They rebranded it from "Radio Shack" to "The Source" in Canada years and years ago. But everyone I know still refers to it as "Radio Shack". I can't even remember the name "The Source" well enough to tell someone how to find the place... I had to check online before I made this post.
Wasn't "The Source" another name for the Devil on that old show Charmed?
Hmm. Maybe the whole "Rat Shack" thing is the reason they're changing their name.... Won't work, though. We'll always jokingly refer to it as the Rat Shack.:-)
Dumb name or not, as long as they continue to sell component parts and soldering gun tips, I'll keep going there. They tend to carry the parts that Fry's doesn't and vice versa. If they drop that, I probably won't set foot in one ever again; they quite literally have nothing else of interest to me or anyone I know.
Rat Shack? There's no T in radio. It was the Rad Shack, the totally tublular place we all hung out at during the 80's.
Which is odd, considering the cartel that they formed. It should be trivial for them to come to an agreement.
Getting diffrent departments in the same business to work together is hard enough. Getting different members of a cartel to work togther is next to impossible.
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility.
Take the Linux of, say, 2000 and compare it to Windows 2000. The former was free. The latter was more popular. Yes, because it was bundled and people were duped into thinking Windows is the be-all end-all, but there's more to it. I know a few people who tried Linux and found it complicated, they switched back to Windows. It might be different today (Ubuntu is in some areas way more convenient than Windows), but with the half-assed installers of early days, a lot of manual configuration (with command line!) and stuff that doesn't "just work", people dropped free for convenient.
The same can work for content. To beat free, you have to be easier to use and more convenient than free. Apple and iTunes went that way, and with some success. It's easy and hassle free to buy in that store, it's well organized and it offers what people want, with reliable quality. Compared to the free alternative, it's more convenient (no need to configure anything in your firewall, no need to find trackers or peers...), it's better organized (no need to ponder how it might have been named, no sifting through "insider" taggings) and more reliable in the quality of your product (you get that song. Not a (deliberately or accidently) mislabeled one, not in some shoddy, useless quality).
The only way to compete with 'free' is to offer more. People are willing to pay for convenience. The problem is that they get less with the current system of crippling DRM. The free stuff is, well, first of all free AND also more convenient to use because it does work on every player, any time you want, and without that sword of damocles hanging over your head, i.e. that the organisation offering it might close the shop and you're sitting there with data junk.
Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
Amazon has been DRM free for a while now.
Find another arguement.
The Bush administration was not, to my knowledge, grabbing Americans off the street and "disappearing" them. Was this in fact the case, outside this guy's fevered dreams?
Does it make you feel better that he has disappearing and torturing people in other countries instead?
That's becuase it's fairly old.
It's only in the past 5 yeats or so that they've really mangled english speaking anime in the attempt to get it across the pond quicker.
You could probably bring a lawsuit, and Amazon could say, okay, here's a paperback copy of 1984, enjoy.
Your forgetting all the pain and suffering money.
I lost my copy of 1984 and therefore didn't finish my book report. Now I'll never get into medical school.
I demmand the 10 millions dollars I would have made if I had found a cure for cancer.
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
That's interesting. I think just yesterday I said exactly the opposite.
Everyone I know who's furiously pusued the American married-with-2-kids nuclear family ideal is miserable. Everyone I know who has some alternative-y lifestyle (without marriage, kids, lucrative job, white picket fence, or some combination) seems a lot happier.
In reality everyone is miserable.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid I can't understand your analogy. Perhaps if it were in terms of a car design failure...
There's a good one, but that would lead to a discussion of presidential politics:)
The Manhattan Project wasn't kept secret. One of the personnel working on it sold the information to the Russians. The project was compromised before we dropped the first bomb.
and we were all so happy about that during the cold war.
Well, I'm off to plunder the depths of the internet in hopes of learning more about ant colony differentiation. Adieu!
I'm back. Whew! Plundering the depths of the internet is exhausting.
