Hey, I find it strangely satisfactory when I find the media campaign fifty times as interesting as the product itself. Do I give a shit about the XBox 360? No, but it might have been possible that something interesting happens in this campaign. Did I care about Halo 2? No, but I like the universe it's set in and the ilovebees thing was pretty cool. It's free entertainment - I don't care if in the end people expect me to buy a game I don't want for a console I don't own anyway.
Maybe that's why Nintendo went with "Has An Interesting Input Device" with their two latest consoles. Seriously, the Revolution has caught my interest, which hasn't happened since the original Playstation. I still won't buy it (as it doesn't play PSX games, which is pretty much the only reason for me to buy a console) but I find it very interesing (as opposed to the PS3, which is just a faster PS2 and the XBox 360, which is just a faster XBox).
Yes, for example, what do the tree and the rabbit have to do with the XBox 360? Oh, I know! It will have a case made of tropical wood and rabbit fur! Revolutionary! Greenpeace and PETA are going to throw a fit!
I correct myself: Seventeen DAYS. They probably detected that I'm a Linux user and want me to be two weeks to late for the launch of a gaming console I'm not going to buy anyways. ZING! I JUST FOILED YOUR EVIL PLANS, MICROSOFT!!
17:09:46 for me. Oh noes, they're going to keep it a secret from Europe until, erm, in seventeen hours.
BTW, I found a different bit of text on the tree. If you zoom in on the trunk, at the point where the branches, er, branch off there is "Originality is the key to a proper face." written in easily readable red text.
I'm not from the US, but I have had very a good experience with Maxtor. Exactly five days before the warranty would have run out, my hard drive (a 120 GB DiamondMax Plus 9 with liquid bearing) started to spontaneously corrupt files and shut down while the computer was running. Mator's diagnostic utility told me that the hard drive was damaged and needed to be replaced. So I went to the Maxtor website and requested RMA. They offered to send me the replacement drive first and give me 30 days to send back the old one using the same package they used to send the replacement drive. This required me to give them a credit card number (so they could bill me the HDD in case I didnn't send the old one back).
I still had to pay for shipment to them (in Ireland), which cost me about ten Euros. But being able to copy most of my data from the old drive to the new one was definitely worth it. I don't know if this is common among hardware manufacturers, but I certainly wish it was more common among hardware retailers.
It really depends. I'm living 30 kilometers from the next big city (Bremen), in a small town (or a big village, depending on how you look at it). While houses are hideously expensive*, they offer a lot of space - and a nice garden ain't too bad either. And if you can live with commuting (it takes me one hour to get to/from the university) you probably won't have too many problems, as there are many small towns with railroad connnections to a big city and space for new houses. If you carefully choose where you build your house you can get your stuff done without having to own a car at all.
* Note to American readers: I'm talking about what's considered a house in Germany, which includes walls made from materials like foamed concrete as well as additional methods of insulation (like glass wool in the roof and airtight double-paned windows). Building a decent house can easily cost you more than 300.000 Euros and quite a bit more with a basement.
In comparison, the kind of house I have most commonly seen in the USA would be considered a really big shed over here.
Plus, spaghetti code is not fun, so hobbiest programmers arent going to waste their time with it.
Quite true. Recently, I was asked to take a look as the homebrew CMS of a website dedicated to a game creation system. There was a new version of the game creator coming out and they esentially wanted everything to be extended with an attribute indicating the version; also the CMS should be able to filter the data. Not a big thing, of course; with a new field in the database (defaulting to the old version) and a few dozen lines of code the changes would be up without much work.
Then I saw the code. It was not spaghetti code but rather some kind of weird Irish stew. The former designer obviously had never heard of templates, as PHP and HTML were intersprased with entire sections of the website were included based on the reault of an if() - the left-out sections even contained PHP tags, which sometimes contained further tag-spanning conditionals. That was the most horribly convoluted and unreadable code I have ever seen, including Perl scripts. I figured that an entire rewrite of the site would have been necessary before any changes could be made - that means carefully going through a dozen files with hundreds of lines each (wc counts ~53.500 lines total), trying to figure out what exactly the code is supposed to do, finally replacing most of it with a template engine.
I refused. While I would happily change the site and might even work out a presentation system for the site (although I probably wouldn't have implemented it) I didn't want to get involved with this kind of coding nightmare.
Turns out that no one else wanted to do so, either. They're still looking for someone to fix their CMS.
Does Gobby actually work now? I have pretty much given up on collaborative editing as using Wine to emulate MoonEdit (as the Linux version wouldn't accept any Umlauts for some reason) resulted in a slow, unstable and generally bothersome editor. Gobby, which I also tried, simply failed to compile on both my box and the one on the other side of the pipe. SubEthaEdit does work on my iBook but the other user doesn't have a Mac...
There should be a standardised protocol für collaboative editing. Then I could use SubEthaEdit, the other user could use MoonEdit and we'd both be happy.
Except from that, I see two differences: The "Reply to This" link has a bigger font size now and the Greasemonkey "Live Comments" script doesn't work anymore.:/
Oh, and the icons at the top of the page have working tooltips now. For some reason with the old design the tooptips wouldn't show.
