I have access to all that crap, but using it via the phone is pointless. IT takes so long to hammer in addresses on those crappy little keypads.
Sure, if I could link it to the PC and use my PC to do the browsing... wait, I can. Shit, if I want to take the phone out of my pocket I could use IRDA to get ~1MB/sec to the phone... plenty fast enough for 3G.
But wait there's more. If you but a phone or laptop today we'll throw in a thing called Bluetooth. Your phone connects to your PC with bluetooth and can share the broadband connection that the phone has. Multiple bluetooth users can connect to my phone simultaneously, making it interesting for sharing the internet connection.
Not that I ever bother. There are enough unsecured APs around with much faster connections behind them than a 3G phone.
3G data here (in Australia) is farking expensive. I don't know why you would want to share your limited data allowance that you pay more than $1/meg for with everyone else?
Looks to me like a typical management-induced knee jerk reaction to a minor problem and the subsequent FUD to try and hide the fact that management were in error.
This and the plan to put a camera in every house...
What next?
I would sell my soul for total control over you. Or something like that. What has come of the world that corporate greed has taken over from the free harmonious society? I would love to say everyone will just scrap computers and move onto other ventures (like going outside) but that is the Utopian view. In reality the Orwellian scenario us coming upon us. It won't be long now people.
What is sad about this is they are touting the "legitimite" uses of making sure software is unmodified and doesn't contain root kits and protecting sensitive data from attackers. I find it funny that SHA1SUM and gpg --checksig tells me when my download isn't what the author intended. Cryptoloop (and a tonne of other software) keeps my files highly secure and safe from prying eyes even if they do steal my disks.
There are no legitimite uses for this technology that can't already be accomplished today. There are only evil uses!
The share holders are in dire need of the sex workers union. Anyone who is going to use this as an excuse to sue is fucking crazy. Hot Coffee didn't make them lose money. It publicised the game to a lot more people than ever before. I know people who paid for a copy to just see that extra bit.
You always have the option to say "none of your business" because they can't legally ask you that question. Asking how much you earn in an interview is akin to asking if you're homosexual.
If they ask the question and you don't get the job you have good grounds for taking them to court; regardless of whether you answer it or not.
If they are asking how much you earn you dont' want to work there because it's obvious they don't really care too much about your right to privacy.
Well I don't get it then, because both work fine on Fedora for me; not that I use Gnome very much because I think it is a steaming pile of goat's piss.
The only writing driver for NTFS that is any good is the one Microsoft themselves wrote. All the others are well known for causing massive filesystem corruption. The Linux kernel one can't even create files - you can only modify existing files so long as they don't get larger.
Not so much of an issue if you're backing up using a Windows box and only need to read the data later. Big issue if you're using another OS to do all your backing up.
Gnome uses the underlying facilities like UDEV too.
I have no issue on KDE with hotplugging USB storage devices, inserting and removing cds, zip disks, LS120 disks, etc. They all just appear and Konqueror lets you mount/unmount them like any other device.
Are you using Gnome and KDE on different distros?
Re:Screenshots from article
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ta for the screens, but in response to your comment...
Gnome makes me want to reinstall WindowsXP. I am glad we are not all forced to use Gnome becuase I really feel that it is a backwards step from the interface shipped with Windows. Gnome might be polished to a mirror shine, but it is still clunky to use. I feel like i'm fighting it every time I use it.
KDE might be less polished, require more work to initially configure, and present more options (and hence confuse new users) but it is less clunky under the hood. It took me a day to configure KDE from the defaults shipped with my OS to a competely different set of options that make it just blend into the computer. I didn't set out to change the config and I just tweaked here and there until I was satisfied with how it used.
I could never get Gnome to work like that - there was always something wrong with it, no matter how long I sat in front of it trying to tweak it so it didn't get in the way all the time.
Anywho... to summarise: Gnome sucks compared to KDE if you really want a desktop that will just bugger off into the background and not wrestle with you.
