One of the cool things about the port for the Atari ST was when the dude played his piano and you had your MIDI compatible device hooked up to the onboard MIDI ports, the music he played channeled through. I remember leaving the computer on, eating dinner and hearing The Entertainer on my keyboard.
One game that comes to mind that was unique at the time was Mail Order Monsters.
Game play sucked because of loading times, 2 minutes of loading for 30 seconds of game play followed by another 1 minute of post round then repeat. All the virtually limitless combinations, my favorite was the squid with the grav gun or the lion bear with beast fu.
If it costs 10 cents to make 1000 garbage cans and you feel that $20 a can is what people should pay then so be it. More power to you. If vendor B says that there is absolutely no educated skill is required in putting a plug in a vacuum form machine and that $5 a can is what people should pay and have the company still make a profit, the more power to them. The market will sort it out.
Basically the market told Rubbermaid that $20 a can isn't going to cut it.
Rubbermaid had some overpriced crap and I mean crap. How many rubbermaid clothes baskets have you gone through in your college years? How many overpriced garbage cans have had their lips tear? If I'm going to pay $15 for an 8 gallon garbage can, I don't expect to replace it every 3 years. At that rate, I'll buy the $5 one.
I remember Rubbermaid. Basically sold plastic slugs, vacuum formed in various shapes and were way overpriced. I can understand the bias against Wal-Mart in stories like that but I'm sure there is another side as I've seen in local economies more recently in the dot com boom.
How much of that is Rubbermaids arrogance and sticking to a high price to keep inflated salaries? If Vendor B can provide the same garbage can from the same plastic supplier and for 60% less, is it really the fault of Wal-Mart?
I've witnessed small businesses overcharge ( and when I say overcharge, I mean the large businesses had a budget big enough to cover the service because there wasn't market research done as to how much it should really cost and the small business took the budget ) large local customers for services that were sparse in the dot com era. The small businesses didn't diversify and had 70% of their income on 1 or 2 contracts that were these large customers. Eventually the real cost of services appear after a few years and the small shop is out of business because it based payroll and other fees on the bigger budgeted services.
If Wal-Mart has a `good enough` product for a fair or cheap price, I'll take it. If Wal-Mart has a product that isn't `good enough`, I'll shop elsewhere, case in point, their produce sucks where I live so I go to the local supermarket and pay a higher price, gladly.
Wal-Mart sucks the essense out of every product they buy.
There is no `essence` in sporting goods, cheap furniture, mass produced DVDs, diapers, and toilet paper. If you want nice furniture that has `essence`, go to Robb and Stucky or some guy that builds chairs in his garage; but then you'll bitch about the high prices. I will say that I am surprised that Wilson still has a lot of `hands-on` in the process of making tennis balls. Wal-Mart provides goods that are `good enough` for the people that shop there.
I suppose you're going to bitch about the $4.00 prescriptions that Wal-Mart will offer saying that they will undercut the CVS, OSCO, Walgreens, and local drugstore pharmacies. Let's just forget about the people that will benefit from that because they should be paying $20/bottle just to be fair. Wal-Mart pays their staff what they're worth and obviously what they're willing to take. You can't demand $1,000,000 for a $200,000 home. It doesn't work that way. People aren't assigned employment at Wal-Mart, they voluntarily walk in the door and fill out an application. Wal-Mart empowers people to have things that they normally wouldn't have and for rural America, provide a much needed service for thousands of people.
If you've ever lived in a small town where the real town was 20+ miles away, Wal-Mart is a very much appreciated entity.
I have my issues with Wal-Mart especially as it comes to property that the municipalities try to take away from citizens but I blame both the local politicians and Wal-Mart for that.
People may hate termites but they do have a place in the eco-system.
If the cows can't escape, then that's their problem. Heads of lettuce can't escape either but according to the above articles and Mythbusters, these plants defintely do send distress signals when being attacked. Make of it what you will, soon there will be a plants right nutjob wanting us to eat some sort meal made from bacteria.
First you have the so called animal rights nutjobs that want everyone to stop eating meat, next we're going to have plant right whacks that want to ban us from eating plants. What the hell is left to eat? If it isn't organic, the granola crowd isn't going to bite, and if it's manufactured (genetically engineered), we'll have activists spouting the dangers of modified DNA.
Some of us older guys could build one out of stuff we find in our backyard. Inspired by the professor of Gilligans Island and using the crystal from the Six Million Dollar Man radio, learning science was fun as a kid.
