" first they refused to put out any sports games on the dreamcast..."
Oh, it gets even better than that--they also stated in an interview printed in Next Generation magazine that they believed DC would not survive without their support.
I picked up the latest issue of Next Generation today. Interviewed is
Electronic Arts Senior VP and Chief Creative Officer (whatever that is),
Bing Gordon.
Gordon bitches that Sega should have gone with 3Dfx for the Dreamcast. But the real kicker is the following:
Next Generation: Do you think Dreamcast can succeed, long term, if EA
doesn't support it?
Gordon: No.
That remark made my blood boil, and I don't even play sports games.
(And if you really want to work yourslf into a lather, lets not forget the president of Working Designs, identifying himself by name, actually posting (on several occasions) in the primary sega newsgroup that the DC was headed for an early demise)
I had the symantec antivirus product on my win98 box, but after the free trial expired I uninstalled it. Despite my best efforts to remove every trace of the program I couldn't find a way to keep it from showing a window at every login that tried to convince me to pay for a subscription.
I had that happen with Ghost 2002 on a win98 laptop when I tried to uninstall it in favor of Ghost 2003 (it supported external USB drives in DOS). '2003 kept claiming that I had '2002 installed and that the Win9x version of '2003 "cannot upgrade an older version", despite my having uninstalled '2002.
I finally had to go into the Registry, and delete every occurance of "ghost". Turns out that Ghost leaves literally dozens of orphan keys strewn throughout the registry when it uninstalls. After I removed them, '2003 was finally able to install. (The actual process of cloning to the external drive was a exercise in frustration until I tried copying patition-to-partition instead of drive-to-drive, but that's a response for my post in the story about top ten persistent design flaws ).
(Not a reply specifically to this parent, but it was as good a place as any to bring this up...)
Last time I checked, there was no such thing as "gangbang.slashdot.org"
Really, does anybody expect common street thugs to keep a close eye on gee-whiz crimefighting technologies, let alone employ elaborate countermeasures to defeat them during a spur-of-the-moment stickup? To think even a substantial number of these guys plan their assaults like a military operation is worth at best, a few chuckles to anyone whose watched enough of those 'police video' reality shows.
Example:
In New York City, it's common knowledge that the NYPD targets subway farebeaters to intercept mayehem-inclined individuals looking to ply their trade in the subway, as well as those already wanted on other arrest warrants. The logic being that if you have been committing, or are looking to commit serious crimes, then you're not going to be inclined to pay the fare going into the subway.
This is no secret plot. It has been widely discussed in the newspapers over and over again how many people wanted on outstanding warrants got caught when they were busted for evading the fare. So the logical defense against this tactic is obvious--pay the fare and you won't get stopped and checked out, right?
Well, the criminal element obviously didn't (and still hasn't) figured this out, since they were getting snagged in numbers great enough that crime in the subways practically went into a nosedive before the rest of the city followed suit. That's right, for a time statistics showed you were actually safer in the subway than above ground, contrary to popular opinion. Right now, those same crime statistics show NYC (yeah, that includes The Bronx too) is substantially safer than most large cities, including those indicated in the article.
Addendum: there is also a reason to curb firing-into-the-air "celebrations", since what goes up must come down, and bullets fired up in the air have been documented coming down and causing injuries and deaths among individuals fairly well removed from the shooter's location.
can someone please tell me how xm radio knows you have a subscribtion or not, i dont see how it works since its one way wireless...
Each XM unit comes with a serial number incorporated into the hardware (firmware?). You don't have to subscribe to purchase the unit, but a subscription is necessary to activate it. Until then all you can get is the preview station on Channel 1.
Once you call in (or log in at the XM website) to subscribe, you give your unit's number, and the authorization comes over the satellite signal once payment is confirmed.
I got my unit using the Opie & Anthony promotion (listeners already on their FoundryMusic mailing list prior to their satellite debut were given the oppurtunity to sign up and get the basic hardware for $50), and it supposedly came pre-activated, but I needed to resubmit the radio's code a couple of times on the XM website before the unit picked up the signal and started loading the stations into memory. After that smooth sailing.
Rather than get the boombox unit (I have the home kit), I used a workaround consisting of the automotive adapter/FM transmitter in conjunction with an AC-DC power supply with 12V automotive power output . This way I can use the transmitter in the house (it also functions as the reciever's power supply), listening with an FM-equipped MP3 player as I move about the house, as well as recording if I desire, since I have a Yepp player with FM recording, as well as an Archos Jukebox recorder that can grab the last 30 seconds of audio preceding a recording session, just in case you decide to record after the song's started.
I'd certainly get more use out of the MiFi, but I'd wait for a bit of a price drop before investing in one (you can add additional recievers to your account for an extra fee). As it is, I've used the home kit in the car using the car adapter/transmitter, and the stock indoor antenna works fine sitting on the dashboard. You only need a secure spot to sit the reciever, as it's a bit nose-heavy in the home docking station.