Drug tests and DNA samples can be taken non-intrusively.
Chipping someone is a body modification that leaves a scar, and an even bigger one when you leave the company; do you really want to leave that chip in there forever even though it's "deactivated"? They will have a much harder time getting that past the hippies and the tin foil hat brigade.
No complaint apart from the fact it's from Microsoft and they have a history of being unreliable... and there is no way to write NTFS unless you're using Windows.
I haven't seen any unbiassed comparisons of NTFS against some of the other file systems, but if you want to limit your liability I'd go with something that's open. MS have a habbit of breaking backwards compatibility, and Vista seems to want to do a lot of that. Who says the version of Windows in the future will support today's version of NTFS?
At least with an open system you could actually re-engineer support into the OS of the future if you ever needed it and it wasn't there.
journaling methods to prevent data loss due to some natural disaster while data is being shifted around
Journalling doesn't do this!. Journalling helps reduce file system corruption in the event of a catastrophic failure while modifying the file system - ie, it's possible to bring it back to the last clean state before it crashed - journalling does not prevent data loss. You might say "well filesystem corruption and data loss are the same", but they are not. If the filesystem is corrupted, the data is not lost. It just becomes not easily retreivable. If the data is lost then it becomes entirely irretreivable.
I tried using SGI's XFS due to its promising details, but I was met with countless IO errors
Have you considered your hardware is shit? I use XFS on terabytes of raided disks and have been for more years than I remember... 5 or so? I don't see any I/O errors. XFS is very reliable and I trust it with my data.
I feel that Ext3 is not optimal for this
Well not all of your post was dumb!
ReiserFS is too slow when it comes to reading large data files
How is it slow? It takes a few microseconds longer to access the first data sector because it does some extra processing first? Give me a break. Filesystem performance for journalled filesystems is mostly bound by writing speed, and this is a function of how the journal is updated. I doubt you would notice the difference in read speed unless you ran a million tests over a million different files, took some sort of average for the filesystems and quibbled over a few milliseconds.
Reiser4 isn't mature enough to entrust my digital assets to
You entrust your assets digitally? Shit, why do you trust any filesystem? They are all buggy. Give me a break.
If you don't like it, keep backups on other media; buy a tape drive and a robot and get in bed with a good archiving company to securely store the backups. Don't come one here and poo poo all of the file systems known to man then tell me "is there anything better"? About the only 4 in common use you left out were JFS (good for large databases but not much use if you have a lot of small files), FAT[12/16/32] (not much good for anything really), NTFS (see FAT, but more complex) and ISO9660. I'll concede there are others, but if you want something that's in common use so you can actually retreive your data when the world turns to shit...
At least, it doesn't need to be cut out to be used by a sufficiently motivated attacker.
No, but if you ever leave your job it needs to be cut out by a suitably skilled surgeon; leaving the bloody mess, the days/weeks of painful injury to the arm and then finally... a fucking scar!
Actually, if they install it incorrectly they need to cut it out. If it moves, they need to cut it out. If it breaks down they need to cut it out. The list goes on.
I wonder if WorkCover will compensate me for the "injury" sustained as a direct result of the installation of the device... oh, and also the injury sustained as a result of its removal. Those things occurred as a direct result of carrying out my job!
I have seen the scars where other similarly sized implants have been removed from people, and it's not pretty. If the implant is installed incorrectly then it's even worse.
They won't require you to implant the chip to keep your job. But how long can you keep your job if you can't access the datacenter?
Well I am keeping my fucking job - I refused to be implanted with anything for my employer. When they fire my ass for refusing to have body modifications (which, funnily enough, they expressly forbid in my contract of employment) I'll be taking the $100M compensation for unfair dismissal payout.
They can't possibly force this - let-alone implement it. It breaks all the fundamental human rights laws.
I have a great desire to work nights, for a lot of reasons.