Really. Haven't there been these design challenges before. I seem to remember one from Microsoft when Win98SE came out. Same time of the Hot Wheels and Barbie PC. What always happens is that some Alienware looking crap gets the attention but the Mac still wins for design.
I don't know about Canada but in the states, concerned parents groups urged the regulators to make it against regulations for local TV personalities to endorse products. That was back when it was costly to produce a commercial and syndicated content were sold as 1ups, not packages. It was common for the Weatherman to put on a cowboy outfit or the like for the morning kids show and give a 15-30 second spot on milk from the local dairy saying "And now for Popeye, brought to you from `Dairy name here`".
Today, local radio personalities can endorse products, but not TV.
My grandparents witnessed the birth of aviation all the way to the moon landings. Same with my great-grandfather, born in 1860, died in 1974.
My era is the information age. I've witnessed the PC boom, personal communication, the death of typing class - to be made into a game now, and really, the birth of the digital age as we see it unfold now.
I look forward to the next 20 years to see how different it will be from now.
I remember being a lad in school in 1973 and being told point blank that the world will run out of oil in 30 years. Yeah, public education.
...why couldn't a weather man host a kids show now?
I'm a little older than Sesame Street. I grew up in a small town near 2 bigger cities that each had TV stations. 1 town had a morning kids show, the other had an afternoon movie show that gave away money to callers and an afternoon kids show.
Back then, the TV lineup was, local kids show, Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo; then you had your Saturday morning cartoons. Today there are 5 cable channels and 1 satellite channel dedicated to programming that is appealing to children.
There is an audio snippet here about A History of Local Children's TV Programs. Basically, a `concerned` parents group urged the regulators to make it against regulations for a local TV personality to endorse products.
Well, the local outlets got their money from the local economy and the money was used to purchase syndicated content i.e. cartoons,movies. It was cheaper for a supermarket, appliance store, local dairy, or car dealer to pay someone to say 15-30 seconds of good things than it was to produce a commercial for 15-30 seconds and pay the airtime. Some stations kept their show, some didn't. It depended upon if the host was doing it for `public service` or not. Syndicated packages became available (You just don't get Gilligans Island, you get Gilligans Island, Petticoat Junction, F-Troop, and Green Acres) and the local stations had more content for cheaper. Cable became wide spread and today, we have the Wiggles.
I was a kid in the 70s and I remember the blue pamphlets with the Civil Defense logo with the lists of what to do in case of nuclear fallout. I particularly remember the cartoon of kids playing, the next panel was some black dots near a telephone pole, the next panel was duck and cover.
I also lived in a hurricane pro area so having bottled water and canned goods was just a way of life.
Wow. The babysitter I hire for my kids was born in 1992.
Between you, she, and a host of the current MTV generation, you guys have no concept of:
The significance of the Berlin Wall - you used to be able to buy pieces of it when you were in grade school. Life before the internet. Life without cell phones. A time when you couldn't buy telephones in the store - they had to be leased from the Bells and from their stores. 61 cents a minute to a town 90 miles away was the normal fee for intrastate long distance. Life before VCRs; and yeah, the Wizard of OZ was on every Easter and that was your only chance to see it. There was a smoking section in airplanes and the ashtrays in the arm rests used to open. A time before the Space Shuttle. A time when rocket trips to the moon were current events. My 6th birthday had the Apollo capsule on the cake. A time before Star Wars. A time when your local TV weatherman hosted a kids show on their station. It's kind of against regulations now.
And as far as I matter, Cuba has always been shut off to the US. I eagerly await the day when travel from the US will be allowed.
The logic here is that Apple actually designs and builds computer hardware and Microsoft writes software that powers computer hardware. Both have a hand in engineering hardware to accomodate their software. The big picture that they miss is the power part as it isn't likely that either camp has the number of servers that Google has. Thousands, maybe yes. Close to half a million servers is a mind blowing amount. Their[Apple and MS] standpoint is how to make it consumer friendly.
Google's standpoint is how to make it efficient. Then we can make it consumer friendly later.
Can you imagine dealing with passwords on half a million servers? (joking)
I really don't think that Google is a bunch of shoeless code jockeys playing with database results and fiddling with power connectors to fry capacitors. I'm pretty sure that there are intelligent, educated people that get a Google payroll paycheck. I'm also willing to bet that if some of the intelligent, educated people that are experts in this area that aren't on Google's payroll did receive a Google paycheck for their opinion and dissertation on the matter.