I'm not quite sure if the service was the reason Howard Stern choose to sign a contract with Sirius, but I'm fairly certain I could come up with half a billion other factors that helped his decision process...
Chief among them being that Opie & Anthony were already on XM when he made his announcement (coincidentally, occurring just as O&A made their debut on sat radio) , maybe?. Stern likes O&A about as much as Slashdot likes the RIAA. He at one time had prevailed upon management to forbid the two from even mentioning his name on the air (the two shows were under the same corporate umbrella).
Speculation has it that O&A were kept on their contracts for two years after being taken off the air, and paid a pile of $$$ for essentially doing nothing, just to forestall the possibility of a competitor snapping them up and putting them on AM drive directly opposite Stern.
He isn't upset that they are grey, just that he can't find out WHY they are grey. I agree with him, I think that they should be grey and have tool tip text explaining why.
Seconded. I'm currently wrestling with an old Win98-based P-II laptop that seems supernaturally determined to prevent me from cloning its puny 4GB HDD (>90% full) to a newer, slightly less puny 10GB one.
After days of fiddling with drivers to get the external drive recognized under DOS in its USB enclosure (works perfectly in Windows--too bad you can't clone from within Win9x), the dos-based cloning software either falsely reports bad sectors in the source (Ghost 2003) or just spazzing out come time to write the copy (Ghost '02 & PowerQuest DriveCopy), I finally take it's HD out, put it in a second USB enclosure, and hook both drives to another machine running the XP version of PowerQuest's DriveImage 7, which can clone from within Windows (unlike the Win9x version, which simply dies of a fatal exception on it's title screen so I have no idea what it does). So I'm attempting to clone from drive E: to drive F:
Guess which option in the entire Copy Drive wizard is the only one greyed out?
"Resize drive to fill unallocated space"
And yes, you guessed it -- going through with the operation anyway results in a perfectly bootable cloned HDD -- except that the new drive thinks it's the exact same size as the old one. Why? Disabling the drive resize feature in a drive cloning operation is just beyond stupefying. And yet it gave me no other choice.
I'd try Ghost 9.0 on the XP box, but Powerquest was acquired by Symantec, and Ghost 9.0's drive copying documentation contains the same text as the PowerQuest app.
The magic 8-ball is saying "Outlook not so good" (no pun intended). Might wind up having to invest in a copy of PartitionMagic or something like that.
Now, if I was starting a company, what would be most important to me would be locating where the overhead is the lowest, but that's just me. The other advantage of setting up shop in a cow pasture somewhere is employee lock-in. Basically, if somebody wants to quit, they have to sell their house and move to find a new job, unlike, say, the Silicon Valley, where you can find another job in the same field right down the street.
(emphasis mine)
Maybe more CEO's will adopt this model. The employees will then be double screwed when they eventually get outsourced or downsized:)
I found out a few years ago that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York has a trademark on the appearance of a typical New York City subway car, of all things.
I found out after I left my e-mail address in a flyer informing interested MTA employees that one of the companies currently making O-gauge electric trains, (MTH) was going to release models of NYC subways. I subsequently got an e-mail from the senior assistant counsel of the MTA that basically said "You know, you require permission from us to make such things. Provide proof of permission or explain why you don't think you need it.". I phoned him the next day and that's when I found out about the trademark. Of course, I was in the clear since I was only publicising the product of a company that I had only the most tenuous connection to, but a similar letter had already been sent directly to the company in any event. (BTW, this was long before 9/11)
I already knew their route designation symbols (single-digit numbers or letters superimposed on colored circles or diamonds) were trademarked, but a trademark on the subway trains themselves was new to me.
---PCJ
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
> If the market really says that the only possible price for music is zero, what should the RIAA do? Give away the music for free, with little ads in it?
With all the prevailing protestation that "The **AA should find/should have found a new business model", I was wondering how long it would take for somebody here to raise this question.
I haven't seen, nor have been able to come up with, any "models" that don't end with "countless copies then appear on filesharing networks."
>>"Hell, how did Metallica ever get their fanbase but through fans passing around tapes?"
>And lost it as quickly for condemning the same.
Specifically, they condemmed mass distribution to complete strangers with minimal effort (i.e. Internet P2P).
Physically making analog recordings of concerts and physically dubbing/mailing or otherwise physically transporting analog copies (i.e. cassettes) to interested friends/ parties was specifically noted as being okay by the band.(probably still is)
(source: interview on the O&A radio show)
(During this same interview it was also mentioned by the band member being interviewed that Metallica, unlike most bands/performers, owned the rights to a significant portion, (if not all) of their material, which motivated their pointed efforts to attack P2P)
Of course, it's far easier to believe they turned their backs on the fanbase and condemned all copying, so I'm not discounting the possibility that they fell from grace due to that perception becoming larger than the reality. I'm not even a Metallica fan (or a fan of the musical genre they perform in), but the above assertion caught my attention given the then-current Napster stinkeroo (and Camp Chaos' 'Napster Bad' cartoons fresh in my mind).