1. I am a night person, coding best between the hours of 12AM and 8AM. 2. I have a good friend in the US who I hardly get to talk to because of the shitty hours that I do work and the time difference. 3. I'd be willing to take over your job and work odd hours to better utilise my time...
I work in a similar environment. We have a custom wireless phone system that I don't believe can be integrated to the PC - so I am a bit pissed off about that.
I don't know about wireless, but certainly a good quality padded, closed back set of phones with a decent retractable boom mic and some way to tie it to the phone as well.
What I am after is an external sound card - USB or something. The two PCs on my desk have crappy sound cards (most sound cards are crappy) and with decent headphones you can hear all of the internal computer noise unless you bring up the output level to dangerous levels.
I have a pair of senheizer HD-220s or somesuch (they're from the 200 series but I can't remember the specific number because they are at work where I am not).
They are semi-open back. They block out most ambient noise just by putting them on - the general chatter fades out. Talking in the next cube, rap-tap-tapping and the phone doesn't go.
Turn on some music and bam - nearly everything is gone. I play the music quietly all day and I don't have a problem. I can hear when people are talking to me or tapping on the cube, so it is cool.
God forbid technology should progress and old tools fall by the wayside as better ones become available.
The problem is that BETTER tools aren't available. The word processor is bloated and inefficient and requires access to computing facilities. How many of the current high school generation are capable of making legible notes in a book these days?
The computer tools are less efficient than the classical ones for many things. Preparing and typesetting a document is one thing you can use a computer for. Researching, note taking, paraphrasing, etc are others. If you don't have a full grasp of the classical (pen and paper) way of doing things then how are you supposed to sit and take quick, detailed notes. I tell you typing is infinitely slower than scribbling neatly with a pen an paper and I challenge you to find someone who can type as quick as they write.. and don't just say "i can" because I'll know you're lying; I've been typing for nigh-on 25 years and I am very efficient, but handwriting is still quicker. Let's add on to that making rough diagrams. It's pretty easy with pen and paper, but on computer it's time consuming and difficult compared to the classical option!
My previous point: how many kids can add two random integers under 100 without the use of their calculator these days? They can't. They certainly can't subtract them, multiply or divide them anymore. They don't have the powers of numerical estimation to gauge the ballpark of the solution. These things are fundamental to practically any serious career path that isn't flipping burgers.
I'm sorry... but you can't be serious. You're trying to tell me that you think that going to a library and looking in a book is faster than using Google, Wikipedia?
Google returns any page matching your choice of search terms, and Wikipedia is not a definitive resource. Both of these are starting points, but the information contained within cannot be considered as authorative. If you seriously take wikipedia articles as accurate, authorative sources then you need a serious lesson in the real world. By the time you find a soft copy of a particular journal article or book chapter that is a definitive reference on the topic, you could have gone to the local library, spoken to the librarian and arranged copies of many articles to be delivered to you almost instantly. Libraries have facilities in place to obtain electronic (or physical, if it takes your fancy) copies of just about anything in a very short time for very little cost (free for students of my previous uni). You'd know this if you didn't use Wikipedia as a definitive encyclopedia.
The Internet is full of shit. Anyone can publish a page and push their views, no matter how ill-founded or inaccurate their views. Anyone can publish "research", no matter how fundamentally flawed that research is. People like you (and the next generation of school kids) come along and take that information as accurate, quote it and propogate the garbage. The Internet serves as an Agenda-Pushing tool for many people. My (horrible) ex uses it daily. She'll search for hours to find the one lonely page by someone with no demonstrable expertise in the field that says what she's saying to prove her (incorrect) point and ignore the hundreds of other pages from more authorative sources that all prove her wrong. This is all because the "it's on the Internet, it must be right" mentality has been taught to people.
