I find that gaming is like music. After I grew up, got married, and had kids, new my tastes stagnated.
I haven't bought (or "acquired") any new music in many many years because I'm just not interested in it anymore. I have a library that I like, and the new stuff just doesn't interest me.
I have a library of fun old games that I like to play now and then (Civ II, Tie Fighter, Diablo, etc), and the new stuff just doesn't interest me.
Add to that the fact that most games require a huge time investment. I just don't have several hours at a time to set aside for a gaming session.
To be honest, the game that I play the most often is bsdgames hangman.
That's exactly what I did. I picked up a Dell C400 with a P3 1Ghz on ebay for $200. I've since doubled the RAM to 512 MB, and a miniPCI Intel 2915 and this thing runs great. Its about 3.5 pounds with a 12" screen and a usable keyboard. Why pay more?
When I was I kids, we would stage gigantic crashes with our bicycles. We were playing CHiPs. Remember how that show always started with a huge pile up on the California freeways...
I run a very small computer repair/sales shop out of my house. I see a lot of customers who are still running win98 and a few with ME. With support ending, I decided to see if Xubuntu Dapper would be a good option for these low spec boxes. So I threw together a spare parts box with about a 600 MHz CPU, 128 MB, and a 2.5 GB HD.
Then I did a test install and played around with it for a while, trying to imagine it from the perspective of a customer. It was quite serviceable, and I especially liked the security update notification in the taskbar. Its something that is vital for linux on the desktop.
There were useful apps for every normal usage, a word processor, spreadsheet, instant messenger, internet browser. Gnumeric is a great spreadsheet, and Abiword is a passable Word Processor. I definately understand why OpenOffice is not part of the base install. The computer response time was reasonable.
The thing that really turned me off was how ugly everything looked. All those flat greys just reminded me of the motif days. Ughh. Maybe its because I'm a KDE user and I really like the nice bright icons, but this looked terrible drab.
Perhaps there are nicer themes out there for XFCE, but I didn't go looking for them since I was really looking at the default install.
A friend of mine who is a tech/computer teacher at our local high school has kids doing lots of stuff in Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/). Its a nifty little open source visual programming environment. And he's getting pretty good results with it.
I run a very small computer service company, and most of my clients are home users. I've seen a few folks that had disconnected their internet connection for a few months before bringing their computer in to me. And if their kids didn't whine so much, some of them would probably bother at all.
I've commiserated with many clients over the fact that its not getting any easier. Its the people that I don't see at all that have decided that it just isn't worth it anymore.
The seem to have forgotten a PC game from back in '95 or so. It was Yoda stories. It was a desktop adventure game that never really caught on. They made an Indiana Jones game that was nearly identical.
I'll go on record to say that for Mom and Pop shops, XP costs $120 CDN, that about $93 US. We can buy a three pack for $354. I wouldn't be surprised if Dell and Compaq/HP pay MUCH less than the $70 stated in the article.
It is a major part with trying to compete with the big boys.
You must have bought a while ago, for a 5 bed room house. The current cost in the states is a minimum $100K for a 5 bedroom house, at least near any decent sized city.
I bought three years ago. However, it is nowhere near any decent sized city. It is in a pathetic little town with a population around 1400. We're about an hour away from the wee little city of Moncton, and a little under two hours from the larger city of Halifax. We do have high speed internet though since the provincial cable-tv baron lives down the road.
Last year someone bought the house across the street for $80,000 and its bigger and nicer than mine (I paid $85,000).
My mortgage payment is about $290 CDN every 2 weeks. This is for a 5 bedroom house, and I put 25% down. Lots of graphics cards cost WAY more than this. Maybe the author lives in a place where real estate is NOT insane.
Some chip makers went green, and it killed their reliability a few years later. Hence a zillion useless Fujitsu hard drives.
I hope they have done huge testing, or else landfills will be clogged with a lot more computer parts.
Of course, given my experience VIA stuff doesn't last that well anyway. When I'm working on a flakey computer with a dying MB, I usually see a VIA chipset on it.
I moved to Oxford, NS, Canada around the same time and bought a 5 bedroom house, 3000 sqft with 80 year old oak woodworking + garage for $85K Canadian. Its a shame there are no IT jobs here....
I see lots of posts here from people saying "Just upgrade to IE6.1. The problem is that there are lots of people out there that can't or won't.
