You might not see any hybrid players coming from Japan or the US, but it wont be long before the same Chinese electronics manufacturers that have been making region free DVD players for years will be making blue laser players with all the bells and whistles you want. Check ebay in a few months, but just don't expect a warranty or well written instruction manuals.
(sorry if this comment appears twice. I posted it 20 minutes ago and it is yet to appear.)
None of these sites, TTBOMK, asks for or checks references. And the liability assumed thereunder would be huge if they did, so they probably never will.
That simply isn't true. I can't speak for the other sites, but Casey Fenton, who started couchsurfing.com, is a friend of a friend. I registered with the site a few years ago and am pretty familiar with it. There are multiple forms of verification and safety checks. They are all optional, but it allows you to be fairly discerning about who you stay with, or who you allow to sleep on your couch. Some of the security measures include.
Address verification To become verified, you must make a payment with a credit card in your name with a billing address matching that on record. A letter is sent with a confirmation code to that address that is entered online to verify the profile.
Vouching This system recently changed to become more strict. Basically, starting with the core group of people who began the site, they can vouch for people they know personally. A person vouched for 3 times can in turn vouch for someone else. As part of the user agreement, you can only vouch for friends you know personally--not acquaintances or people you have only spoken to online. Obviously this can't be very well policed, but anyone found in violation is immediately and irrevocably banned from the site, so it is taken seriously.
Feedback You can leave feedback on the profile for anyone whose couch you surf. Likewise, they can rate you as their guest.
Connection Strength Like any other social networking site, you link your profile to those of your friends. Unlike other sites, you also rate how well you know the person on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "I don't really know this person" up to "I trust this person with my life." So besides looking at feedback from previous couchsurfers, you can gauge what sort of people the couch owner hangs out with, and to some extent how trustworthy those people consider him/her.
Email Records You are encouraged to use the web sites messaging service to communicate with the other party rather than by phone or private email. Records are kept of the communication, so if someone disappears, there are some pretty strait-forward clues as to where to look for them. This doesn't necessarily prevent a crime from happening, but it makes it unlikely the criminal would get away with anything if it did occur.
Clearly it is still possible something could go wrong and a psycho could get through the cracks and kill you. You might also get hit by a meteor. Its up to you to decide what risks you are willing to take, but honestly I would feel at least as safe staying at the house of someone who has passed all the above hurdles as I would checking into a cheap hotel I know nothing about in a town I'm not familiar with.
None of these sites, TTBOMK, asks for or checks references. And the liability assumed thereunder would be huge if they did, so they probably never will.
That simply isn't true. I can't speak for the other sites, but Casey Fenton, who started couchsurfing.com, is a friend of a friend. I registered with the site a few years ago and am pretty familiar with it. There are multiple forms of verification and safety checks. They are all optional, but it allows you to be fairly discerning about who you stay with, or who you allow to sleep on your couch. Some of the security measures include.
Address verification To become verified, you must make a payment with a credit card in your name with a billing address matching that on record. A letter is sent with a confirmation code to that address that is entered online to verify the profile.
Vouching This system recently changed to become more strict. Basically, starting with the core group of people who began the site, they can vouch for people they know personally. A person vouched for 3 times can in turn vouch for someone else. As part of the user agreement, you can only vouch for friends you know personally--not acquaintances or people you have only spoken to online. Obviously this can't be very well policed, but anyone found in violation is immediately and irrevocably banned from the site, so it is taken seriously.
Feedback You can leave feedback on the profile for anyone whose couch you surf. Likewise, they can rate you as their guest.
Connection Strength Like any other social networking site, you link your profile to those of your friends. Unlike other sites, you also rate how well you know the person on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "I don't really know this person" up to "I trust this person with my life." So besides looking at feedback from previous couchsurfers, you can gauge what sort of people the couch owner hangs out with, and to some extent how trustworthy those people consider him/her.
Email Records You are encouraged to use the web sites messaging service to communicate with the other party rather than by phone or private email. Records are kept of the communication, so if someone disappears, there are some pretty strait-forward clues as to where to look for them. This doesn't necessarily prevent a crime from happening, but it makes it unlikely the criminal would get away with anything if it did occur.