My point is not that the Internet is bad, just that it's not a good source of real information. There is no substitute for going to a library or a store or whatnot.
as well as all manner or reviews, ratings, and anything you could want to know
That are more often than not written by techno nerds who expect the device to do a million things more than it does, wanker (read: technology) reporters who don't know crap and just needed to write 500 words, or people with no clue that couldn't work their open fireplace even if i
Nope didn't misspell playstation. Playstation is yet another form of "Personal Computer". Just becasue it's a games box and not a general purpose machine doesn't mean that it's not a PC. The term PC has been usurped by BillyG to mean "intel-compatible grey box running Windows".
The theatre is next on the list to die. What, with my insane sound system, my 200" HD projected screen and my collection of DVDs I can be at the theatre with my girl in seconds, and it's so much more comfy... Not to mention the unthinkables that we don't get in trouble for at home;)
Cool thing is all of these bits that I love so much are affordable except the GF. They require regular (shiny) maintainence.
As commodity computing became a reality, and the technology required to run arcade-quality games became widespread, the draw of going to an arcade to play dampened significantly. It got to a point (around '99 or '00, plus or minus a bit depending on locale) where arcade machines were no longer able to outperform home computers and consoles. As a result, people were no longer willing to drop $50 a month at an arcade because they can spend that same $50 at home and get a BETTER gaming experience.
This was my point as well. After I made my previous post I stopped and thought about it a bit. I remember receiving a copy of Daytona on three floppy disks and installing it on my PC toward the end of the 90s. I was impressed by the fact that the game was almost identical to the arcade version, but without the $$$ figure associated. Of course, it was missing the controllers that I so loved about the arcade version. For all intents and purposes the PC version was fine for what I wanted to do; this was just racing around the track and having a bit of fun for an hour or so. Why spend an hour on the bus and then shovel money in for another hour when you can make better use of your time?
Video games/gamers have never really been social creatures. The arcade brings people together. A lot of the time (in my experience) friends and wellwishers tagged along as well, creating the social scene on the sidelines.
Internet gaming has become so popular becasue you can play against real people from the comfort of your own home and you don't actually have to deal with real people while you're doing it. Real people play better than machines because machines can only play the way they've been programmed. Real people learn from their mistakes and are able to improve/become more challenging as you play them. The collection of real people in game servers is also vastly more diverse than any programmer could possibly code into game elements.
To draw on my Daytona story again:
In the arcade, when you ran someone off the road the guy on the screen next to you would yell and scream at you. At home, you don't have to deal with that crap and can go on and play after you clobber someone.
DDR was used as an example here, but I think it's a crappy game. I watched the few people that ever used it at my local arcade recently and they were always pathetic losers trying to impress girls they'd brought out on a date. That's not to say everyone who plays it is a pathetic loser, but from what I saw they were. Oh, if you were wondering, I spent a lot of time at the local arcade playing air hockey because a full-sized table is just infeasible to fit in my house.
The arcade will likely never die (*note to self, get to Funworld while I'm in the US this year) but gaming has fundamentally changed of late too. Games have become larger, more complex and require massive investments of time just to learn. Then, the game carries on for weeks or months until you complete it. To be paying an arcade owner for all the time you're there would become a very expensive prospect. Arcade gaming works on relatively short, easily completed games where you can pay by the life, or per turn.
The arcade died the day powerful personal computers became affordable for the masses. Why go down to the arcade to stand in front of a machine and shovel money when you can just pass disks/carts/CDs around your friends and play all the latest games?
The trend continued and now "LANNING" is the new norm. Why go out when the Interdoodle has all the game servers you could ever need and your connection is plenty fast enough to use them?
Funny that. It displayed a whole bunch of random addresses every time I went there... hmns. They say you can't hide your IP on the Net, but there exists still anonymous proxies. You just gotta know where to look.
But this will likely scare off all the 1337 h4x0rz that think there "IP stealthing" software they paid $100 from some SPAM for is great.
Slashdot Mirror
I have access to all that crap, but using it via the phone is pointless. IT takes so long to hammer in addresses on those crappy little keypads.
