"I wonder if, once the kernel, KDE, and GNOME guys have to lug around twenty years' worth of backward compatibility, they'll be exactly like Windows... bloated, buggy, and insecure."
They do. man 2 pipe. That's not new. man 2 fork. That's not new. Read up on POSIX. That's not new. Read up the C stdlib. That's not new.
Nothing that has been implemented in a Linux distribution is very young. Most of it is so old, that Windows was just a copy of a program called QDOS bought by a young man named Bill Gates before an interview with a company that thought it could make money selling small computers in addition to its mainframe line.
Comments like this illustrate the idiocy of people who have no reason to comment on stuff. Microsoft, which is dominated be the business rule of not breaking compatibility for the sake of its money-paying customers, are not unlinke all Unixes that caused the POSIX standard to come about. The difference is that Microsoft is 1 company with 1 closed-vision of money, while the Unix and C interfaces were widely used, and became standardized through standard engineering practices.
I bet you're the same kind of person who thinks a desktop PC is poorly designed because it has RS-232 next to its USB ports. Good, well engineered software and hardware can change over time without ditching backwards compatibility. Linux is a great example of this.
You're either very ignorant, a troll, or an astroturfer. Either way, you did manage to get modded up, which reflects poorly on all the mods that touched your comment.
Or Camino, or Mozilla. All of the Gecko-based browsers support this without a "restart" on all platforms. Just edit the bookmark, and be done with it. You can do this with any number of search engines or other GET-capable web applications (I use the keyword gs for my google searches).
I'd mod you as redundant (since someone posted clearer instructions elsewhere), but I'd be risking having people believe that Gecko-based products are as shoddy as Microsoft's operating systems!
Satoru Iwata has said, again and again, that he wants to open gaming up. When Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down, he left some words for Nintendo:
"As I retire from management, I have no words to share. Coincidental to my leaving the company, I would like to make one request: that Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard. Furthermore, this software should attract consumers as new and interesting. Lastly, and of equal importance, is completing these products quickly and at a cost comparable to today's current market. I imagine most people question the feasibility of my request, but Nintendo has always pursued those objectives..."
I've watched the Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo E3 presentations. Sony and Microsoft both repeated the same thing -- we want to be the most powerful machines, and we have them here! Nintendo said, we want our machine to be easy to play and easy to develop for.
Sony said that they wanted to be a media hub. Microsoft said they wanted to break out of the male 18-34 demographic -- right before they stereo typed girls as casual gamers! Nintendo said they had something they felt would include more people in the games.
How about the games? I own Wario Ware: Twisted. It has some of the technology Nintendo has applied to the Revolution controller inside of it. It detects my hand motions, and uses those as means of control. I also have Wario Ware: touched! Between the two, you can quite clearly see that the folks at Nintendo are playing with various games and methods of controlling them (while also delivering interesting gameplay!).
While I am male and in the 18-34 demographic, I don't buy Madden every year. I don't want to buy another WW2 shooter. I don't feel like joining a 5-hour raid in WOW. I just want to have fun. I want to be able to have fun around my school, work, family, etc. I want to involve my friends and family in my fun when I can. The games Sony and Microsoft were showing weren't the games I can see doing that for me. Nintendo's games still do it for me 20 years later.
I don't think Nintendo is in trouble for this next generation.
"They're not going to like it and the 360 is going to suffer from a draught of good Japanese games,"
Change 360 to Xbox and "going to" to "currently" as in: "They're not going to like it, and the Xbox is currently suffering from a draught of good Japanese games,"
I bought it used from someone. Most video game stores don't offer much to people, because they need to protect their margins. For example, EB will give you 175$ for a PSP of store credit; they then sell it for 229$ ish and pocket the 55$ for store profits and in case you trade in garbage.
I was able to do the same thing with textbooks to avoid having to pay out my ass; I bought a complete set of my chem text, student solutions manual, and study guide for 60$ (MSRP: 200$ new) because I offered a bit more than the cash for books lady (who offers 50% of new, if everything's in perfect condition, and won't buy a lot of stuff like the study guide and solutions manual).
Lots of people want to get rid of stuff, and are willing to part with it for not very much money. Take the time to scout where this stuff happens and go for it. EB gives 75$ for a Nintendo DS system. I bet you could beat that if you want to!