(1) There folks still running Win95 that are stuck. They've got an old Pentium 166, and have no legitimate way to upgrade to Win98. Have you see upgrade copies available in the last couple of years? Sure they can find a copy on ebay, but lots of these folks would never think of that.
(2) There are folks with Dial-up who didn't want to tie up their phone lines downloading the beast. These folks should definately do it now, but they haven't had a really compelling reason.
(3) They may not know how. "Windows Update, what's that?"
I do lots of work for clueless users, and trust me, their are PLENTY of IE5 boxes out there.
As a very small system builder, I agree. I've been making mostly Celeron systems lately for my low end boxes (which is mostly all of them). There are two reasons for this:
(1) Heatsink design. The Intel retail heatsink is foolproof, quick, and hassle free. My time is money.
(2) Stable value motherboards. I generally will build a value system on a SiS651 based board. In my experience, these things are completely rock solid, and MUCH cheaper than any Nforce2 based boards that I can get from my distributer. I had some bad experiences with VIA based all-in-one boards a little over a year ago, and am still somewhat leery of them.
Of course, if someone mentions gaming at all, I immediately steer them to what I call a mid range system which is AMD+NForce.
But if someone is just going to surf the web and do a little word processing, then I would still recommend Celerons. They end up cheaper with better motherboards.
I wish my distributer stocked Durons, then I could use a much cheaper CPU, and get a good Nvidia-based motherboard for around the same.
Yes, but there are tons of first gen pentiums out there.
I run a very small computer service company. The majority of machines that I see have less than a 200 Mhz (the most common seems to be P120) processor and often less than 64 MB of RAM. They are owned by people who want to surf the web, read their email, and play solitaire. Mozilla does not run very well on their machines.
Sure they could plunk down another $1000 CDN for a new machine, but there is no need. These folks are working the lines at the local frozen foods plant, or are retired on a fixed income. That is a lot of money for them.
I wish I could point some of these folks to mozilla to help with their browsing, but I can't recommend it because of the system requirements.
Here is a more concrete example of how misused calculators can seriously hinder Math education.
Many of the newer calculators will do arithmatic with fractions. They will tell you that 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4. Grade five kids who are allowed to use these don't have to worry about finding lowest common denominators and greatest common factors any more.
When they hit grade ten math, and have to work with rational expressions, the just can't tell you that
1/(x+1) + 3/(x+2) = (4x+5)/(x^2+3x+2)
This should be simple stuff for any high school math student, but they don't have a feel for fractions any more.
I live in little town called Oxford, Nova Scotia. The last census put our population at around 1400 heads.
We have competition here for broadband service. Both the phone company and the cable company offer good service for around $25-$30 US. Both have free installs and free hardware.
Our cable company also offers phone service over the cable lines.
How I wish that there were filters available for wordperfect and Quattro pro. I'd really like to be able to import my files and templates. If I could, I might do the migration from WP Office 7.0 for my business work.
Did you write Mostly Harmless because of pressure from your fans, publisher, or accountant? Having read the full series more often than I would like to mention, it seemed to me that there was a lot of bitterness in the last book. Most characters were unhappy most of the time (not just the humans with digital watches), and you brought out the worst parts of these characters.
Also, killing off the main characters seems like the act of an author who is sick of it all, and never wants to think about that part of his work again. It reminds me of a story I once heard about Stan Rogers. He was a folk musician who wrote mostly about Maritime Canada (my neck of the woods). His most famous song was called Barrett's Privateers. It is said people wanted to hear that song so much that he started to hate it, and didn't want to sing it anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a good book, but not nearly as innocent as the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that gaming is like music. After I grew up, got married, and had kids, new my tastes stagnated.
I haven't bought (or "acquired") any new music in many many years because I'm just not interested in it anymore. I have a library that I like, and the new stuff just doesn't interest me.
I have a library of fun old games that I like to play now and then (Civ II, Tie Fighter, Diablo, etc), and the new stuff just doesn't interest me.
Add to that the fact that most games require a huge time investment. I just don't have several hours at a time to set aside for a gaming session.
To be honest, the game that I play the most often is bsdgames hangman.
That's exactly what I did. I picked up a Dell C400 with a P3 1Ghz on ebay for $200. I've since doubled the RAM to 512 MB, and a miniPCI Intel 2915 and this thing runs great. Its about 3.5 pounds with a 12" screen and a usable keyboard. Why pay more?