Sure, if I could link it to the PC and use my PC to do the browsing... wait, I can. Shit, if I want to take the phone out of my pocket I could use IRDA to get ~1MB/sec to the phone... plenty fast enough for 3G.
But wait there's more. If you but a phone or laptop today we'll throw in a thing called Bluetooth. Your phone connects to your PC with bluetooth and can share the broadband connection that the phone has. Multiple bluetooth users can connect to my phone simultaneously, making it interesting for sharing the internet connection.
Not that I ever bother. There are enough unsecured APs around with much faster connections behind them than a 3G phone.
3G data here (in Australia) is farking expensive. I don't know why you would want to share your limited data allowance that you pay more than $1/meg for with everyone else?
We recently re-evaluated the term
Looks to me like a typical management-induced knee jerk reaction to a minor problem and the subsequent FUD to try and hide the fact that management were in error.
This and the plan to put a camera in every house...
What next?
I would sell my soul for total control over you. Or something like that. What has come of the world that corporate greed has taken over from the free harmonious society? I would love to say everyone will just scrap computers and move onto other ventures (like going outside) but that is the Utopian view. In reality the Orwellian scenario us coming upon us. It won't be long now people.
What is sad about this is they are touting the "legitimite" uses of making sure software is unmodified and doesn't contain root kits and protecting sensitive data from attackers. I find it funny that SHA1SUM and gpg --checksig tells me when my download isn't what the author intended. Cryptoloop (and a tonne of other software) keeps my files highly secure and safe from prying eyes even if they do steal my disks.
There are no legitimite uses for this technology that can't already be accomplished today. There are only evil uses!
The share holders are in dire need of the sex workers union. Anyone who is going to use this as an excuse to sue is fucking crazy. Hot Coffee didn't make them lose money. It publicised the game to a lot more people than ever before. I know people who paid for a copy to just see that extra bit.
Americans are so fucking mad
You always have the option to say "none of your business" because they can't legally ask you that question. Asking how much you earn in an interview is akin to asking if you're homosexual.
If they ask the question and you don't get the job you have good grounds for taking them to court; regardless of whether you answer it or not.
If they are asking how much you earn you dont' want to work there because it's obvious they don't really care too much about your right to privacy.
Well I don't get it then, because both work fine on Fedora for me; not that I use Gnome very much because I think it is a steaming pile of goat's piss.
The only writing driver for NTFS that is any good is the one Microsoft themselves wrote. All the others are well known for causing massive filesystem corruption. The Linux kernel one can't even create files - you can only modify existing files so long as they don't get larger.
Not so much of an issue if you're backing up using a Windows box and only need to read the data later. Big issue if you're using another OS to do all your backing up.
Gnome uses the underlying facilities like UDEV too.
I have no issue on KDE with hotplugging USB storage devices, inserting and removing cds, zip disks, LS120 disks, etc. They all just appear and Konqueror lets you mount/unmount them like any other device.
Are you using Gnome and KDE on different distros?
Ta for the screens, but in response to your comment...
Gnome makes me want to reinstall WindowsXP. I am glad we are not all forced to use Gnome becuase I really feel that it is a backwards step from the interface shipped with Windows. Gnome might be polished to a mirror shine, but it is still clunky to use. I feel like i'm fighting it every time I use it.
KDE might be less polished, require more work to initially configure, and present more options (and hence confuse new users) but it is less clunky under the hood. It took me a day to configure KDE from the defaults shipped with my OS to a competely different set of options that make it just blend into the computer. I didn't set out to change the config and I just tweaked here and there until I was satisfied with how it used.
I could never get Gnome to work like that - there was always something wrong with it, no matter how long I sat in front of it trying to tweak it so it didn't get in the way all the time.
Anywho... to summarise: Gnome sucks compared to KDE if you really want a desktop that will just bugger off into the background and not wrestle with you.
