)
Talk about an understatement.
But that's okay. I'll continue to not buy pre-built computers. Doesn't really matter to me either way. Well, unless I owned AMD stock - which I don't.
Speaking of pre-built, I have a Gateway M305 laptop that is in perfect condition except that the male part of the power adapter (the part in the laptop that the adapter plugs into) has been pushed back or broken off or otherwise busted. So I can't plug my adapter in. Has anyone fixed this problem before? Gateway only gave me a 30 day warranty and it's an $800 laptop! I don't want to throw it away just because a 20 cent piece of conductive metal bent or broke. And if it broke, I don't want to take a soldering iron to it unless it's certain that it won't cause the adapter to short out or something next time I plug it in.
If anyone could help, I'd appreciate it. Or if you just want to buy it from me and fix it yourself (it has a hard drive full of porn if you're interested), I'd be glad to consider offering it cheaply (half what I paid for it - it's only been used for a month).
I agree, completely.
:D
The last time I walked into a store and bought a CD was in 1998.
There just isn't anything on FM radio or in music stores that interests me. I'm a little too old (nearing 30) for new stuff that all sounds bland and alike to me - like Maroon, 3 Doors Down, Simple Plan - UGH! And there aren't a lot of widely distributed and advertised albums from genres I do like such as industrial.
Additionally, I'm not interested in owning a case, liner notes and a CD. I listen to music almost exclusively on my desktop computer, on my laptop and on my portable MP3 player. And in the rare instance that I need to listen to a CD in a car - I could just burn a copy of my own music to disc. But I can't recall the last time I did that, either.
This doesn't mean I don't buy music, though. I admit, I do download a lot of less popular things. Mostly classic rock, classical music and a lot of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s. But I also buy a lot of music. For example, I discovered "Sub Dub Micromachine" by listening to their song "Bullshit". I googled for their website, found a link to purchasing a downloadable copy of their album for $7.99 (in euros - about $10 in USD, I believe) and then added it to my collection.
While I was at the site that handled the online distribution of this band's album, I stumbled upon a band called "Hammerfall". They sounded great from the samples. So I bought two of their albums, too.
That's three full album sales that never would have occurred without the existance of P2P. And while I could probably have found their content for free online, I was happy enough to have discovered something new that my ears appreciated, that I gladly handed over about $34 USD.
The thing is, because these are smaller bands, with smaller followings (and both bands are from Norway, Sweden or Germany) and they aren't part of the big labels, I suspect that their sales are not tabulated by the industry. I could be wrong, but I would suggest that a lot of the lost sales the major RIAA members are claiming (which of course doesn't seem to be legitimate in the first place) are actually legitimate sales being lost to other, rival, smaller labels and direct band sales.
Another thing to consider is that CDs have been the major medium for some time now. So a lot of their former sales surges were probably by people looking to replenish their collection of 8-tracks and cassettes with CDs. Now that they've done so in the last two decades, they don't need to buy any more CDs. If you're a classic rock fan, there's no more classic rock being produced today - so you're not going to be buying any music. Seems logical enough.
But when they introduce yet another medium and CDs start to fail (or CD players become hard to find), they'll see another uptake in purchases by people who haven't bought music in a decade, replenishing their collection yet again.
Unless, of course, they decide that they're tired of paying for the same song five times over their lifespan and just download it.
Are you insinuating that Linus listens to disco while he codes?
Fortunately, keeping bits will be a much simpler task now that they are standing perpendicular.
Show it to them and then kill them.
There is a big world outside of the united states and not all countries or societies have the same values and social concerns. For example, if your site showed a naked bressed in some context in America, it would be abhorent, whereas in Australia, it would just be normal.
And do you really want to begin classifying the internet institutionally based on how relatively appropriate it is for children? The beauty of the net is that you create whatever you want however you want and people can deem for themselves what is or is not appropriate for their own consumption.
You mean horizontal, right?
It's Gerardo, with an 'R'.
And I wouldn't take a drink from a suicide girl bartender anymore than I would let a toddler compile my apache install.
Unfortunately, I have flash and did check out the gallery. I was not impressed. I am moving a couple thousand miles away and considered for a moment that a little wicked videogame related artwork would be interested in my walls. After checking out the gallery, I don't think I'm interested. None of it struck me as much more than the stuff you see at the starving-artist booths at a comic book convention (and no, I haven't been to a comic convention in almost two decades - since I was twelve years old).
I like the idea. Just don't like the execution (that I saw so far, at least).
Dude, your name is DarkHelmet. This shit was practically made JUST FOR YOU...