Sorry, I didn't realize this was for a laptop.
Make that $52 to go from 2 sticks of 512 to 2 sticks of 1GB.
$26 to go from 80GB to 120GB Mobile SATA. I can't get any 160's right now.
Thats still WAY less than $275.
I always knew that Dell makes its money on the upgrades.
$275 upgrade for a bigger HD and more RAM?
Let me check my price lists... A 160 GB Hard Drive Costs $10 more than an 80 GB HD.
2 Sticks of 1 GB DDR2 cost $36 more than 2 Sticks of 512MB DDR2.
So that upgrade costs $46.
Those are wholesale prices in Canadian Dollars available to Mom and Pop shops. I'm sure Dell gets things cheaper.
When I was I kids, we would stage gigantic crashes with our bicycles. We were playing CHiPs. Remember how that show always started with a huge pile up on the California freeways...
I run a very small computer repair/sales shop out of my house. I see a lot of customers who are still running win98 and a few with ME. With support ending, I decided to see if Xubuntu Dapper would be a good option for these low spec boxes. So I threw together a spare parts box with about a 600 MHz CPU, 128 MB, and a 2.5 GB HD.
Then I did a test install and played around with it for a while, trying to imagine it from the perspective of a customer. It was quite serviceable, and I especially liked the security update notification in the taskbar. Its something that is vital for linux on the desktop.
There were useful apps for every normal usage, a word processor, spreadsheet, instant messenger, internet browser. Gnumeric is a great spreadsheet, and Abiword is a passable Word Processor. I definately understand why OpenOffice is not part of the base install. The computer response time was reasonable.
The thing that really turned me off was how ugly everything looked. All those flat greys just reminded me of the motif days. Ughh. Maybe its because I'm a KDE user and I really like the nice bright icons, but this looked terrible drab.
Perhaps there are nicer themes out there for XFCE, but I didn't go looking for them since I was really looking at the default install.
Mark
A friend of mine who is a tech/computer teacher at our local high school has kids doing lots of stuff in Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/). Its a nifty little open source visual programming environment. And he's getting pretty good results with it.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. Ahh the joys of Munchman, Parsec, and Tunnels of Doom.
I still think Tunnels of Doom was an amazing Dungeon crawler game.
I used to fiddle around doing some programming too on that thing... My greatest accomplishment was "Mark's Game".
I know a guy who always gets his three year old daughter to talk to the telemarketers. Apparently it is quite entertaining.
I run a very small computer service company, and most of my clients are home users. I've seen a few folks that had disconnected their internet connection for a few months before bringing their computer in to me. And if their kids didn't whine so much, some of them would probably bother at all.
I've commiserated with many clients over the fact that its not getting any easier. Its the people that I don't see at all that have decided that it just isn't worth it anymore.
The seem to have forgotten a PC game from back in '95 or so. It was Yoda stories. It was a desktop adventure game that never really caught on. They made an Indiana Jones game that was nearly identical.
I'll go on record to say that for Mom and Pop shops, XP costs $120 CDN, that about $93 US. We can buy a three pack for $354. I wouldn't be surprised if Dell and Compaq/HP pay MUCH less than the $70 stated in the article.
It is a major part with trying to compete with the big boys.
I bought three years ago. However, it is nowhere near any decent sized city. It is in a pathetic little town with a population around 1400. We're about an hour away from the wee little city of Moncton, and a little under two hours from the larger city of Halifax. We do have high speed internet though since the provincial cable-tv baron lives down the road.
Last year someone bought the house across the street for $80,000 and its bigger and nicer than mine (I paid $85,000).
My mortgage payment is about $290 CDN every 2 weeks. This is for a 5 bedroom house, and I put 25% down. Lots of graphics cards cost WAY more than this. Maybe the author lives in a place where real estate is NOT insane.
I can't help thinking about this story,
9 23 0
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/06/044
Some chip makers went green, and it killed their reliability a few years later. Hence a zillion useless Fujitsu hard drives.
I hope they have done huge testing, or else landfills will be clogged with a lot more computer parts.
Of course, given my experience VIA stuff doesn't last that well anyway. When I'm working on a flakey computer with a dying MB, I usually see a VIA chipset on it.
I moved to Oxford, NS, Canada around the same time and bought a 5 bedroom house, 3000 sqft with 80 year old oak woodworking + garage for $85K Canadian. Its a shame there are no IT jobs here....