For example, on Starwars when using hyper drive, the stars would extend out into lines and kind of flash away, and you'd see a big flash on screen.
But "hyper drive" (I believe it was referred to as "light speed") wasn't fast enough for Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis)--he demanded "Ludicrous Speed" over the objections of Spaceball One's captain.
As the ship accelerated past "Light Speed", the speed indicator on the bridge first moved to "Ridiculous Speed, then finally to "Ludicrous Speed", at which point the stretched-out stars in the forward viewscreen receded off-screen, replaced by a square tunnel of plaid-patterned light advancing from the distance.
And as Spaceball One roared past its target, the occupants of the fleeing space winnebago saw the ship as an immense ribbon of plaid racing over and ahead of them, prompting the astonished remark "It's Spaceball One. She's gone to Plaid". (as if nobody thought it possible)
At least that's how I remember it--"Spaceballs" was the first flick I bought to try out my first DVD-equipped laptop.
The above is from this encyclopedia article. A sanity check of the figures shows that the meteor had nothing to do with the evolutionary event that you're talking about.
The Toba supervolcano eruption was implicated in one such sharp decline in the human population (it's mentioned about 3/4 of the way through the linked transcript)
Six-year-old install of 98SE on the P-II laptop that serves as my primary dinking-around machine. Of course it's fully patched, Ad-Aware+Spybot fully updated, using Eudora Pro, and never used or even configured Outlook with any of my data (but it's been patched too). I often leave it on over weekends without issue. It's only been hit with one worm (Emmanuel) that I set off accidentally while clicking around my attatchment folder looking for flash animations. Prior to that, the worm had lain dormant for almost 6 months. After that, I got real good at identifying suspiscious emails and whacking their attatchments into the bitbucket (I assigned a.wav of a loud toilet flush to the act of emptying the recycle bin to celebrate their demise).
It runs behind a homebuilt P-4 1.7 tower, running it's install of '98SE for three years, mostly running the modem shared by my network (too cheap to pay $50 a month for broadband). Also fully patched, scanned regularly for spy/adware, and often runs unattended for entire weekends without incident. I know that's not really much to brag about, but it stays up well enough that no one loses any sleep if it's left on for a few days
That arrangement apparently kept my brother's XP laptop from catching Blaster while getting his first updates (though I had to help him with a browser hijacker once, but that's an IE issue (and he fixed his next encounter with one himself)). I also updated my first XP laptop through it, and my first Win2000 laptop (and that one needed to sip 45 megs out of Windows update)
Sheesh, I even managed to get a ME laptop to behave itself. Had Pinnacle Studio 8 crash repeatedly after getting into a fight with Kernel32.exe (or so it said), while Ulead Videostudio 6 and Windows Media Player 7, as well as the OS itself, kept chugging along as if nothing happened. Too bad I lost that machine after accidentally leaving it on an Amtrak train a month or so ago, so no more proof of my "accomplishment".
Current Ion drives can deliver >10x more power overall per Kg compared to rockets - but they do it slowly, over months/years.. Rockets can deliver "punch" at a specific time. Advantages/Disadvantages both ways really.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I don't think I'd want to depend on a thruster that takes that long to develop it's 'punch' for braking while headed toward something as close to the Sun as Mercury.
To be fair, some of the streetcar replacement was done as a transitioning of transit systems from the fixed, "bad" rail to the flexible "good" busses.
Certainly. I don't believe for a moment that all of the systems would've survived without the interference of the auto industry. (Most interurbans were already on shaky ground by the 1920s) But a fair number of systems were converted over the objection of the communities they served, and it stands to reason that if the will of the people were observed, some of that physical plant may well be around today, albeit municipally owned and operated.
-- the driver can't just decide to make a turn because they feel like it or because "dispatch said so", often missing stops and in the worst cases even getting lost!
I've seen the gamut--from buses (even articulated ones) detouring up my street (a one-way residential street) because of accidents/fires on the main route, to showing a substitute driver which way to turn on the Bx35 because his only orientation (he was on overtime from another garage serving a different part of the city) was that he was given a route map (not completely detailed in spots) to study without actually being shown the route before being assigned a bus that day.
How does it work? During normal operation, nothing apparently touches the rail. I've seen them on sections under bridges. It's not clear why they would be there
It's a guard rail. It doesn't prevent derailments so much as it prevents a derailed car from straying off the track structure. On a bridge it's supposed to prevent a derailed car from moving far enough laterally to fall off the side. A ground-level platform would probably have tracks so protected to keep any derailments from straying sideways into the platform area.