I didn't manage to learn much about ant colony differentiation, but I did learn that:
1. A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once - just before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring (Wow!).
2. The study of ants is called Myrmecology.
3. In heraldry the two-tailed mermaid is shown full face with the ends of her tails held in each hand. Both single-tailed and double-tailed varieties symbolize eloquence. If she has her comb and mirror with her then it means vanity.
4. You can buy cheap bathroom vanities from some site called vanities.pronto.com.
5. If you mispell "pronto" while googling with safesearch turned off, the results are um... interesting.
6. Adult chat tends to focus on certain subjects. And "LilMissHotty69" is actually a guy from Peoria, IL named Bob who is into fishing and fixing up GTOs. Who knew?
Maybe plundering the depths of the internet is not the best way to learn about an esoteric subject when hopped up on caffeine.
"With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering."
Good thing I don't need to kill animals for food then, imagaine how much damage that would do to the psyche as opposed to the detatchment we get from buying meat vaccuum sealed at the supermarket.
It's not that long ago in terms of human history that death was far more familiar to everyone, we killed for food, people were born and died at home, wars broke out far more frequently and we most likely on your doorstep, life in general was far more girtty and voilent on a daily basis.
Oddly enough the average 'man in the street' didn't turn into a serial killer through simple exposure to all this banal violence. Maybe that was the difference, the banality of it all. Why do we believe the exposure to fantasy violence will be so damaging when exposure to real violence typically wasn't?
There are still people in our communities who are exposed to massive violence on a daily basis - slaughtermen, emergency services personnel, etc... Do they have a higher than average likelihood to commit violent crimes?
There are times I think this is all a beat up for someones honours thesis.
While video game violence is debatable exposure to real violence does have dramtic consequences on some people.
You never heard of post traumatic stress disorder?
You obviously have no idea what a kernel is, or what it does.
Your all missing the point.
The question was why did we have one version of Windows 95 and several versions of Vista. The answer is they made a seperate OS (Windows NT) to sell to businesses instead of making a business version of 95.
It's probably related to the fact that you could pick up Windows 95 for about 90 bucks. There was no 'home', or 'home premium', or whatever. There was just a full version for 90 bucks. To get the 'full' version of the newest flavor of Windows 7, we must shell out almost 4 times the cost. This in just a little over 10 years. It's a bit ridiculous when you look at the rate of inflation. The product offers new features, but so do many software products on the market, yet they tend to retain the same costs.
If I'm paying so much more for an OS, I expect much more value.
The full version of Windows 95 was Windows NT and it wasn't cheap.
Gee, wonder why Guild Wars PvP characters start at level 20 (the max).
Nope, I got bored with that game long ago so I seldom think about it. Besides why stop there. You still have to grind for your abilities in Guild Wars....and if you want the cool weapons you need to make a real character, then level, and then grind the dungeons. Why don't we just start everyone with all the abilites and all the equipment?
If you could teleport anywhere within a game at any time instantly, the best places, best quests, and so forth would all be overcrowded. It's like if you could teleport anywhere instantly in real life. The California coast would be heaving every weekend and evening and numerous "hotspots" would be crowded with tens of thousands of people 24/7. Popular areas in existing games have demonstrated this, since they're usually the easiest places to get to. A key example is outside the bank in Ultima Online's Britain.
Brit's bank was neccessary given the lack of a real auction house.
Slashdot Mirror
They rebranded it from "Radio Shack" to "The Source" in Canada years and years ago. But everyone I know still refers to it as "Radio Shack". I can't even remember the name "The Source" well enough to tell someone how to find the place... I had to check online before I made this post.
Wasn't "The Source" another name for the Devil on that old show Charmed?
Is it proper English to use "google" intransitively?
NO!
If they really did that, it was years after they intimidated Auto Shack to rename itself Auto Zone.
At least Rat Shack doesn't abuse design patents to try to stifle competition.