No. GP said that "is educated" does not imply "curses a lot" and vice versa. Someone who is educate does not necessarily curse a lot, but the opposite is also true. GP simply states that there is no correlation between cursing frequency and level of education.
Windows 9x/ME didn't. Windows NT/2k did, but only as a username/password dialog, which apparently is too complicated for novice users. (Make that "novice Windows users".)
But Steve Ballmer can bury anyone he wants! Steve Ballmer throws chairs all the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that Steve Ballmer was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Steve Ballmer buried the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Steve Ballmer totally throw a chair at some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Depends on the station. A while ago, we switched from cable TV to satellite (because via satellite we get more programs without reoccurring costs and we an use the savings). As a nice side effect I can now listen to radio stations via my TV and I discovered a nifty litte Bavarian station that plays nothing but rock, metal etc. Listening to that station has ntroduced me to bands I've never heard about.
Of course with analog radio I wouldn't be able to listen to that station as I live on the other side of Germany. But there always are stations that play stuff besides pop... At least over here there are.
(BTW, when driving into town, I sometines tune in to one of our local classical music stations, turn the volume up and drive by people at about 10 km/h, nodding to the "beat". You know, like those "cool" people who have to inform everyone about the latest hip hop trends.)
Yu, sounds about right. I had much fun with NIS 2001, which, for some strange reason, decided to stop working after we had reinstalled the computer's ISDN card. Not only did the process refuse to respond to any kind of input, it could also not be terminated in any way (which subsequently made proper deinstallation imossible). Also, it blocked 100% of all Internet traffic.
We had to boot from a rescue floppy and delete the NIS folder before the system got usable again (yay for FAT32). Of course, a few weeks later another PC's installation of Norton Personal Firewall decided to eat the system tray. The tray was just gone, with no way to get it back. At least we could wipe NPF using Safe Mode.
Back when DOS was cool the Norton products were great. But the Win32 versions are complete and utter junk. If I have to secure a Windows computer, I now use Antivir PE and a NAT router.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I find it strangely satisfactory when I find the media campaign fifty times as interesting as the product itself. Do I give a shit about the XBox 360? No, but it might have been possible that something interesting happens in this campaign. Did I care about Halo 2? No, but I like the universe it's set in and the ilovebees thing was pretty cool. It's free entertainment - I don't care if in the end people expect me to buy a game I don't want for a console I don't own anyway.
Maybe that's why Nintendo went with "Has An Interesting Input Device" with their two latest consoles. Seriously, the Revolution has caught my interest, which hasn't happened since the original Playstation. I still won't buy it (as it doesn't play PSX games, which is pretty much the only reason for me to buy a console) but I find it very interesing (as opposed to the PS3, which is just a faster PS2 and the XBox 360, which is just a faster XBox).
Yes, for example, what do the tree and the rabbit have to do with the XBox 360? Oh, I know! It will have a case made of tropical wood and rabbit fur! Revolutionary! Greenpeace and PETA are going to throw a fit!
I correct myself: Seventeen DAYS. They probably detected that I'm a Linux user and want me to be two weeks to late for the launch of a gaming console I'm not going to buy anyways. ZING! I JUST FOILED YOUR EVIL PLANS, MICROSOFT!!
17:09:46 for me. Oh noes, they're going to keep it a secret from Europe until, erm, in seventeen hours.
BTW, I found a different bit of text on the tree. If you zoom in on the trunk, at the point where the branches, er, branch off there is "Originality is the key to a proper face." written in easily readable red text.
In Soviet Russia, the grandparent laughs at YOU!
SCNR
I'm not from the US, but I have had very a good experience with Maxtor. Exactly five days before the warranty would have run out, my hard drive (a 120 GB DiamondMax Plus 9 with liquid bearing) started to spontaneously corrupt files and shut down while the computer was running. Mator's diagnostic utility told me that the hard drive was damaged and needed to be replaced. So I went to the Maxtor website and requested RMA. They offered to send me the replacement drive first and give me 30 days to send back the old one using the same package they used to send the replacement drive. This required me to give them a credit card number (so they could bill me the HDD in case I didnn't send the old one back).
I still had to pay for shipment to them (in Ireland), which cost me about ten Euros. But being able to copy most of my data from the old drive to the new one was definitely worth it. I don't know if this is common among hardware manufacturers, but I certainly wish it was more common among hardware retailers.
It really depends. I'm living 30 kilometers from the next big city (Bremen), in a small town (or a big village, depending on how you look at it). While houses are hideously expensive*, they offer a lot of space - and a nice garden ain't too bad either. And if you can live with commuting (it takes me one hour to get to/from the university) you probably won't have too many problems, as there are many small towns with railroad connnections to a big city and space for new houses. If you carefully choose where you build your house you can get your stuff done without having to own a car at all.
* Note to American readers: I'm talking about what's considered a house in Germany, which includes walls made from materials like foamed concrete as well as additional methods of insulation (like glass wool in the roof and airtight double-paned windows). Building a decent house can easily cost you more than 300.000 Euros and quite a bit more with a basement.
In comparison, the kind of house I have most commonly seen in the USA would be considered a really big shed over here.