On sharp curves, a guard rail is placed close to the inside rail so that the wheel flange on the outer wheel doesn't bite into the railhead (which wears out both prematurely). Instead, the larger surface area of the back of the inner wheel (on the inside of the curve) rubs against the side of the guard rail, keeping the outer flange off the outer railhead.
It's because the government subsidized passenger train service at the time. The money on the rails is freight. Passenger service has ALWAYS been a losing proposition for the lines.When the government withdrew the passenger train subsidies, the rail lines went right back to freight only. The only one left with government funding was Amtrak.
Minor correction. Freight railroads shouldered the burden of passenger services on their own, helped along by government contracts to carry mail along with those passengers. Some trains depended on mail so much that they had more mail cars than passenger cars.
When the government canceled the mail contracts in favor of air transport, this touched off a rash of passenger service abandonments that ultimately led the government to create Amtrak in order to prevent passenger trains from vanishing entirely.
Freight carrier Conrail was also created by the government in response to a wave of bankrupcies that threatened to wipe out all the major Northeast freight railroads. The difference being that freight became profitable again, as did Conrail, which was subsequently sold and divided between CSX and Norfolk Southern.
Given Amtrak's prices, I think the only people who bother are those who want to take a 'land cruise' vacation and not actually use it to just get from point A to point B.
I don't remember where I heard it--it might've been an interview with Amtrak's current president himself--but the carrier's statistics indicate that most riders on long-distance trains are actually travelling between intermediate points on the route and comparitivley few are going end-to-end.
I remember taking summertime trips from NYC to South Carolina in my youth, and I do recall that the train got progressivley more crowded as it headed south to Washington DC, but many of the riders still on board after DC had disembarked in Virginia and North Carolina by the time I had reached our destination in SC, even though the train was going all the way to Florida. Also, I don't recall most of the folks getting off south of DC looking like they were on vacation.
In any event, public transit thrived despite our lack of physical density for a good 60 years, and then died. Perhaps the point could be made that it could no longer successfully compete against private transit in our relatively non-dense environment, but even the bostonwash DC corridor has very poor transit now as compared to history and yet remains rather dense.
The problem is a good deal more complex than you suggest.
Ever watch the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It was partly based on events surrounding the destruction of the streetcar here in the US.
Pages 3 and 4 of the linked article get to the nitty gritty. in a nutshell, the street railway companies were specifically targeted to be acquired, their trackage torn up, and replaced with buses. The antitrust laws on the books at the time didn't specifically address the notion of one industry infiltrating a competing one in order to destroy it from within, so the parties involved got less than a wrist slap when finally hauled into court. And they kept doing it after being found guilty.
At one time it was possible (if not completely practical) to travel from Hoboken to Delaware by streetcar, from Times Square to practically any other streetcar system in the Northeast just by transferring from one company's service to another where systems met (the tracks were often interconnected even where services didn't overlap at the meet point). It was even supposedly possible at one time to travel from New York City to Wisconsin by trolley, minus two stretches that had to be covered by railroad passenger services.
And all of it was privately built, owned and operated. No doubt much of it would have faltered even without the cancerous infiltration of the auto industry in the mid 20th century, but a significant portion of the system would more than likely be in place today (no doubt under municipal ownership) had it not been outright destroyed.
Here is a list of streetcar systems that were taken over by National City Lines, a bus company owned at the time by an alliance of major players in the auto, petroleum and tire industries.
I have it, but haven't played it yet. Had far more experience with the city bus in Midtown Madness (and actually winning some contests with it (!) ).
"Cruise" mode in MM is somewhat like a "driving simulation" in that you have no set goal, just drive around interacting with traffic. But the CPU-controlled vehicles plow into each other far too often to be anywhere near realistic. And your only hint that you've done something wrong is when a parked patrol car suddenly decides you've become Public Enemy No. 1, at which point their strenuous attemps to run you off the road sends all pretense of realism out the window.
2) because the HUGE injection of current into the ground causes the ground itself to "rise" from a nominal 0 volts to several kilo- or even mega-volts, and that voltage falls off as the square of the distance... so that if your two legs are 10 feet and 12 feet respectively from the channel termination point, you might experience a voltage of several kV (or more) between them. This causes a current to flow up one leg and down the other, and makes you (and your goodies, don't ya know) very unhappy. This is worse if you happen to have four legs which CAN'T be placed together, like if you're a cow or horse. Zap!
In one of the lightning documentaries, (you've probably seen this one) there is a clip of a soccer game taking place on a rain-soaked field. Lightning strikes the ground off to the side of the field, and roughly a third of the players immediatley fall, knocked senseless by the jolt.