Drug tests and DNA samples can be taken non-intrusively.
Chipping someone is a body modification that leaves a scar, and an even bigger one when you leave the company; do you really want to leave that chip in there forever even though it's "deactivated"? They will have a much harder time getting that past the hippies and the tin foil hat brigade.
No complaint apart from the fact it's from Microsoft and they have a history of being unreliable... and there is no way to write NTFS unless you're using Windows.
I haven't seen any unbiassed comparisons of NTFS against some of the other file systems, but if you want to limit your liability I'd go with something that's open. MS have a habbit of breaking backwards compatibility, and Vista seems to want to do a lot of that. Who says the version of Windows in the future will support today's version of NTFS?
At least with an open system you could actually re-engineer support into the OS of the future if you ever needed it and it wasn't there.
journaling methods to prevent data loss due to some natural disaster while data is being shifted around
Journalling doesn't do this!. Journalling helps reduce file system corruption in the event of a catastrophic failure while modifying the file system - ie, it's possible to bring it back to the last clean state before it crashed - journalling does not prevent data loss. You might say "well filesystem corruption and data loss are the same", but they are not. If the filesystem is corrupted, the data is not lost. It just becomes not easily retreivable. If the data is lost then it becomes entirely irretreivable.
I tried using SGI's XFS due to its promising details, but I was met with countless IO errors
Have you considered your hardware is shit? I use XFS on terabytes of raided disks and have been for more years than I remember... 5 or so? I don't see any I/O errors. XFS is very reliable and I trust it with my data.
I feel that Ext3 is not optimal for this
Well not all of your post was dumb!
ReiserFS is too slow when it comes to reading large data files
How is it slow? It takes a few microseconds longer to access the first data sector because it does some extra processing first? Give me a break. Filesystem performance for journalled filesystems is mostly bound by writing speed, and this is a function of how the journal is updated. I doubt you would notice the difference in read speed unless you ran a million tests over a million different files, took some sort of average for the filesystems and quibbled over a few milliseconds.
Reiser4 isn't mature enough to entrust my digital assets to
You entrust your assets digitally? Shit, why do you trust any filesystem? They are all buggy. Give me a break.
If you don't like it, keep backups on other media; buy a tape drive and a robot and get in bed with a good archiving company to securely store the backups. Don't come one here and poo poo all of the file systems known to man then tell me "is there anything better"? About the only 4 in common use you left out were JFS (good for large databases but not much use if you have a lot of small files), FAT[12/16/32] (not much good for anything really), NTFS (see FAT, but more complex) and ISO9660. I'll concede there are others, but if you want something that's in common use so you can actually retreive your data when the world turns to shit...
Anywho!
At least, it doesn't need to be cut out to be used by a sufficiently motivated attacker.
No, but if you ever leave your job it needs to be cut out by a suitably skilled surgeon; leaving the bloody mess, the days/weeks of painful injury to the arm and then finally... a fucking scar!
Actually, if they install it incorrectly they need to cut it out. If it moves, they need to cut it out. If it breaks down they need to cut it out. The list goes on.
I wonder if WorkCover will compensate me for the "injury" sustained as a direct result of the installation of the device... oh, and also the injury sustained as a result of its removal. Those things occurred as a direct result of carrying out my job!
I have seen the scars where other similarly sized implants have been removed from people, and it's not pretty. If the implant is installed incorrectly then it's even worse.
They won't require you to implant the chip to keep your job. But how long can you keep your job if you can't access the datacenter?
Well I am keeping my fucking job - I refused to be implanted with anything for my employer. When they fire my ass for refusing to have body modifications (which, funnily enough, they expressly forbid in my contract of employment) I'll be taking the $100M compensation for unfair dismissal payout.
They can't possibly force this - let-alone implement it. It breaks all the fundamental human rights laws.
I have a great desire to work nights, for a lot of reasons.