Once could conclude that with a server farm of 450,000, that they probably employ some knowlegeable, educated people that probably know more than your average lay person about power distribution in the enterprise. Hell, the lead maintenance man of any skycraper could teach you gobs of information on how to cool a room.
At any rate, what would make Google's opinion worth any less merit than anything from Microsoft or Apple with regards to power distribution on a motherboard?
If you're talking about old games like Knights of the Round, Ultima III took me weeks beat and I didn't have a job then either. Ultima IV was easier as well as Bards Tale.
Thats why the electric car died and why we still have no effective R&D material from the big 'energy' companies that are supposedly putting gobs of money, theirs and ours (grants from the government), into alternative 'energy' sources. Instead what we get is better oil detection and extraction methods. Fine, but I want my R&D papers that proves other methods. Giving fat paychecks to managers of a supposed R&D project to ensure that X isn't viable isn't how I want my money spent.
It always has been the little guy that has the answer.
Coming from someone who used to skydive on a regular basis, we used to do vomit comets on some trips to altitude. It depended on the pilot. We have about 2-5 seconds of weightlessness on tape and it was pretty cool.
I'm not into conspiracy stories but removing the convenience stores would put a hurt on them. I'm not talking about the petroleum in the ground, it's the nickel and dimes they get off the impulse items as well in corporate stores and/or franchisees.
Exxon isn't likely to put up a charging station. It would be a franchisee opening up another location or adding a charging station without prior approval with a "ask for forgiveness not permission" attitude.
What would car crashes look like in the movies in the future with these cars?
A blinding light, a loud "BZZZZZT!", and a mess of welded metal with organic matter fused to it. Of course the good guys would be able to cut themselves out or break away and the bad guys would have their limbs and face in various places of the ex-vehicle.
A) You'd have a trickle charge device at home B) You'd get some sort of storage system like solar houses and geo thermal houses have to pass on stored electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, that opening was pretty damn fantastic but the let down was the end when all he says "no, no, NOOOO" and you see his big head.
Ghostbusters was the other speaking game at the time.
One of the cool things about the port for the Atari ST was when the dude played his piano and you had your MIDI compatible device hooked up to the onboard MIDI ports, the music he played channeled through.
I remember leaving the computer on, eating dinner and hearing The Entertainer on my keyboard.
One game that comes to mind that was unique at the time was Mail Order Monsters.
Game play sucked because of loading times, 2 minutes of loading for 30 seconds of game play followed by another 1 minute of post round then repeat.
All the virtually limitless combinations, my favorite was the squid with the grav gun or the lion bear with beast fu.
Also, don't forget Archon and Adept.
That's my point.
If it costs 10 cents to make 1000 garbage cans and you feel that $20 a can is what people should pay then so be it. More power to you.
If vendor B says that there is absolutely no educated skill is required in putting a plug in a vacuum form machine and that $5 a can is what people should pay and have the company still make a profit, the more power to them. The market will sort it out.
Basically the market told Rubbermaid that $20 a can isn't going to cut it.
Rubbermaid had some overpriced crap and I mean crap. How many rubbermaid clothes baskets have you gone through in your college years? How many overpriced garbage cans have had their lips tear?
If I'm going to pay $15 for an 8 gallon garbage can, I don't expect to replace it every 3 years. At that rate, I'll buy the $5 one.
I remember Rubbermaid. Basically sold plastic slugs, vacuum formed in various shapes and were way overpriced.
I can understand the bias against Wal-Mart in stories like that but I'm sure there is another side as I've seen in local economies more recently in the dot com boom.
How much of that is Rubbermaids arrogance and sticking to a high price to keep inflated salaries?
If Vendor B can provide the same garbage can from the same plastic supplier and for 60% less, is it really the fault of Wal-Mart?
I've witnessed small businesses overcharge ( and when I say overcharge, I mean the large businesses had a budget big enough to cover the service because there wasn't market research done as to how much it should really cost and the small business took the budget ) large local customers for services that were sparse in the dot com era. The small businesses didn't diversify and had 70% of their income on 1 or 2 contracts that were these large customers.
Eventually the real cost of services appear after a few years and the small shop is out of business because it based payroll and other fees on the bigger budgeted services.
If Wal-Mart has a `good enough` product for a fair or cheap price, I'll take it.
If Wal-Mart has a product that isn't `good enough`, I'll shop elsewhere, case in point, their produce sucks where I live so I go to the local supermarket and pay a higher price, gladly.
Wal-Mart sucks the essense out of every product they buy.