Knowing point (2) above about electrical flow across a body with two points of ground contact during a nearby strike leads me to believe that the players who remained on their feet and uninjured were the ones who had only one foot in contact with the ground at the moment of the strike. However, nothing of the sort was ever mentioned or discussed in repeated showings of this footage, leaving me to wonder if I guessed right.
Well, that particular incident wasn't mentioned, (I wouldn't discount it as a factor, though). The only thing that came out in this particular interview was their animosity toward effortless mass distribution to strangers as opposed to the traditional laborious manual duping for a small circle of interested friends
The comment you made in your first reply regarding spammers vs. snail junkmail illustrates the bandmember's sentiments better than anything I said.
"Metallica had the same thing going for the first decade of their careers. You'd get a special "Recording Section" pass and get to sit/stand right by the speaker stack for the best sound. Then they did an about face with the whole Napster thing, and we all know how that went over.
"
I recall a couple of years or so ago, a member of Metallica was interviewed on the now defunct "Opie & Anthony" radio show in NYC. One of the first things O&A hit him with is the above statement.
I don't remember the band member's name, but he stated that the kind of bootlegging Metallica sanctioned was the kind where you made an analog recording, duplicated it manually on cassettes, and then paid actual money to mail these copies to friends whom you personally knew would be interested in Metallica's music. What the band objected to was the idea of taking a single copy and posting it to the Web so that (words to the effect of)"a million strangers can grab a copy with just a mouse click"
Now, I don't happen to be a Metallica fan (they're not of a genre that I go out of my way to listen to), and I happen to have found the "Napster bad" flash cartoons very funny. But I do believe given the context, he had a point. Certainly, O&A (who were/are far more into this sort of thing than I ever will be) accepted his explanation.
History Channel's series Modern Marvels did an episode on Robinson Industries, a Canadian trucking firm that also builds/maintains ice highways during the winter months. The process is described here
Of interest is how the truckers must travel at a certain speed when traveling over lakes and rivers. Seems that the truck's presence deflects the ice in such a way that creates pressure waves in the water underneath, such that if the truck approaches the shore too quickly, the pressure wave can actually blow out the ice in front of the truck as the wave hits the shore.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it gets even better than that--they also stated in an interview printed in Next Generation magazine that they believed DC would not survive without their support.
(Quoted from this thread in Google Groups):
That remark made my blood boil, and I don't even play sports games.
(And if you really want to work yourslf into a lather, lets not forget the president of Working Designs, identifying himself by name, actually posting (on several occasions) in the primary sega newsgroup that the DC was headed for an early demise)
---PCJ
I had that happen with Ghost 2002 on a win98 laptop when I tried to uninstall it in favor of Ghost 2003 (it supported external USB drives in DOS). '2003 kept claiming that I had '2002 installed and that the Win9x version of '2003 "cannot upgrade an older version", despite my having uninstalled '2002.
I finally had to go into the Registry, and delete every occurance of "ghost". Turns out that Ghost leaves literally dozens of orphan keys strewn throughout the registry when it uninstalls. After I removed them, '2003 was finally able to install. (The actual process of cloning to the external drive was a exercise in frustration until I tried copying patition-to-partition instead of drive-to-drive, but that's a response for my post in the story about top ten persistent design flaws ).
I imagine NAV is probably the same.
---PCJ
Last time I checked, there was no such thing as "gangbang.slashdot.org"
Really, does anybody expect common street thugs to keep a close eye on gee-whiz crimefighting technologies, let alone employ elaborate countermeasures to defeat them during a spur-of-the-moment stickup? To think even a substantial number of these guys plan their assaults like a military operation is worth at best, a few chuckles to anyone whose watched enough of those 'police video' reality shows.
Example:
In New York City, it's common knowledge that the NYPD targets subway farebeaters to intercept mayehem-inclined individuals looking to ply their trade in the subway, as well as those already wanted on other arrest warrants. The logic being that if you have been committing, or are looking to commit serious crimes, then you're not going to be inclined to pay the fare going into the subway.
This is no secret plot. It has been widely discussed in the newspapers over and over again how many people wanted on outstanding warrants got caught when they were busted for evading the fare. So the logical defense against this tactic is obvious--pay the fare and you won't get stopped and checked out, right?
Well, the criminal element obviously didn't (and still hasn't) figured this out, since they were getting snagged in numbers great enough that crime in the subways practically went into a nosedive before the rest of the city followed suit. That's right, for a time statistics showed you were actually safer in the subway than above ground, contrary to popular opinion. Right now, those same crime statistics show NYC (yeah, that includes The Bronx too) is substantially safer than most large cities, including those indicated in the article.
Addendum: there is also a reason to curb firing-into-the-air "celebrations", since what goes up must come down, and bullets fired up in the air have been documented coming down and causing injuries and deaths among individuals fairly well removed from the shooter's location.