Hmm. Maybe the whole "Rat Shack" thing is the reason they're changing their name.... Won't work, though. We'll always jokingly refer to it as the Rat Shack. :-)
Dumb name or not, as long as they continue to sell component parts and soldering gun tips, I'll keep going there. They tend to carry the parts that Fry's doesn't and vice versa. If they drop that, I probably won't set foot in one ever again; they quite literally have nothing else of interest to me or anyone I know.
Rat Shack? There's no T in radio. It was the Rad Shack, the totally tublular place we all hung out at during the 80's.
To be fair, though: Word isn't a good text processor. And no, neither is OpenOffice Writer.
Then what is?
They should make Duke Nukem (in DNF) a black, homosexual, vegetarian, female eskimo, right?
They tried....which is why the project was shut down.
I always knew MS Office would have somthing to do with it.
Bloody Neutral.
What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
If I don't survive tell my wife I said....hi.
Which is odd, considering the cartel that they formed. It should be trivial for them to come to an agreement.
Getting diffrent departments in the same business to work together is hard enough. Getting different members of a cartel to work togther is next to impossible.
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility.
Take the Linux of, say, 2000 and compare it to Windows 2000. The former was free. The latter was more popular. Yes, because it was bundled and people were duped into thinking Windows is the be-all end-all, but there's more to it. I know a few people who tried Linux and found it complicated, they switched back to Windows. It might be different today (Ubuntu is in some areas way more convenient than Windows), but with the half-assed installers of early days, a lot of manual configuration (with command line!) and stuff that doesn't "just work", people dropped free for convenient.
The same can work for content. To beat free, you have to be easier to use and more convenient than free. Apple and iTunes went that way, and with some success. It's easy and hassle free to buy in that store, it's well organized and it offers what people want, with reliable quality. Compared to the free alternative, it's more convenient (no need to configure anything in your firewall, no need to find trackers or peers...), it's better organized (no need to ponder how it might have been named, no sifting through "insider" taggings) and more reliable in the quality of your product (you get that song. Not a (deliberately or accidently) mislabeled one, not in some shoddy, useless quality).
The only way to compete with 'free' is to offer more. People are willing to pay for convenience. The problem is that they get less with the current system of crippling DRM. The free stuff is, well, first of all free AND also more convenient to use because it does work on every player, any time you want, and without that sword of damocles hanging over your head, i.e. that the organisation offering it might close the shop and you're sitting there with data junk.
Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
Amazon has been DRM free for a while now.
Find another arguement.
The Bush administration was not, to my knowledge, grabbing Americans off the street and "disappearing" them. Was this in fact the case, outside this guy's fevered dreams?
Does it make you feel better that he has disappearing and torturing people in other countries instead?
Cowboy Bebop was much better in English.
That's becuase it's fairly old. It's only in the past 5 yeats or so that they've really mangled english speaking anime in the attempt to get it across the pond quicker.
Watch some anime; you'll get used to it.
NO I demmand the original japanese cast with subtitles!
You could probably bring a lawsuit, and Amazon could say, okay, here's a paperback copy of 1984, enjoy.
Your forgetting all the pain and suffering money.
I lost my copy of 1984 and therefore didn't finish my book report. Now I'll never get into medical school.
I demmand the 10 millions dollars I would have made if I had found a cure for cancer.
Error $DEITY undefined.
I'm atheist you insensitive clod.
I thought atheists defined $DEITY as localhost.
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
That's interesting. I think just yesterday I said exactly the opposite.
Everyone I know who's furiously pusued the American married-with-2-kids nuclear family ideal is miserable. Everyone I know who has some alternative-y lifestyle (without marriage, kids, lucrative job, white picket fence, or some combination) seems a lot happier.
In reality everyone is miserable.
I'm afraid I can't understand your analogy. Perhaps if it were in terms of a car design failure...
There's a good one, but that would lead to a discussion of presidential politics :)
Change! Hope!