There is no `essence` in sporting goods, cheap furniture, mass produced DVDs, diapers, and toilet paper.
If you want nice furniture that has `essence`, go to Robb and Stucky or some guy that builds chairs in his garage; but then you'll bitch about the high prices.
I will say that I am surprised that Wilson still has a lot of `hands-on` in the process of making tennis balls.
Wal-Mart provides goods that are `good enough` for the people that shop there.
I suppose you're going to bitch about the $4.00 prescriptions that Wal-Mart will offer saying that they will undercut the CVS, OSCO, Walgreens, and local drugstore pharmacies. Let's just forget about the people that will benefit from that because they should be paying $20/bottle just to be fair.
Wal-Mart pays their staff what they're worth and obviously what they're willing to take. You can't demand $1,000,000 for a $200,000 home. It doesn't work that way.
People aren't assigned employment at Wal-Mart, they voluntarily walk in the door and fill out an application.
Wal-Mart empowers people to have things that they normally wouldn't have and for rural America, provide a much needed service for thousands of people.
If you've ever lived in a small town where the real town was 20+ miles away, Wal-Mart is a very much appreciated entity.
I have my issues with Wal-Mart especially as it comes to property that the municipalities try to take away from citizens but I blame both the local politicians and Wal-Mart for that.
People may hate termites but they do have a place in the eco-system.
If the cows can't escape, then that's their problem.
Heads of lettuce can't escape either but according to the above articles and Mythbusters, these plants defintely do send distress signals when being attacked. Make of it what you will, soon there will be a plants right nutjob wanting us to eat some sort meal made from bacteria.
First you have the so called animal rights nutjobs that want everyone to stop eating meat, next we're going to have plant right whacks that want to ban us from eating plants.
What the hell is left to eat? If it isn't organic, the granola crowd isn't going to bite, and if it's manufactured (genetically engineered), we'll have activists spouting the dangers of modified DNA.
Some of us older guys could build one out of stuff we find in our backyard.
Inspired by the professor of Gilligans Island and using the crystal from the Six Million Dollar Man radio, learning science was fun as a kid.
Story with a small picture of the 'designed' personal computers.y +lags+in+holiday+crunch/2100-1017_3-234533.html
i splay_~reviews
http://news.com.com/Barbie,+Hot+Wheels+PC+deliver
Epinion of the PC
http://www.epinions.com/kifm-Toys-All-Barbie_PC/d
Really. Haven't there been these design challenges before. I seem to remember one from Microsoft when Win98SE came out. Same time of the Hot Wheels and Barbie PC.
What always happens is that some Alienware looking crap gets the attention but the Mac still wins for design.
I don't know about Canada but in the states, concerned parents groups urged the regulators to make it against regulations for local TV personalities to endorse products.
That was back when it was costly to produce a commercial and syndicated content were sold as 1ups, not packages.
It was common for the Weatherman to put on a cowboy outfit or the like for the morning kids show and give a 15-30 second spot on milk from the local dairy saying "And now for Popeye, brought to you from `Dairy name here`".
Today, local radio personalities can endorse products, but not TV.
My grandparents witnessed the birth of aviation all the way to the moon landings.
Same with my great-grandfather, born in 1860, died in 1974.
My era is the information age.
I've witnessed the PC boom, personal communication, the death of typing class - to be made into a game now, and really, the birth of the digital age as we see it unfold now.
I look forward to the next 20 years to see how different it will be from now.
I remember being a lad in school in 1973 and being told point blank that the world will run out of oil in 30 years. Yeah, public education.
I'm a little older than Sesame Street.
I grew up in a small town near 2 bigger cities that each had TV stations.
1 town had a morning kids show, the other had an afternoon movie show that gave away money to callers and an afternoon kids show.
Back then, the TV lineup was, local kids show, Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo; then you had your Saturday morning cartoons.
Today there are 5 cable channels and 1 satellite channel dedicated to programming that is appealing to children.
There is an audio snippet here about A History of Local Children's TV Programs.
Basically, a `concerned` parents group urged the regulators to make it against regulations for a local TV personality to endorse products.
Well, the local outlets got their money from the local economy and the money was used to purchase syndicated content i.e. cartoons,movies.
It was cheaper for a supermarket, appliance store, local dairy, or car dealer to pay someone to say 15-30 seconds of good things than it was to produce a commercial for 15-30 seconds and pay the airtime.
Some stations kept their show, some didn't. It depended upon if the host was doing it for `public service` or not.