1. I am a night person, coding best between the hours of 12AM and 8AM.
2. I have a good friend in the US who I hardly get to talk to because of the shitty hours that I do work and the time difference.
3. I'd be willing to take over your job and work odd hours to better utilise my time...
Outsource YOUR position to the same Indian company you outsourced everyone else's position to.
I work in a similar environment. We have a custom wireless phone system that I don't believe can be integrated to the PC - so I am a bit pissed off about that.
I don't know about wireless, but certainly a good quality padded, closed back set of phones with a decent retractable boom mic and some way to tie it to the phone as well.
What I am after is an external sound card - USB or something. The two PCs on my desk have crappy sound cards (most sound cards are crappy) and with decent headphones you can hear all of the internal computer noise unless you bring up the output level to dangerous levels.
I have a pair of senheizer HD-220s or somesuch (they're from the 200 series but I can't remember the specific number because they are at work where I am not).
They are semi-open back. They block out most ambient noise just by putting them on - the general chatter fades out. Talking in the next cube, rap-tap-tapping and the phone doesn't go.
Turn on some music and bam - nearly everything is gone. I play the music quietly all day and I don't have a problem. I can hear when people are talking to me or tapping on the cube, so it is cool.
God forbid technology should progress and old tools fall by the wayside as better ones become available.
The problem is that BETTER tools aren't available. The word processor is bloated and inefficient and requires access to computing facilities. How many of the current high school generation are capable of making legible notes in a book these days?
The computer tools are less efficient than the classical ones for many things. Preparing and typesetting a document is one thing you can use a computer for. Researching, note taking, paraphrasing, etc are others. If you don't have a full grasp of the classical (pen and paper) way of doing things then how are you supposed to sit and take quick, detailed notes. I tell you typing is infinitely slower than scribbling neatly with a pen an paper and I challenge you to find someone who can type as quick as they write.. and don't just say "i can" because I'll know you're lying; I've been typing for nigh-on 25 years and I am very efficient, but handwriting is still quicker. Let's add on to that making rough diagrams. It's pretty easy with pen and paper, but on computer it's time consuming and difficult compared to the classical option!
My previous point: how many kids can add two random integers under 100 without the use of their calculator these days? They can't. They certainly can't subtract them, multiply or divide them anymore. They don't have the powers of numerical estimation to gauge the ballpark of the solution. These things are fundamental to practically any serious career path that isn't flipping burgers.
I'm sorry... but you can't be serious. You're trying to tell me that you think that going to a library and looking in a book is faster than using Google, Wikipedia?
Google returns any page matching your choice of search terms, and Wikipedia is not a definitive resource. Both of these are starting points, but the information contained within cannot be considered as authorative. If you seriously take wikipedia articles as accurate, authorative sources then you need a serious lesson in the real world. By the time you find a soft copy of a particular journal article or book chapter that is a definitive reference on the topic, you could have gone to the local library, spoken to the librarian and arranged copies of many articles to be delivered to you almost instantly. Libraries have facilities in place to obtain electronic (or physical, if it takes your fancy) copies of just about anything in a very short time for very little cost (free for students of my previous uni). You'd know this if you didn't use Wikipedia as a definitive encyclopedia.
The Internet is full of shit. Anyone can publish a page and push their views, no matter how ill-founded or inaccurate their views. Anyone can publish "research", no matter how fundamentally flawed that research is. People like you (and the next generation of school kids) come along and take that information as accurate, quote it and propogate the garbage. The Internet serves as an Agenda-Pushing tool for many people. My (horrible) ex uses it daily. She'll search for hours to find the one lonely page by someone with no demonstrable expertise in the field that says what she's saying to prove her (incorrect) point and ignore the hundreds of other pages from more authorative sources that all prove her wrong. This is all because the "it's on the Internet, it must be right" mentality has been taught to people.