---PCJ
Each XM unit comes with a serial number incorporated into the hardware (firmware?). You don't have to subscribe to purchase the unit, but a subscription is necessary to activate it. Until then all you can get is the preview station on Channel 1.
Once you call in (or log in at the XM website) to subscribe, you give your unit's number, and the authorization comes over the satellite signal once payment is confirmed.
I got my unit using the Opie & Anthony promotion (listeners already on their FoundryMusic mailing list prior to their satellite debut were given the oppurtunity to sign up and get the basic hardware for $50), and it supposedly came pre-activated, but I needed to resubmit the radio's code a couple of times on the XM website before the unit picked up the signal and started loading the stations into memory. After that smooth sailing.
Rather than get the boombox unit (I have the home kit), I used a workaround consisting of the automotive adapter/FM transmitter in conjunction with an AC-DC power supply with 12V automotive power output . This way I can use the transmitter in the house (it also functions as the reciever's power supply), listening with an FM-equipped MP3 player as I move about the house, as well as recording if I desire, since I have a Yepp player with FM recording, as well as an Archos Jukebox recorder that can grab the last 30 seconds of audio preceding a recording session, just in case you decide to record after the song's started.
I'd certainly get more use out of the MiFi, but I'd wait for a bit of a price drop before investing in one (you can add additional recievers to your account for an extra fee). As it is, I've used the home kit in the car using the car adapter/transmitter, and the stock indoor antenna works fine sitting on the dashboard. You only need a secure spot to sit the reciever, as it's a bit nose-heavy in the home docking station.
---PCJ
Chief among them being that Opie & Anthony were already on XM when he made his announcement (coincidentally, occurring just as O&A made their debut on sat radio) , maybe?. Stern likes O&A about as much as Slashdot likes the RIAA. He at one time had prevailed upon management to forbid the two from even mentioning his name on the air (the two shows were under the same corporate umbrella).
Speculation has it that O&A were kept on their contracts for two years after being taken off the air, and paid a pile of $$$ for essentially doing nothing, just to forestall the possibility of a competitor snapping them up and putting them on AM drive directly opposite Stern.
---PCJ
Seconded. I'm currently wrestling with an old Win98-based P-II laptop that seems supernaturally determined to prevent me from cloning its puny 4GB HDD (>90% full) to a newer, slightly less puny 10GB one.
After days of fiddling with drivers to get the external drive recognized under DOS in its USB enclosure (works perfectly in Windows--too bad you can't clone from within Win9x), the dos-based cloning software either falsely reports bad sectors in the source (Ghost 2003) or just spazzing out come time to write the copy (Ghost '02 & PowerQuest DriveCopy), I finally take it's HD out, put it in a second USB enclosure, and hook both drives to another machine running the XP version of PowerQuest's DriveImage 7, which can clone from within Windows (unlike the Win9x version, which simply dies of a fatal exception on it's title screen so I have no idea what it does). So I'm attempting to clone from drive E: to drive F:
Guess which option in the entire Copy Drive wizard is the only one greyed out?
"Resize drive to fill unallocated space"
And yes, you guessed it -- going through with the operation anyway results in a perfectly bootable cloned HDD -- except that the new drive thinks it's the exact same size as the old one. Why? Disabling the drive resize feature in a drive cloning operation is just beyond stupefying. And yet it gave me no other choice.
I'd try Ghost 9.0 on the XP box, but Powerquest was acquired by Symantec, and Ghost 9.0's drive copying documentation contains the same text as the PowerQuest app.
The magic 8-ball is saying "Outlook not so good" (no pun intended). Might wind up having to invest in a copy of PartitionMagic or something like that.
---PCJ
(emphasis mine)
Maybe more CEO's will adopt this model. The employees will then be double screwed when they eventually get outsourced or downsized :)
(sorry, somebody had to shoot for the funny)
---PCJ
I found out after I left my e-mail address in a flyer informing interested MTA employees that one of the companies currently making O-gauge electric trains, (MTH) was going to release models of NYC subways. I subsequently got an e-mail from the senior assistant counsel of the MTA that basically said "You know, you require permission from us to make such things. Provide proof of permission or explain why you don't think you need it.". I phoned him the next day and that's when I found out about the trademark. Of course, I was in the clear since I was only publicising the product of a company that I had only the most tenuous connection to, but a similar letter had already been sent directly to the company in any event. (BTW, this was long before 9/11)
I already knew their route designation symbols (single-digit numbers or letters superimposed on colored circles or diamonds) were trademarked, but a trademark on the subway trains themselves was new to me.
---PCJ
With all the prevailing protestation that "The **AA should find/should have found a new business model", I was wondering how long it would take for somebody here to raise this question.
I haven't seen, nor have been able to come up with, any "models" that don't end with "countless copies then appear on filesharing networks."
---PCJ
>And lost it as quickly for condemning the same.