Syndicated packages became available (You just don't get Gilligans Island, you get Gilligans Island, Petticoat Junction, F-Troop, and Green Acres) and the local stations had more content for cheaper.
Cable became wide spread and today, we have the Wiggles.
I was a kid in the 70s and I remember the blue pamphlets with the Civil Defense logo with the lists of what to do in case of nuclear fallout.
I particularly remember the cartoon of kids playing, the next panel was some black dots near a telephone pole, the next panel was duck and cover.
I also lived in a hurricane pro area so having bottled water and canned goods was just a way of life.
Wow. The babysitter I hire for my kids was born in 1992.
Between you, she, and a host of the current MTV generation, you guys have no concept of:
The significance of the Berlin Wall - you used to be able to buy pieces of it when you were in grade school.
Life before the internet.
Life without cell phones.
A time when you couldn't buy telephones in the store - they had to be leased from the Bells and from their stores.
61 cents a minute to a town 90 miles away was the normal fee for intrastate long distance.
Life before VCRs; and yeah, the Wizard of OZ was on every Easter and that was your only chance to see it.
There was a smoking section in airplanes and the ashtrays in the arm rests used to open.
A time before the Space Shuttle.
A time when rocket trips to the moon were current events. My 6th birthday had the Apollo capsule on the cake.
A time before Star Wars.
A time when your local TV weatherman hosted a kids show on their station. It's kind of against regulations now.
And as far as I matter, Cuba has always been shut off to the US. I eagerly await the day when travel from the US will be allowed.
The logic here is that Apple actually designs and builds computer hardware and Microsoft writes software that powers computer hardware.
Both have a hand in engineering hardware to accomodate their software. The big picture that they miss is the power part as it isn't likely that either camp has the number of servers that Google has. Thousands, maybe yes. Close to half a million servers is a mind blowing amount.
Their[Apple and MS] standpoint is how to make it consumer friendly.
Google's standpoint is how to make it efficient. Then we can make it consumer friendly later.
Can you imagine dealing with passwords on half a million servers? (joking)
I really don't think that Google is a bunch of shoeless code jockeys playing with database results and fiddling with power connectors to fry capacitors.
I'm pretty sure that there are intelligent, educated people that get a Google payroll paycheck.
I'm also willing to bet that if some of the intelligent, educated people that are experts in this area that aren't on Google's payroll did receive a Google paycheck for their opinion and dissertation on the matter.
Once could conclude that with a server farm of 450,000, that they probably employ some knowlegeable, educated people that probably know more than your average lay person about power distribution in the enterprise.
Hell, the lead maintenance man of any skycraper could teach you gobs of information on how to cool a room.
At any rate, what would make Google's opinion worth any less merit than anything from Microsoft or Apple with regards to power distribution on a motherboard?
If you're talking about old games like Knights of the Round, Ultima III took me weeks beat and I didn't have a job then either.
Ultima IV was easier as well as Bards Tale.
Just start banning *.mobi senders on your email server. I am.
Thats why the electric car died and why we still have no effective R&D material from the big 'energy' companies that are supposedly putting gobs of money, theirs and ours (grants from the government), into alternative 'energy' sources.
o _killed_the_electric_car.html
Instead what we get is better oil detection and extraction methods. Fine, but I want my R&D papers that proves other methods. Giving fat paychecks to managers of a supposed R&D project to ensure that X isn't viable isn't how I want my money spent.
It always has been the little guy that has the answer.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/45596/wh
Coming from someone who used to skydive on a regular basis, we used to do vomit comets on some trips to altitude. It depended on the pilot. We have about 2-5 seconds of weightlessness on tape and it was pretty cool.
That was my unmentioned point.
I'm not into conspiracy stories but removing the convenience stores would put a hurt on them.
I'm not talking about the petroleum in the ground, it's the nickel and dimes they get off the impulse items as well in corporate stores and/or franchisees.
Exxon isn't likely to put up a charging station. It would be a franchisee opening up another location or adding a charging station without prior approval with a "ask for forgiveness not permission" attitude.
Ha!
What would car crashes look like in the movies in the future with these cars?
A blinding light, a loud "BZZZZZT!", and a mess of welded metal with organic matter fused to it.
Of course the good guys would be able to cut themselves out or break away and the bad guys would have their limbs and face in various places of the ex-vehicle.
2 things come to mind.
A) You'd have a trickle charge device at home
B) You'd get some sort of storage system like solar houses and geo thermal houses have to pass on stored electricity.