Clearly it is still possible something could go wrong and a psycho could get through the cracks and kill you. You might also get hit by a meteor. Its up to you to decide what risks you are willing to take, but honestly I would feel at least as safe staying at the house of someone who has passed all the above hurdles as I would checking into a cheap hotel I know nothing about in a town I'm not familiar with.
if you are including every headless beige box that gets assembled and stuck in a corner to serve files, that might be true (although I think you're making up statistics), but among computers purchased and used by actual people (the part of PC sales interesting to game developers), apple is most certainly growing, across the board but in laptop sales especially.
That is an absolute lie. Installing memory doesn't void anything. It doesn't now, and it never has. I have installed memory in every Mac I have owned since 1985, and Apple has service all of them without complaint.
Memory you install yourself is not covered under warrantee, and Apple will not install memory you didn't buy from them. If you install bad memory and it fries your motherboard, you're shit out of luck. But you can't fault Apple for not taking responsibility for RAM when they can't exercise any quality control over it.
It's the customers job to educate him/herself, and the salesmans job is to sell. If grandma and grampa huckleberry bought a $5000 Vaio just to check their e-mail, because the salesman made up some techincal jibba-jabba, then it's on them. If he managed to sell them an extended warranty and a set of monster cables to hook it all up, then thats a job well done.
It strikes me as strange and a little disturbing that we could be reaching the point that blatant disinformation is considered an acceptable, or even necessary, component of a salesman's job. I agree with most of what you said, and wouldn't buy much of anything from CompUSA or BestBuy except maybe printer paper. Thats partly because I'm well enough informed to use froogle and other comparison shopping sites, and partly because im the sort of obsessive-compulsive cheapskate that will waste 2 hours to save $10 on a harddrive. But most people don't know how to write a perl script to alert them when the price drops on some product on a particular web page, and don't have time to even if they did know how. I'm sort of of the opinion that whether buying a computer, or a car, or an air conditioner, you should be able to walk into a store and expect the salesman to give an honest account of that the costs and basic features are of the options available. This doesn't require encyclopedic knowledge of every bit of minutia, but at least a familiarity with the product categories. It's not his job to decide for the customer what will best meet his needs, but he should try to be as helpful as he can in helping the customer make that decision.
If I owned a store, thats how I would want my employees to behave. Sooner or later, Joe Shmoe with the Monster Cables is going to figure out that he's been had, and in the future he will do his shopping elsewhere. It seems likely that in the long run, it would be more advantageous to give the customer reason to shop again at my store.
I'm not sure how "old" you are referring to. Apple seems to follow a pattern of lowering the price of the pro apps once hardware fast enough to run it becomes cheap enough that it is common place. They certainly did that with the Final Cut suite. By reducing the cost as the potential market gets bigger, they may even increase profits, before you even consider what payoff results from increased marketshare.
That said, it also seems to be Apple's modus operandi to put powerful software into as many hands as possible. As far as I can tell, Apple bought Logic for the express purpose of gutting it and repackaging it as Garage Band. I mean, you got to give them props for that: taking an (expensive) production quality piece of software, giving it a nice UI, and then giving it away practiacally for free. Now if they would just buy protools.
I think Aperture is a fluke, though. They rushed to get it out the door to put pressure on Adobe when the software should not have passed QA. While nice when it works, the software has serious flaws. I think the price reduction is due primarily to the fact that the software isn't worth what they were charging. People who bought the software before the price drop were given a partial refund. I am quite sure that is NOT how apple planned that to go. You certainly aren't going to see many Shake customers getting $2500 checks from Apple.
yeah, i hadn't even thought about the neo geo in years until thiss article. i didn't realize how long they continued to produce games for it (as late as 2004). I really can't imagine why anyone would pay that much for a game now. im pretty sure you can download an emulator and the roms and play them just as well.
but i guess if you're paying $1000 for a game, playing it might not be your motivation.
One thing that Neo Geo did right, and I wish others had picked up on, was you could purchase the system with pretty much any game SNK made. (I picked King of the Monsters and Art of Fighting.) To some extent, that was probably necessary, given the price of cartriges, but I wish modern consoles had followed suit.
Slashdot Mirror
You might not see any hybrid players coming from Japan or the US, but it wont be long before the same Chinese electronics manufacturers that have been making region free DVD players for years will be making blue laser players with all the bells and whistles you want. Check ebay in a few months, but just don't expect a warranty or well written instruction manuals.
(sorry if this comment appears twice. I posted it 20 minutes ago and it is yet to appear.)
None of these sites, TTBOMK, asks for or checks references. And the liability assumed thereunder would be huge if they did, so they probably never will.