I will warn you; my DS is scratched on the case, and my PSP is also scuffed a bit (nothing on the screen, but it's not the same as a new one).
I use it for my DS games, and occasionally GBA games. I prefer my SP for playing GBA games since the DS makes them look washed out (the palette doesn't seem correct).
To use a NES/SNES emulator on my SP or DS, I'd still need a flash cart and a method for getting roms onto it. For the 190$ CDN I paid for my 1.5 firmware PSP and 512mb MSPDuo, I think I got a good deal. The screen on the PSP alone is a good reason to get playing NES/SNES games on the PSP!
If it weren't for homebrew, there'd be no reason to run a PSP. Thankfully, Nintendo doesn't suck:)
I'd say watch out. AFAIK, newer games are starting to require a firmware update. GTA: Liberty City Stories will be requiring it. I would expect that all the future UMD games will have them built in.
The Sony updater is designed to update if the version is >= to the current one, so they'd have no problem putting forced updaters on discs and forgetting about it.
My answer is simple: I do not buy UMD games. I bought my PSP used with a memory card because I wanted to run homebrew on it anyways. The actual games for the PSP have nothing I want.
Not only is it a bad movie, plus an abreviation of a game that's short enough, but it also patches your firmware to v2.0. Like playing your NES and SNES roms on the go? Tough luck; go buy a laptop.
Sony is desperately trying to get content out for the PSP. I think it's rather telling that the DS has 8 games coming for it this holiday season that I want to buy, while the PSP has only 2 games worth getting (IMO; Lumines and Metal Gear Acid). Otherwise the only reason to have it is for the decent NES emulation available on it (and less decent SNES emulation).
Did you watch the keynote last week? With the exception of the part where Jobs talked about OS X native applications, it was spot on. He went on and on about how many iPods were sold. He introduced lots of little things.
Then, at the end, "1,000 songs in your pocket, impossibly small!" the iPod nano -- an afterthought!
The following courses he wants are not listed in any of these: touch typing, nutrition (although you could take it as an elective), basics of GIS (as I don't know what GIS). The software engineering option touches on pretty much everything he wants, but also does a lot more (making for a full 4-year program). The honours program is similar, except it allows you to focus more on theory of computation, which is great once you realize that practical usage stuff is just as easy to learn on your own Linux machines at home as it is in a classroom setting (if not more so!).
I know I've learned everything about systems administration by running my own website/email system for the past 7 years. I don't think there's a course that says to take Postfix, DSPAM, Procmail, Cyrus IMAPD, Linux software RAID, MySQL, and combine them all to make a nice email system. I'm taking the honours program (non-SE), though, which means I'm not going to learn his touch-typing classes and basics of nutrition:p
A science degree is about science -- not programming, even if it's in computers. I'd no sooner expect a CS degree to be perfect for programming that I'd expect a chemistry degree to be good for making a house that lasts a long time, or a physics degree making you good at making fast cars. Science is about research and investigation!
"I don't think any of us really choose our mailer. At work I use Compuserve because everyone else at work uses it. BUt I also use AOL, because my little sister is away at school, and she uses AOL. I hate AOL, but if I choose not to use AOL, I am only hurting myself because then I couldn't mail my sister. The next logical Question- Why can't I get my sister to switch? All her friends use AOL. And so it goes."
If only there was some kind of simple message ttransport protocol that could communicate between servers, allowing the server type itself to be abstracted out of the equation. People on different ISPs could mail people on others! It'd be a miracle.
Why do we have the same problem we had with email in th 80s, now with IM clients? The Jabber protocol is designed to work just like SMTP was designed to allow messages between servers. Google's talk service is Jabber (mind you, their Jabber won't connect out to other Jabber servers, which is a pretty lame thing to do).
Personally, I'm looking into setting up a Jabber server on the same system that does my email/web stuff. When it's working, I'll begin to try and migrate people over (Kopete works with it just fine).
You want Postfix + Cyrus IMAPD. These are your core elements; Postfix is easy to chroot, run SSL, SMTP auth, and will work with SQL or OpenLDAP, etc. Ditto for Cyrus. There exist ways to interface it with several account management sides. The fine folks at CMU have designed it to scale out the ying-yang. I've never had a peep of trouble out of either piece of software.
Cyrus will also provide you with POP3, in addition to IMAP.