Specifically, they condemmed mass distribution to complete strangers with minimal effort (i.e. Internet P2P).
Physically making analog recordings of concerts and physically dubbing /mailing or otherwise physically transporting analog copies (i.e. cassettes) to interested friends/ parties was specifically noted as being okay by the band.(probably still is)
(source: interview on the O&A radio show)
(During this same interview it was also mentioned by the band member being interviewed that Metallica, unlike most bands/performers, owned the rights to a significant portion, (if not all) of their material, which motivated their pointed efforts to attack P2P)
Of course, it's far easier to believe they turned their backs on the fanbase and condemned all copying, so I'm not discounting the possibility that they fell from grace due to that perception becoming larger than the reality. I'm not even a Metallica fan (or a fan of the musical genre they perform in), but the above assertion caught my attention given the then-current Napster stinkeroo (and Camp Chaos' 'Napster Bad' cartoons fresh in my mind).
---PCJ
But "hyper drive" (I believe it was referred to as "light speed") wasn't fast enough for Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis)--he demanded "Ludicrous Speed" over the objections of Spaceball One's captain.
As the ship accelerated past "Light Speed", the speed indicator on the bridge first moved to "Ridiculous Speed, then finally to "Ludicrous Speed", at which point the stretched-out stars in the forward viewscreen receded off-screen, replaced by a square tunnel of plaid-patterned light advancing from the distance.
And as Spaceball One roared past its target, the occupants of the fleeing space winnebago saw the ship as an immense ribbon of plaid racing over and ahead of them, prompting the astonished remark "It's Spaceball One. She's gone to Plaid". (as if nobody thought it possible)
At least that's how I remember it--"Spaceballs" was the first flick I bought to try out my first DVD-equipped laptop.
---PCJ
The Toba supervolcano eruption was implicated in one such sharp decline in the human population (it's mentioned about 3/4 of the way through the linked transcript)
---PCJ
Dunno if the site actually crashed the browser, since I never revisited that particular site afterwards (pre-1999)
---PCJ
It runs behind a homebuilt P-4 1.7 tower, running it's install of '98SE for three years, mostly running the modem shared by my network (too cheap to pay $50 a month for broadband). Also fully patched, scanned regularly for spy/adware, and often runs unattended for entire weekends without incident. I know that's not really much to brag about, but it stays up well enough that no one loses any sleep if it's left on for a few days
That arrangement apparently kept my brother's XP laptop from catching Blaster while getting his first updates (though I had to help him with a browser hijacker once, but that's an IE issue (and he fixed his next encounter with one himself)). I also updated my first XP laptop through it, and my first Win2000 laptop (and that one needed to sip 45 megs out of Windows update)
Sheesh, I even managed to get a ME laptop to behave itself. Had Pinnacle Studio 8 crash repeatedly after getting into a fight with Kernel32.exe (or so it said), while Ulead Videostudio 6 and Windows Media Player 7, as well as the OS itself, kept chugging along as if nothing happened. Too bad I lost that machine after accidentally leaving it on an Amtrak train a month or so ago, so no more proof of my "accomplishment".
---PCJ
I'm no rocket scientist, but I don't think I'd want to depend on a thruster that takes that long to develop it's 'punch' for braking while headed toward something as close to the Sun as Mercury.
It just has "oops" written all over it :)
---PCJ
Certainly. I don't believe for a moment that all of the systems would've survived without the interference of the auto industry. (Most interurbans were already on shaky ground by the 1920s) But a fair number of systems were converted over the objection of the communities they served, and it stands to reason that if the will of the people were observed, some of that physical plant may well be around today, albeit municipally owned and operated.
-- the driver can't just decide to make a turn because they feel like it or because "dispatch said so", often missing stops and in the worst cases even getting lost!
I've seen the gamut--from buses (even articulated ones) detouring up my street (a one-way residential street) because of accidents/fires on the main route, to showing a substitute driver which way to turn on the Bx35 because his only orientation (he was on overtime from another garage serving a different part of the city) was that he was given a route map (not completely detailed in spots) to study without actually being shown the route before being assigned a bus that day.
---PCJ
It's a guard rail. It doesn't prevent derailments so much as it prevents a derailed car from straying off the track structure. On a bridge it's supposed to prevent a derailed car from moving far enough laterally to fall off the side. A ground-level platform would probably have tracks so protected to keep any derailments from straying sideways into the platform area.
On sharp curves, a guard rail is placed close to the inside rail so that the wheel flange on the outer wheel doesn't bite into the railhead (which wears out both prematurely). Instead, the larger surface area of the back of the inner wheel (on the inside of the curve) rubs against the side of the guard rail, keeping the outer flange off the outer railhead.
---PCJ
Minor correction. Freight railroads shouldered the burden of passenger services on their own, helped along by government contracts to carry mail along with those passengers. Some trains depended on mail so much that they had more mail cars than passenger cars.