Mark
I see lots of posts here from people saying "Just upgrade to IE6.1. The problem is that there are lots of people out there that can't or won't.
(1) There folks still running Win95 that are stuck. They've got an old Pentium 166, and have no legitimate way to upgrade to Win98. Have you see upgrade copies available in the last couple of years? Sure they can find a copy on ebay, but lots of these folks would never think of that.
(2) There are folks with Dial-up who didn't want to tie up their phone lines downloading the beast. These folks should definately do it now, but they haven't had a really compelling reason.
(3) They may not know how. "Windows Update, what's that?"
I do lots of work for clueless users, and trust me, their are PLENTY of IE5 boxes out there.
Mark
In my province (Nova Scotia, Canada) broadband is available in most towns of at 3000 people. Cost is $C 45 DSL or cable after intro pricing is over.
My town only has 1400 people, but we broadband it too. Of course the cable baron is from around here, so this little place is special.
Mark
As a very small system builder, I agree. I've been making mostly Celeron systems lately for my low end boxes (which is mostly all of them). There are two reasons for this:
(1) Heatsink design. The Intel retail heatsink is foolproof, quick, and hassle free. My time is money.
(2) Stable value motherboards. I generally will build a value system on a SiS651 based board. In my experience, these things are completely rock solid, and MUCH cheaper than any Nforce2 based boards that I can get from my distributer. I had some bad experiences with VIA based all-in-one boards a little over a year ago, and am still somewhat leery of them.
Of course, if someone mentions gaming at all, I immediately steer them to what I call a mid range system which is AMD+NForce.
But if someone is just going to surf the web and do a little word processing, then I would still recommend Celerons. They end up cheaper with better motherboards.
I wish my distributer stocked Durons, then I could use a much cheaper CPU, and get a good Nvidia-based motherboard for around the same.
Mark
Yes, but there are tons of first gen pentiums out there.
I run a very small computer service company. The majority of machines that I see have less than a 200 Mhz (the most common seems to be P120) processor and often less than 64 MB of RAM. They are owned by people who want to surf the web, read their email, and play solitaire. Mozilla does not run very well on their machines.
Sure they could plunk down another $1000 CDN for a new machine, but there is no need. These folks are working the lines at the local frozen foods plant, or are retired on a fixed income. That is a lot of money for them.
I wish I could point some of these folks to mozilla to help with their browsing, but I can't recommend it because of the system requirements.
Here is a more concrete example of how misused calculators can seriously hinder Math education.
Many of the newer calculators will do arithmatic with fractions. They will tell you that 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4. Grade five kids who are allowed to use these don't have to worry about finding lowest common denominators and greatest common factors any more.
When they hit grade ten math, and have to work with rational expressions, the just can't tell you that
1/(x+1) + 3/(x+2) = (4x+5)/(x^2+3x+2)
This should be simple stuff for any high school math student, but they don't have a feel for fractions any more.
Another rural example in Canada:
I live in little town called Oxford, Nova Scotia. The last census put our population at around 1400 heads.
We have competition here for broadband service. Both the phone company and the cable company offer good service for around $25-$30 US. Both have free installs and free hardware.
Our cable company also offers phone service over the cable lines.
Mark
How I wish that there were filters available for wordperfect and Quattro pro. I'd really like to be able to import my files and templates. If I could, I might do the migration from WP Office 7.0 for my business work.
Did you write Mostly Harmless because of pressure from your fans, publisher, or accountant? Having read the full series more often than I would like to mention, it seemed to me that there was a lot of bitterness in the last book. Most characters were unhappy most of the time (not just the humans with digital watches), and you brought out the worst parts of these characters.
Also, killing off the main characters seems like the act of an author who is sick of it all, and never wants to think about that part of his work again. It reminds me of a story I once heard about Stan Rogers. He was a folk musician who wrote mostly about Maritime Canada (my neck of the woods). His most famous song was called Barrett's Privateers. It is said people wanted to hear that song so much that he started to hate it, and didn't want to sing it anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a good book, but not nearly as innocent as the rest.
Hey there, don't forget Rendition (tee hee hee).
My V2200 can keep up with a standard Voodoo 1 any day of the week...under windows.
Its a shame that it there are no 3d drivers for linux...
Its a shame that the windows drivers never reached a truly stable state...
Its a shame that its a very old card...
Its a shame that I'm too cheap to update...
Oh well.