That simply isn't true. I can't speak for the other sites, but Casey Fenton, who started couchsurfing.com, is a friend of a friend. I registered with the site a few years ago and am pretty familiar with it. There are multiple forms of verification and safety checks. They are all optional, but it allows you to be fairly discerning about who you stay with, or who you allow to sleep on your couch. Some of the security measures include.
Address verification To become verified, you must make a payment with a credit card in your name with a billing address matching that on record. A letter is sent with a confirmation code to that address that is entered online to verify the profile.
Vouching This system recently changed to become more strict. Basically, starting with the core group of people who began the site, they can vouch for people they know personally. A person vouched for 3 times can in turn vouch for someone else. As part of the user agreement, you can only vouch for friends you know personally--not acquaintances or people you have only spoken to online. Obviously this can't be very well policed, but anyone found in violation is immediately and irrevocably banned from the site, so it is taken seriously.
Feedback You can leave feedback on the profile for anyone whose couch you surf. Likewise, they can rate you as their guest.
Connection Strength Like any other social networking site, you link your profile to those of your friends. Unlike other sites, you also rate how well you know the person on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "I don't really know this person" up to "I trust this person with my life." So besides looking at feedback from previous couchsurfers, you can gauge what sort of people the couch owner hangs out with, and to some extent how trustworthy those people consider him/her.
Email Records You are encouraged to use the web sites messaging service to communicate with the other party rather than by phone or private email. Records are kept of the communication, so if someone disappears, there are some pretty strait-forward clues as to where to look for them. This doesn't necessarily prevent a crime from happening, but it makes it unlikely the criminal would get away with anything if it did occur.
Clearly it is still possible something could go wrong and a psycho could get through the cracks and kill you. You might also get hit by a meteor. Its up to you to decide what risks you are willing to take, but honestly I would feel at least as safe staying at the house of someone who has passed all the above hurdles as I would checking into a cheap hotel I know nothing about in a town I'm not familiar with.
None of these sites, TTBOMK, asks for or checks references. And the liability assumed thereunder would be huge if they did, so they probably never will.
That simply isn't true. I can't speak for the other sites, but Casey Fenton, who started couchsurfing.com, is a friend of a friend. I registered with the site a few years ago and am pretty familiar with it. There are multiple forms of verification and safety checks. They are all optional, but it allows you to be fairly discerning about who you stay with, or who you allow to sleep on your couch. Some of the security measures include.
Address verification To become verified, you must make a payment with a credit card in your name with a billing address matching that on record. A letter is sent with a confirmation code to that address that is entered online to verify the profile.
Vouching This system recently changed to become more strict. Basically, starting with the core group of people who began the site, they can vouch for people they know personally. A person vouched for 3 times can in turn vouch for someone else. As part of the user agreement, you can only vouch for friends you know personally--not acquaintances or people you have only spoken to online. Obviously this can't be very well policed, but anyone found in violation is immediately and irrevocably banned from the site, so it is taken seriously.
Feedback You can leave feedback on the profile for anyone whose couch you surf. Likewise, they can rate you as their guest.
Connection Strength Like any other social networking site, you link your profile to those of your friends. Unlike other sites, you also rate how well you know the person on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "I don't really know this person" up to "I trust this person with my life." So besides looking at feedback from previous couchsurfers, you can gauge what sort of people the couch owner hangs out with, and to some extent how trustworthy those people consider him/her.
Email Records You are encouraged to use the web sites messaging service to communicate with the other party rather than by phone or private email. Records are kept of the communication, so if someone disappears, there are some pretty strait-forward clues as to where to look for them. This doesn't necessarily prevent a crime from happening, but it makes it unlikely the criminal would get away with anything if it did occur.
Clearly it is still possible something could go wrong and a psycho could get through the cracks and kill you. You might also get hit by a meteor. Its up to you to decide what risks you are willing to take, but honestly I would feel at least as safe staying at the house of someone who has passed all the above hurdles as I would checking into a cheap hotel I know nothing about in a town I'm not familiar with.
you mean no human ever interacts with the computer?
I can understand if you don't care for windows, but I think there is a better solution.
Tied with Botswana, Tonga, and Croatia! Alriiiiiiiiiight!!!
I'm trying to visualize "1 in 10 of 13-65 year-olds" being "instantly recognized" and "shunned and ridiculed in public" anywhere they go.