If you want to extend the system, there are many ways to do it. On top of my Cyrus/Postfix setup, I have a procmail glue layer which runs DSPAM and any custom rules. I use MySQL for the aliases, auth table, etc. I have mod_php and Apache setup with Squirrelmail. Email is the most complex suite of applications that my Linux server does, and it does it flawlessly. I have never lost a single bit of data. I'm using a RAID array with regular backups, though:)
AAC is better than MP3, and supported. Best of all, iTunes will convert your stuff to 128kbit AAC on the fly (at least for the Shuffles it will) when doing a fill, meaning I can fit 2x the songs, and lose not much quality as compared to my 256kbit VBR MP3 standard.
I know you want Ogg support, but there are plenty of other players which support that. Apple is about image and functionality.
"So, let's see. If this were something that happened to a less wealthy nation, what would have happened? In matter of some weeks, there would be some pale shadow of the amount of support that was moving into the Gulf Coast area within hours."
I'd like to point out that while last year's tsunami in the pacific ended with Canadian support taking a while to ramp up, this time around Canadian support was turned away by the US government.
I imagine that the Canadians would've been very quick to step in and help the Cubans rebuild after hurricane Dennis, the most powerful hurricane to hit Cuba since hurricane Flora in 1963. Of course, that's not really relevant, as Cuba evacuated their people (650,000) from the affected area. 16 people died in Cuba. It was a cat 5 when it hit, and its winds reached 239kph (149mph). Haiti also had about 44 deaths.
I think NO has had a great deal more death than that from what was a smaller storm, due to the non-motivation to evacuate, and the failures of the levies and dams that protected the city. Can you argue that this could not have been avoided based on this evidence?
"Cannot find the file 'msconfig' (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available." (Win2k). It does work in both WinXP and Win2k3 Server, though.
Which is about as intuitive to people who aren't CS majors as MIPS ASM; both the error message and the method of invocation!
Why doesn't Windows have a standarized interface to this? Who knows? Ubuntu is, thankfully, simple enough I can start to ween the people I know from the tits of MS long enough that they can start to look at Apple's offerings.
Once people realize that there exist applications different from what is familiar to do what they wish to do, they suddenly feel empowered and can move past MS.
"... especially considering the very existence of the game was revealed by Bill Gates talking about how it would parry the PlayStation 3 launch."
I thought it was revealed by the giant "PREORDER HALO 3 NOW" banner that pops up when you beat the "final" boss in Halo 2. How could anyone follow up such a finale? Perhaps with the real ending!
Seriously, Halo 2 was un-fucking-finished. The only people who won't admit it are fanboys. I'd like to think it's a joke that you don't get the preorder screen when you beat the game on legendary, but seriously...
Take a look at the google topic. Here, I'll make it easy. Hmm, we have ~1 story per day. Some days get 2, some 0, but the average for the past week is 1/day.
Now let's review the content: speculation, rumours, and outright lies, coupled with a small mix of facts.
I think Zonk has proven that he's aware of what's going on, and he's able to make a fairly well played post on the topic. I think this is perfectly topical and great. If you don't get the joke, head on over to here and decheck Zonk as an edior. I would prefer you to not post on his stories!
You want a good name with good components, not just something that's expensive. Lots of places put black paint and go-faster stripes on Tawainese shit and sell it for lot$.
Unless there's some really radical pronunciation changes between US and Canadian english, I think you'll find that affect is pronounced "AH-fect" and effect pronounced "EEEE-fect". Not really the same at all. Kinda like your and you're don't sound the same; your ends on an R sound, while you're is the sound of you + re (you + rrh, an extra h over your).
My ears can distinguish these; it makes it very interesting to hear how some people who are proficient actors still don't know the difference between you're and your.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just link to Wikipedia about it? They have a good article up about it. That way you don't have to wait for me to come along and post it!
You know, you think you're not going to get anything because you're on Linux, but that works seamlessly with no plugins under Mozilla.
My hats off to the illuminata that made it possible for me to be able to see stupid high school kids screw around!
"Don't steal shit."
Downloading media files which are created from master discs I don't own is called copyright infringement.
Taking out my gun and robbing the manure salesman is stealing shit.
Now, do you want me to ARR a bit so you can talk about piracy?