When the government canceled the mail contracts in favor of air transport, this touched off a rash of passenger service abandonments that ultimately led the government to create Amtrak in order to prevent passenger trains from vanishing entirely.
Freight carrier Conrail was also created by the government in response to a wave of bankrupcies that threatened to wipe out all the major Northeast freight railroads. The difference being that freight became profitable again, as did Conrail, which was subsequently sold and divided between CSX and Norfolk Southern.
---PCJ
I don't remember where I heard it--it might've been an interview with Amtrak's current president himself--but the carrier's statistics indicate that most riders on long-distance trains are actually travelling between intermediate points on the route and comparitivley few are going end-to-end.
I remember taking summertime trips from NYC to South Carolina in my youth, and I do recall that the train got progressivley more crowded as it headed south to Washington DC, but many of the riders still on board after DC had disembarked in Virginia and North Carolina by the time I had reached our destination in SC, even though the train was going all the way to Florida. Also, I don't recall most of the folks getting off south of DC looking like they were on vacation.
---PCJ
The problem is a good deal more complex than you suggest.
Ever watch the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It was partly based on events surrounding the destruction of the streetcar here in the US.
The trolley didn't fall--it was pushed.
Pages 3 and 4 of the linked article get to the nitty gritty. in a nutshell, the street railway companies were specifically targeted to be acquired, their trackage torn up, and replaced with buses. The antitrust laws on the books at the time didn't specifically address the notion of one industry infiltrating a competing one in order to destroy it from within, so the parties involved got less than a wrist slap when finally hauled into court. And they kept doing it after being found guilty.
At one time it was possible (if not completely practical) to travel from Hoboken to Delaware by streetcar, from Times Square to practically any other streetcar system in the Northeast just by transferring from one company's service to another where systems met (the tracks were often interconnected even where services didn't overlap at the meet point). It was even supposedly possible at one time to travel from New York City to Wisconsin by trolley, minus two stretches that had to be covered by railroad passenger services.
And all of it was privately built, owned and operated. No doubt much of it would have faltered even without the cancerous infiltration of the auto industry in the mid 20th century, but a significant portion of the system would more than likely be in place today (no doubt under municipal ownership) had it not been outright destroyed.
Here is a list of streetcar systems that were taken over by National City Lines, a bus company owned at the time by an alliance of major players in the auto, petroleum and tire industries.
---PCJ
Tokyo Bus Guide. Description here.
I have it, but haven't played it yet. Had far more experience with the city bus in Midtown Madness (and actually winning some contests with it (!) ).
"Cruise" mode in MM is somewhat like a "driving simulation" in that you have no set goal, just drive around interacting with traffic. But the CPU-controlled vehicles plow into each other far too often to be anywhere near realistic. And your only hint that you've done something wrong is when a parked patrol car suddenly decides you've become Public Enemy No. 1, at which point their strenuous attemps to run you off the road sends all pretense of realism out the window.
---PCJ
In one of the lightning documentaries, (you've probably seen this one) there is a clip of a soccer game taking place on a rain-soaked field. Lightning strikes the ground off to the side of the field, and roughly a third of the players immediatley fall, knocked senseless by the jolt.
Knowing point (2) above about electrical flow across a body with two points of ground contact during a nearby strike leads me to believe that the players who remained on their feet and uninjured were the ones who had only one foot in contact with the ground at the moment of the strike. However, nothing of the sort was ever mentioned or discussed in repeated showings of this footage, leaving me to wonder if I guessed right.
---PCJ
The comment you made in your first reply regarding spammers vs. snail junkmail illustrates the bandmember's sentiments better than anything I said.
---PCJ
I recall a couple of years or so ago, a member of Metallica was interviewed on the now defunct "Opie & Anthony" radio show in NYC. One of the first things O&A hit him with is the above statement.
I don't remember the band member's name, but he stated that the kind of bootlegging Metallica sanctioned was the kind where you made an analog recording, duplicated it manually on cassettes, and then paid actual money to mail these copies to friends whom you personally knew would be interested in Metallica's music. What the band objected to was the idea of taking a single copy and posting it to the Web so that (words to the effect of)"a million strangers can grab a copy with just a mouse click"
Now, I don't happen to be a Metallica fan (they're not of a genre that I go out of my way to listen to), and I happen to have found the "Napster bad" flash cartoons very funny. But I do believe given the context, he had a point. Certainly, O&A (who were/are far more into this sort of thing than I ever will be) accepted his explanation.
---PCJ
Of interest is how the truckers must travel at a certain speed when traveling over lakes and rivers. Seems that the truck's presence deflects the ice in such a way that creates pressure waves in the water underneath, such that if the truck approaches the shore too quickly, the pressure wave can actually blow out the ice in front of the truck as the wave hits the shore.
---PCJ