While an amusing image, I'm having a hard time believing it.
but does it run...
oh wait, i guess it does.
if you are including every headless beige box that gets assembled and stuck in a corner to serve files, that might be true (although I think you're making up statistics), but among computers purchased and used by actual people (the part of PC sales interesting to game developers), apple is most certainly growing, across the board but in laptop sales especially.
Duke Nukem Forever is coming to the Mac!
"sarcastic elitist bullshit" constitutes about 95% of /.
4th post gets modded redundant? good job, guys.
while I agree with you, I think what the OP meant was that crowds have a larger pool of knowledge and experience to draw from than one individual.
but they aren't very good at making decisions.
I know I'm exited.
One *GOOD* review is really all I need. How much more can I really learn from another 20 comparisons.
And, no, I did not RTFA.
thats absolutely nothing like what was going on in the Mac Yahoo!Chat rooms circa 1999.
Apple will void your warranty if you add memory
That is an absolute lie. Installing memory doesn't void anything. It doesn't now, and it never has. I have installed memory in every Mac I have owned since 1985, and Apple has service all of them without complaint.
Memory you install yourself is not covered under warrantee, and Apple will not install memory you didn't buy from them. If you install bad memory and it fries your motherboard, you're shit out of luck. But you can't fault Apple for not taking responsibility for RAM when they can't exercise any quality control over it.
good luck with that.
It strikes me as strange and a little disturbing that we could be reaching the point that blatant disinformation is considered an acceptable, or even necessary, component of a salesman's job. I agree with most of what you said, and wouldn't buy much of anything from CompUSA or BestBuy except maybe printer paper. Thats partly because I'm well enough informed to use froogle and other comparison shopping sites, and partly because im the sort of obsessive-compulsive cheapskate that will waste 2 hours to save $10 on a harddrive. But most people don't know how to write a perl script to alert them when the price drops on some product on a particular web page, and don't have time to even if they did know how. I'm sort of of the opinion that whether buying a computer, or a car, or an air conditioner, you should be able to walk into a store and expect the salesman to give an honest account of that the costs and basic features are of the options available. This doesn't require encyclopedic knowledge of every bit of minutia, but at least a familiarity with the product categories. It's not his job to decide for the customer what will best meet his needs, but he should try to be as helpful as he can in helping the customer make that decision.
If I owned a store, thats how I would want my employees to behave. Sooner or later, Joe Shmoe with the Monster Cables is going to figure out that he's been had, and in the future he will do his shopping elsewhere. It seems likely that in the long run, it would be more advantageous to give the customer reason to shop again at my store.
I'm not sure how "old" you are referring to. Apple seems to follow a pattern of lowering the price of the pro apps once hardware fast enough to run it becomes cheap enough that it is common place. They certainly did that with the Final Cut suite. By reducing the cost as the potential market gets bigger, they may even increase profits, before you even consider what payoff results from increased marketshare.
That said, it also seems to be Apple's modus operandi to put powerful software into as many hands as possible. As far as I can tell, Apple bought Logic for the express purpose of gutting it and repackaging it as Garage Band. I mean, you got to give them props for that: taking an (expensive) production quality piece of software, giving it a nice UI, and then giving it away practiacally for free. Now if they would just buy protools.
I think Aperture is a fluke, though. They rushed to get it out the door to put pressure on Adobe when the software should not have passed QA. While nice when it works, the software has serious flaws. I think the price reduction is due primarily to the fact that the software isn't worth what they were charging. People who bought the software before the price drop were given a partial refund. I am quite sure that is NOT how apple planned that to go. You certainly aren't going to see many Shake customers getting $2500 checks from Apple.
the hurdles are economic, not technological.
Someday, you will be able to use any OS on any CPU and any Application on any OS.
1997 called. They want their wishful thinking back.
yeah, i hadn't even thought about the neo geo in years until thiss article. i didn't realize how long they continued to produce games for it (as late as 2004). I really can't imagine why anyone would pay that much for a game now. im pretty sure you can download an emulator and the roms and play them just as well.
but i guess if you're paying $1000 for a game, playing it might not be your motivation.
I think its colorwarepc.com youre looking for.
and a couple of keys in a different place.
what, does it have an extra 'u' key stuck in there somewhere?
One thing that Neo Geo did right, and I wish others had picked up on, was you could purchase the system with pretty much any game SNK made. (I picked King of the Monsters and Art of Fighting.) To some extent, that was probably necessary, given the price of cartriges, but I wish modern consoles had followed suit.