"I wonder if, once the kernel, KDE, and GNOME guys have to lug around twenty years' worth of backward compatibility, they'll be exactly like Windows... bloated, buggy, and insecure."
They do. man 2 pipe. That's not new. man 2 fork. That's not new. Read up on POSIX. That's not new. Read up the C stdlib. That's not new.
Nothing that has been implemented in a Linux distribution is very young. Most of it is so old, that Windows was just a copy of a program called QDOS bought by a young man named Bill Gates before an interview with a company that thought it could make money selling small computers in addition to its mainframe line.
Comments like this illustrate the idiocy of people who have no reason to comment on stuff. Microsoft, which is dominated be the business rule of not breaking compatibility for the sake of its money-paying customers, are not unlinke all Unixes that caused the POSIX standard to come about. The difference is that Microsoft is 1 company with 1 closed-vision of money, while the Unix and C interfaces were widely used, and became standardized through standard engineering practices.
I bet you're the same kind of person who thinks a desktop PC is poorly designed because it has RS-232 next to its USB ports. Good, well engineered software and hardware can change over time without ditching backwards compatibility. Linux is a great example of this.
You're either very ignorant, a troll, or an astroturfer. Either way, you did manage to get modded up, which reflects poorly on all the mods that touched your comment.
Or Camino, or Mozilla. All of the Gecko-based browsers support this without a "restart" on all platforms. Just edit the bookmark, and be done with it. You can do this with any number of search engines or other GET-capable web applications (I use the keyword gs for my google searches).
I'd mod you as redundant (since someone posted clearer instructions elsewhere), but I'd be risking having people believe that Gecko-based products are as shoddy as Microsoft's operating systems!
The answer is still no.
Satoru Iwata has said, again and again, that he wants to open gaming up. When Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down, he left some words for Nintendo:
"As I retire from management, I have no words to share. Coincidental to my leaving the company, I would like to make one request: that Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard. Furthermore, this software should attract consumers as new and interesting. Lastly, and of equal importance, is completing these products quickly and at a cost comparable to today's current market. I imagine most people question the feasibility of my request, but Nintendo has always pursued those objectives..."
I've watched the Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo E3 presentations. Sony and Microsoft both repeated the same thing -- we want to be the most powerful machines, and we have them here! Nintendo said, we want our machine to be easy to play and easy to develop for.
Sony said that they wanted to be a media hub. Microsoft said they wanted to break out of the male 18-34 demographic -- right before they stereo typed girls as casual gamers! Nintendo said they had something they felt would include more people in the games.
How about the games? I own Wario Ware: Twisted. It has some of the technology Nintendo has applied to the Revolution controller inside of it. It detects my hand motions, and uses those as means of control. I also have Wario Ware: touched! Between the two, you can quite clearly see that the folks at Nintendo are playing with various games and methods of controlling them (while also delivering interesting gameplay!).
While I am male and in the 18-34 demographic, I don't buy Madden every year. I don't want to buy another WW2 shooter. I don't feel like joining a 5-hour raid in WOW. I just want to have fun. I want to be able to have fun around my school, work, family, etc. I want to involve my friends and family in my fun when I can. The games Sony and Microsoft were showing weren't the games I can see doing that for me. Nintendo's games still do it for me 20 years later.
I don't think Nintendo is in trouble for this next generation.
"They're not going to like it and the 360 is going to suffer from a draught of good Japanese games,"
Change 360 to Xbox and "going to" to "currently" as in:
"They're not going to like it, and the Xbox is currently suffering from a draught of good Japanese games,"
Yea, that's right, no major change!
I bought it used from someone. Most video game stores don't offer much to people, because they need to protect their margins. For example, EB will give you 175$ for a PSP of store credit; they then sell it for 229$ ish and pocket the 55$ for store profits and in case you trade in garbage.
I was able to do the same thing with textbooks to avoid having to pay out my ass; I bought a complete set of my chem text, student solutions manual, and study guide for 60$ (MSRP: 200$ new) because I offered a bit more than the cash for books lady (who offers 50% of new, if everything's in perfect condition, and won't buy a lot of stuff like the study guide and solutions manual).
Lots of people want to get rid of stuff, and are willing to part with it for not very much money. Take the time to scout where this stuff happens and go for it. EB gives 75$ for a Nintendo DS system. I bet you could beat that if you want to!