My point is not that the Internet is bad, just that it's not a good source of real information. There is no substitute for going to a library or a store or whatnot.
as well as all manner or reviews, ratings, and anything you could want to know
That are more often than not written by techno nerds who expect the device to do a million things more than it does, wanker (read: technology) reporters who don't know crap and just needed to write 500 words, or people with no clue that couldn't work their open fireplace even if i
Nope didn't misspell playstation. Playstation is yet another form of "Personal Computer". Just becasue it's a games box and not a general purpose machine doesn't mean that it's not a PC. The term PC has been usurped by BillyG to mean "intel-compatible grey box running Windows".
Just at the local theater alone,
The theatre is next on the list to die. What, with my insane sound system, my 200" HD projected screen and my collection of DVDs I can be at the theatre with my girl in seconds, and it's so much more comfy... Not to mention the unthinkables that we don't get in trouble for at home ;)
Cool thing is all of these bits that I love so much are affordable except the GF. They require regular (shiny) maintainence.
As commodity computing became a reality, and the technology required to run arcade-quality games became widespread, the draw of going to an arcade to play dampened significantly. It got to a point (around '99 or '00, plus or minus a bit depending on locale) where arcade machines were no longer able to outperform home computers and consoles. As a result, people were no longer willing to drop $50 a month at an arcade because they can spend that same $50 at home and get a BETTER gaming experience.
This was my point as well. After I made my previous post I stopped and thought about it a bit. I remember receiving a copy of Daytona on three floppy disks and installing it on my PC toward the end of the 90s. I was impressed by the fact that the game was almost identical to the arcade version, but without the $$$ figure associated. Of course, it was missing the controllers that I so loved about the arcade version. For all intents and purposes the PC version was fine for what I wanted to do; this was just racing around the track and having a bit of fun for an hour or so. Why spend an hour on the bus and then shovel money in for another hour when you can make better use of your time?
Video games/gamers have never really been social creatures. The arcade brings people together. A lot of the time (in my experience) friends and wellwishers tagged along as well, creating the social scene on the sidelines. Internet gaming has become so popular becasue you can play against real people from the comfort of your own home and you don't actually have to deal with real people while you're doing it. Real people play better than machines because machines can only play the way they've been programmed. Real people learn from their mistakes and are able to improve/become more challenging as you play them. The collection of real people in game servers is also vastly more diverse than any programmer could possibly code into game elements. To draw on my Daytona story again: In the arcade, when you ran someone off the road the guy on the screen next to you would yell and scream at you. At home, you don't have to deal with that crap and can go on and play after you clobber someone.
DDR was used as an example here, but I think it's a crappy game. I watched the few people that ever used it at my local arcade recently and they were always pathetic losers trying to impress girls they'd brought out on a date. That's not to say everyone who plays it is a pathetic loser, but from what I saw they were. Oh, if you were wondering, I spent a lot of time at the local arcade playing air hockey because a full-sized table is just infeasible to fit in my house.
The arcade will likely never die (*note to self, get to Funworld while I'm in the US this year) but gaming has fundamentally changed of late too. Games have become larger, more complex and require massive investments of time just to learn. Then, the game carries on for weeks or months until you complete it. To be paying an arcade owner for all the time you're there would become a very expensive prospect. Arcade gaming works on relatively short, easily completed games where you can pay by the life, or per turn.
The arcade died the day powerful personal computers became affordable for the masses. Why go down to the arcade to stand in front of a machine and shovel money when you can just pass disks/carts/CDs around your friends and play all the latest games?
The trend continued and now "LANNING" is the new norm. Why go out when the Interdoodle has all the game servers you could ever need and your connection is plenty fast enough to use them?
neighbor's router's IP address
Funny that. It displayed a whole bunch of random addresses every time I went there... hmns. They say you can't hide your IP on the Net, but there exists still anonymous proxies. You just gotta know where to look.
But this will likely scare off all the 1337 h4x0rz that think there "IP stealthing" software they paid $100 from some SPAM for is great.