A day later NASA makes a press release that they have just found 600.000 Martian relics...
Exactly. And you also replace your PC with a low-powered thin client running your software on other people's low-powered thin-- wait a minute...
See, that's what we have IPv6 for...
Plus, spaghetti code is not fun, so hobbiest programmers arent going to waste their time with it.
Quite true. Recently, I was asked to take a look as the homebrew CMS of a website dedicated to a game creation system. There was a new version of the game creator coming out and they esentially wanted everything to be extended with an attribute indicating the version; also the CMS should be able to filter the data. Not a big thing, of course; with a new field in the database (defaulting to the old version) and a few dozen lines of code the changes would be up without much work.
Then I saw the code. It was not spaghetti code but rather some kind of weird Irish stew. The former designer obviously had never heard of templates, as PHP and HTML were intersprased with entire sections of the website were included based on the reault of an if() - the left-out sections even contained PHP tags, which sometimes contained further tag-spanning conditionals. That was the most horribly convoluted and unreadable code I have ever seen, including Perl scripts. I figured that an entire rewrite of the site would have been necessary before any changes could be made - that means carefully going through a dozen files with hundreds of lines each (wc counts ~53.500 lines total), trying to figure out what exactly the code is supposed to do, finally replacing most of it with a template engine.
I refused. While I would happily change the site and might even work out a presentation system for the site (although I probably wouldn't have implemented it) I didn't want to get involved with this kind of coding nightmare.
Turns out that no one else wanted to do so, either. They're still looking for someone to fix their CMS.
Does Gobby actually work now? I have pretty much given up on collaborative editing as using Wine to emulate MoonEdit (as the Linux version wouldn't accept any Umlauts for some reason) resulted in a slow, unstable and generally bothersome editor. Gobby, which I also tried, simply failed to compile on both my box and the one on the other side of the pipe. SubEthaEdit does work on my iBook but the other user doesn't have a Mac...
There should be a standardised protocol für collaboative editing. Then I could use SubEthaEdit, the other user could use MoonEdit and we'd both be happy.
Except from that, I see two differences: The "Reply to This" link has a bigger font size now and the Greasemonkey "Live Comments" script doesn't work anymore. :/
Oh, and the icons at the top of the page have working tooltips now. For some reason with the old design the tooptips wouldn't show.
No. GP said that "is educated" does not imply "curses a lot" and vice versa. Someone who is educate does not necessarily curse a lot, but the opposite is also true. GP simply states that there is no correlation between cursing frequency and level of education.
And when we add the 7 and the 3 we get 10. Or X, if you will... As in "OS X".
The numbers are obviously predicting that Apple will take over the OS market. Numbers never lie, y'know?
...is going to be the year of desktop Windows!
Windows 9x/ME didn't. Windows NT/2k did, but only as a username/password dialog, which apparently is too complicated for novice users. (Make that "novice Windows users".)
But Steve Ballmer can bury anyone he wants! Steve Ballmer throws chairs all the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that Steve Ballmer was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Steve Ballmer buried the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Steve Ballmer totally throw a chair at some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The stuff on the radio is completely homogenized.
Depends on the station. A while ago, we switched from cable TV to satellite (because via satellite we get more programs without reoccurring costs and we an use the savings). As a nice side effect I can now listen to radio stations via my TV and I discovered a nifty litte Bavarian station that plays nothing but rock, metal etc. Listening to that station has ntroduced me to bands I've never heard about.
Of course with analog radio I wouldn't be able to listen to that station as I live on the other side of Germany. But there always are stations that play stuff besides pop... At least over here there are.
(BTW, when driving into town, I sometines tune in to one of our local classical music stations, turn the volume up and drive by people at about 10 km/h, nodding to the "beat". You know, like those "cool" people who have to inform everyone about the latest hip hop trends.)
> Next year, the 11th storm will be named 'Kirk'.
If that one's a major hurricane, I'd better start preparing right now for the dreadful Star Trek jokes.
Let's start speculating about whether the next one will be called "Khan" and how many 'a's they're going to use.
Yu, sounds about right. I had much fun with NIS 2001, which, for some strange reason, decided to stop working after we had reinstalled the computer's ISDN card. Not only did the process refuse to respond to any kind of input, it could also not be terminated in any way (which subsequently made proper deinstallation imossible). Also, it blocked 100% of all Internet traffic.
We had to boot from a rescue floppy and delete the NIS folder before the system got usable again (yay for FAT32). Of course, a few weeks later another PC's installation of Norton Personal Firewall decided to eat the system tray. The tray was just gone, with no way to get it back. At least we could wipe NPF using Safe Mode.
Back when DOS was cool the Norton products were great. But the Win32 versions are complete and utter junk. If I have to secure a Windows computer, I now use Antivir PE and a NAT router.
We're talking about Norton Antivirus here. I'm surprised that the authors can spell "Mac" properly.
Just wait till we reconstruct our early years when the bully use to beat us up, and take our lunch money.
Someone already has. Their next attempt at stealing our lunch money will come in seven flavors.
Thanks for the link. That's probably the most interesting essay I have read lately (with "lately" equalling the last two years or so).