I will warn you; my DS is scratched on the case, and my PSP is also scuffed a bit (nothing on the screen, but it's not the same as a new one).
I use it for my DS games, and occasionally GBA games. I prefer my SP for playing GBA games since the DS makes them look washed out (the palette doesn't seem correct).
:)
To use a NES/SNES emulator on my SP or DS, I'd still need a flash cart and a method for getting roms onto it. For the 190$ CDN I paid for my 1.5 firmware PSP and 512mb MSPDuo, I think I got a good deal. The screen on the PSP alone is a good reason to get playing NES/SNES games on the PSP!
If it weren't for homebrew, there'd be no reason to run a PSP. Thankfully, Nintendo doesn't suck
I'd say watch out. AFAIK, newer games are starting to require a firmware update. GTA: Liberty City Stories will be requiring it. I would expect that all the future UMD games will have them built in.
The Sony updater is designed to update if the version is >= to the current one, so they'd have no problem putting forced updaters on discs and forgetting about it.
My answer is simple: I do not buy UMD games. I bought my PSP used with a memory card because I wanted to run homebrew on it anyways. The actual games for the PSP have nothing I want.
Not only is it a bad movie, plus an abreviation of a game that's short enough, but it also patches your firmware to v2.0. Like playing your NES and SNES roms on the go? Tough luck; go buy a laptop.
Sony is desperately trying to get content out for the PSP. I think it's rather telling that the DS has 8 games coming for it this holiday season that I want to buy, while the PSP has only 2 games worth getting (IMO; Lumines and Metal Gear Acid). Otherwise the only reason to have it is for the decent NES emulation available on it (and less decent SNES emulation).
Did you watch the keynote last week? With the exception of the part where Jobs talked about OS X native applications, it was spot on. He went on and on about how many iPods were sold. He introduced lots of little things.
Then, at the end, "1,000 songs in your pocket, impossibly small!" the iPod nano -- an afterthought!
Except they tend not to be as limited as the author wants.
:p
Take a gander at the U of S 4 year BSc, 4 Years Honours Software Engineering, and Honours program.
The following courses he wants are not listed in any of these: touch typing, nutrition (although you could take it as an elective), basics of GIS (as I don't know what GIS). The software engineering option touches on pretty much everything he wants, but also does a lot more (making for a full 4-year program). The honours program is similar, except it allows you to focus more on theory of computation, which is great once you realize that practical usage stuff is just as easy to learn on your own Linux machines at home as it is in a classroom setting (if not more so!).
I know I've learned everything about systems administration by running my own website/email system for the past 7 years. I don't think there's a course that says to take Postfix, DSPAM, Procmail, Cyrus IMAPD, Linux software RAID, MySQL, and combine them all to make a nice email system. I'm taking the honours program (non-SE), though, which means I'm not going to learn his touch-typing classes and basics of nutrition
A science degree is about science -- not programming, even if it's in computers. I'd no sooner expect a CS degree to be perfect for programming that I'd expect a chemistry degree to be good for making a house that lasts a long time, or a physics degree making you good at making fast cars. Science is about research and investigation!
Let's look at this from another perspective:
"I don't think any of us really choose our mailer. At work I use Compuserve because everyone else at work uses it. BUt I also use AOL, because my little sister is away at school, and she uses AOL. I hate AOL, but if I choose not to use AOL, I am only hurting myself because then I couldn't mail my sister.
The next logical Question- Why can't I get my sister to switch? All her friends use AOL. And so it goes."
If only there was some kind of simple message ttransport protocol that could communicate between servers, allowing the server type itself to be abstracted out of the equation. People on different ISPs could mail people on others! It'd be a miracle.
Why do we have the same problem we had with email in th 80s, now with IM clients? The Jabber protocol is designed to work just like SMTP was designed to allow messages between servers. Google's talk service is Jabber (mind you, their Jabber won't connect out to other Jabber servers, which is a pretty lame thing to do).
Personally, I'm looking into setting up a Jabber server on the same system that does my email/web stuff. When it's working, I'll begin to try and migrate people over (Kopete works with it just fine).
You want Postfix + Cyrus IMAPD. These are your core elements; Postfix is easy to chroot, run SSL, SMTP auth, and will work with SQL or OpenLDAP, etc. Ditto for Cyrus. There exist ways to interface it with several account management sides. The fine folks at CMU have designed it to scale out the ying-yang. I've never had a peep of trouble out of either piece of software.