The Manhattan Project wasn't kept secret. One of the personnel working on it sold the information to the Russians. The project was compromised before we dropped the first bomb.
and we were all so happy about that during the cold war.
No magical pixie dust will make it smaller.
To be fair no one has actually tried using magical fairy dust to make their data smaller.
I'm back. Whew! Plundering the depths of the internet is exhausting. I didn't manage to learn much about ant colony differentiation, but I did learn that: 1. A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once - just before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring (Wow!). 2. The study of ants is called Myrmecology. 3. In heraldry the two-tailed mermaid is shown full face with the ends of her tails held in each hand. Both single-tailed and double-tailed varieties symbolize eloquence. If she has her comb and mirror with her then it means vanity. 4. You can buy cheap bathroom vanities from some site called vanities.pronto.com. 5. If you mispell "pronto" while googling with safesearch turned off, the results are um... interesting. 6. Adult chat tends to focus on certain subjects. And "LilMissHotty69" is actually a guy from Peoria, IL named Bob who is into fishing and fixing up GTOs. Who knew? Maybe plundering the depths of the internet is not the best way to learn about an esoteric subject when hopped up on caffeine.
Stop SHILLING for Bing.com
"With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering."
Good thing I don't need to kill animals for food then, imagaine how much damage that would do to the psyche as opposed to the detatchment we get from buying meat vaccuum sealed at the supermarket.
It's not that long ago in terms of human history that death was far more familiar to everyone, we killed for food, people were born and died at home, wars broke out far more frequently and we most likely on your doorstep, life in general was far more girtty and voilent on a daily basis.
Oddly enough the average 'man in the street' didn't turn into a serial killer through simple exposure to all this banal violence. Maybe that was the difference, the banality of it all. Why do we believe the exposure to fantasy violence will be so damaging when exposure to real violence typically wasn't?
There are still people in our communities who are exposed to massive violence on a daily basis - slaughtermen, emergency services personnel, etc... Do they have a higher than average likelihood to commit violent crimes?
There are times I think this is all a beat up for someones honours thesis.
While video game violence is debatable exposure to real violence does have dramtic consequences on some people.
You never heard of post traumatic stress disorder?
You obviously have no idea what a kernel is, or what it does.
Your all missing the point.
The question was why did we have one version of Windows 95 and several versions of Vista. The answer is they made a seperate OS (Windows NT) to sell to businesses instead of making a business version of 95.
No, the full version of Win95 was Win95. WinNT was an entirely different monster - it just looked kind of the same.
It was the business version that had domain support. Just like the more expensive versions of Vista are.
It's probably related to the fact that you could pick up Windows 95 for about 90 bucks. There was no 'home', or 'home premium', or whatever. There was just a full version for 90 bucks. To get the 'full' version of the newest flavor of Windows 7, we must shell out almost 4 times the cost. This in just a little over 10 years. It's a bit ridiculous when you look at the rate of inflation. The product offers new features, but so do many software products on the market, yet they tend to retain the same costs. If I'm paying so much more for an OS, I expect much more value.
The full version of Windows 95 was Windows NT and it wasn't cheap.
Gee, wonder why Guild Wars PvP characters start at level 20 (the max).
Nope, I got bored with that game long ago so I seldom think about it. Besides why stop there. You still have to grind for your abilities in Guild Wars....and if you want the cool weapons you need to make a real character, then level, and then grind the dungeons. Why don't we just start everyone with all the abilites and all the equipment?
If you could teleport anywhere within a game at any time instantly, the best places, best quests, and so forth would all be overcrowded. It's like if you could teleport anywhere instantly in real life. The California coast would be heaving every weekend and evening and numerous "hotspots" would be crowded with tens of thousands of people 24/7. Popular areas in existing games have demonstrated this, since they're usually the easiest places to get to. A key example is outside the bank in Ultima Online's Britain.
Brit's bank was neccessary given the lack of a real auction house.