:)
Cyrus will also provide you with POP3, in addition to IMAP.
If you want to extend the system, there are many ways to do it. On top of my Cyrus/Postfix setup, I have a procmail glue layer which runs DSPAM and any custom rules. I use MySQL for the aliases, auth table, etc. I have mod_php and Apache setup with Squirrelmail. Email is the most complex suite of applications that my Linux server does, and it does it flawlessly. I have never lost a single bit of data. I'm using a RAID array with regular backups, though
AAC is better than MP3, and supported. Best of all, iTunes will convert your stuff to 128kbit AAC on the fly (at least for the Shuffles it will) when doing a fill, meaning I can fit 2x the songs, and lose not much quality as compared to my 256kbit VBR MP3 standard.
I know you want Ogg support, but there are plenty of other players which support that. Apple is about image and functionality.
"So, let's see. If this were something that happened to a less wealthy nation, what would have happened? In matter of some weeks, there would be some pale shadow of the amount of support that was moving into the Gulf Coast area within hours."
I'd like to point out that while last year's tsunami in the pacific ended with Canadian support taking a while to ramp up, this time around Canadian support was turned away by the US government.
I imagine that the Canadians would've been very quick to step in and help the Cubans rebuild after hurricane Dennis, the most powerful hurricane to hit Cuba since hurricane Flora in 1963. Of course, that's not really relevant, as Cuba evacuated their people (650,000) from the affected area. 16 people died in Cuba. It was a cat 5 when it hit, and its winds reached 239kph (149mph). Haiti also had about 44 deaths.
I think NO has had a great deal more death than that from what was a smaller storm, due to the non-motivation to evacuate, and the failures of the levies and dams that protected the city. Can you argue that this could not have been avoided based on this evidence?
"Cannot find the file 'msconfig' (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available." (Win2k). It does work in both WinXP and Win2k3 Server, though.
Which is about as intuitive to people who aren't CS majors as MIPS ASM; both the error message and the method of invocation!
Why doesn't Windows have a standarized interface to this? Who knows? Ubuntu is, thankfully, simple enough I can start to ween the people I know from the tits of MS long enough that they can start to look at Apple's offerings.
Once people realize that there exist applications different from what is familiar to do what they wish to do, they suddenly feel empowered and can move past MS.
"... especially considering the very existence of the game was revealed by Bill Gates talking about how it would parry the PlayStation 3 launch."
I thought it was revealed by the giant "PREORDER HALO 3 NOW" banner that pops up when you beat the "final" boss in Halo 2. How could anyone follow up such a finale? Perhaps with the real ending!
Seriously, Halo 2 was un-fucking-finished. The only people who won't admit it are fanboys. I'd like to think it's a joke that you don't get the preorder screen when you beat the game on legendary, but seriously...
1.20 (Canadian dollars per litre) = 3.83171193 U.S. dollars per US gallon
A wee bit higher, but I expect that's because the local stations currently have a $0.40/litre markup over what the fuel taxes are.
I'm waiting for biodiesel to become popular..
Take a look at the google topic. Here, I'll make it easy. Hmm, we have ~1 story per day. Some days get 2, some 0, but the average for the past week is 1/day.
Now let's review the content: speculation, rumours, and outright lies, coupled with a small mix of facts.
I think Zonk has proven that he's aware of what's going on, and he's able to make a fairly well played post on the topic. I think this is perfectly topical and great. If you don't get the joke, head on over to here and decheck Zonk as an edior. I would prefer you to not post on his stories!
It's funny, laugh!
I salute you :D
To justforaday!
*drinks*
Handles dual SATA and GF6800 fine here.
You want a good name with good components, not just something that's expensive. Lots of places put black paint and go-faster stripes on Tawainese shit and sell it for lot$.
Unless there's some really radical pronunciation changes between US and Canadian english, I think you'll find that affect is pronounced "AH-fect" and effect pronounced "EEEE-fect". Not really the same at all. Kinda like your and you're don't sound the same; your ends on an R sound, while you're is the sound of you + re (you + rrh, an extra h over your).
My ears can distinguish these; it makes it very interesting to hear how some people who are proficient actors still don't know the difference between you're and your.