This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
True, but you're not taking into account the fact that a new PC can be hard for pretty damn cheap. Yes, lots of people have more power and features than they will need, but it usually makes more sense to buy new-- and to be under warranty for a while, and not have to worry about inheriting someone else's problem-- than to save a couple hundred bucks seeking out a used beater. Especially for a small business, where they may not have an IT expert on staff and where a crashed hard drive or other failure could shut them down for a day. Not that a new computer can't be a lemon, but you do have a little more peace of mind. Or at least, perceived peace of mind.
(Whether running XP is a smart choice is of course a whole 'nother matter...)
And, a new computer can grow with the business and serve other functions beyond the terminal-- you don't know that someone at the store isn't using it to develop their website or do some desktop publishing, or whatever else might come along.
The rest are, yes, worthless, but you might be able to pull in a few hundred for that G3 Powerbook (I forget the model-years, but if it's a Pismo I see them for $300-500, Lombards for $200-400, Wallstreets from $150-300.)
Either way, those are nice 'Books. I loved my Wallstreet, it had the best keyboard of any notebook I've ever owned and the dual-battery capacity is sorely missed.
For the few who don't know, Leo has an excellent radio show on KFI , which does stream live... It's on weekends from 12-3 PST. I believe he also archives the show on his own site.
As much as I liked him on TV, I like the radio show better... Without the time constraints of a half hour show he can go much deeper into topics.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
Uh... Every Honda owner? The depreciation of Hondas is about the same as for Macs, which is "not all that much."
But I still think this is a fun movie to catch on TV. I mean, yeah, it's really cheesy, but does this deserve the Road House treatment?
Certainly not. I guarantee there is no line in The Last Starfighter as disturbing as Swayze's rival delivers before their big showdown... "I used to fuck guys like you in prison!"
RIP is right. Phil Hartman was an amazing talent, yet so low-key it was easy to take him for granted. His death not only ended the great Newsradio, but pretty much marked the end of The Simpsons being any good IMO.
And it's too bad he's not around now, because he would have made an amazing Dick Cheney. Put a bald wig and glasses on him and they would look almost exactly alike.
* eMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/40 downloads
* eMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/65 downloads
* eMusic Premium: $19.99 per month/90 downloads
Yes, it works out to as low as 22 cents a song. But I still won't be using this service. At least, not until you can buy by-the-song.
I can't guarantee there will be 40-90 songs I will want in a given month. If the majors won't support it-- which would mean not just the new crap I could care less about, but just about every song from the 60's, 70's and 80's I would want-- then I foresee downloading a lot of new independent stuff I wouldn't otherwise care about, and probably would never listen to. In the end I would likely be paying $10 a month for a handful of downloads... And they don't even stack, so if you miss a month, they're gone...
Then again, if my tastes leaned towards indie rock and eclectic compilations-- meaning, if I was still a 23-year old hipster-- then I might check it out. So, good luck.
... But I have much higher hopes for this game than I do for Episode 3.
Though there were a few flops, Lucas has had a great track record with their games. Many of them actually had more depth to their stories than any of the movies.
Amazing how such a stupidly simple game could be so captivating to a primitive audience. Are we smarter these days or just more jaded?
Oh yeah. I remember back then, all those primitive fools wasting quarters on that stupidly simple game. I used to shout, "Stop wasting your time, you idiots! Don't you know in thirty years we will be achieving perfect shadows at 30fps in our first person shooters and immersing ourselves in massive MMPORGS?"
Oh and and a few years before that my family was so stupid that we-- get this-- owned a black and white TV that got five channels with an ANTENNA. Stupid family, so primitive. We should'a thrown it away until HDTV and broadband cable became readily available.
Why does everybody on Slashdot trash everything that Microsoft ever did like it's worse than slime, but celebrate the X-box because of Halo and some other mediocre games? It's totally antithetic.
The X-box is praised (when it's praised) for a number of reasons-- the games, the graphics, the ease of modding and ability to turn it into a desktop.
And I'm glad it's praised. It means some Slashdotteers are open-mided and realize Microsoft isn't just Windows, and that we don't have to declare everything they produce "evil" because we don't like their OS.
Anyway last time I checked there wasn't a mandtae on what we were supposed to think. There are people here who seem ready to forgive Real, for God's sake...!
Why does everybody on Slashdot trash everything that Microsoft ever did like it's worse than slime, but celebrate the X-box because of Halo and some other mediocre games? It's totally antithetic.
The X-box is praised (when it's praised) for a number of reasons-- the games, the graphics, the ease of modding and ability to turn it into a desktop.
And I'm glad it's praised. It means some Slashdotteers are open-mided and realize Microsoft isn't just Windows, and that we don't have to declare everything they produce "evil" because we don't like their OS.
Anyway last time I checked there wasn't a mandtae on what we were supposed to think. There are people here who seem ready to forgive Real, for God's sake...!
...everyone knows people get iPods because they help you get mod points on Slashdot. Speaking of which, I got my iPod last month and haven't seen any yet.
Ah, so the "free iPod!" pyramid scheme worked after all.
Mine isn't. Well, it is for general usage, but my DSL is down for one reason or another a few hours every month. I've never had a cable modem but if it's anything like my horrible spotty Adelphia digital cable (which seems to be out a few hours a week, and has constant lags and glitches) I would expect the same.
Neither of these problems is so bad, but if a DSL glitch meant I couldn't use the phone either I would really be up shit creek. (I suppose most home VOIP users would also have a cell phone, but what about, say, businesses who rely on incoming calls?)
Land lines may be archaic but they are very dependable. Even when the power goes out, they're there. Since VOIP relies on both power and your broadband service-- both of which are prone to occasional glitches, especially if you live in a less-than-urban area-- I would never trust one to be my sole phone line.
Of course if I lived in an area where land lines were horribly expensive-- like the Caribbean, or areas of Europe and Asia-- VOIP would be a Godsend.
Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO
I don't think Wikipedia was ever meant to replace the traditional library. Its strength has always been in tracking popular culture and trends, cultures, pop artifacts and events that are recent and/or developing. The fact that Wikipedia is ever-changing is a good thing in that regard, because the topics it covers best are in the process of change too.
Amen. I spent a few years in the Midwest growing up where both thunderstorms and intense snow and ice could knock out power for days at a time. One particularly harsh ice storm knocked out power for a week. But the phones always worked...
Add to that you're connecting over broadband-- my DSL is out for half a day at least once a month, and my digital cable screws up for an hour or two almost every week. Not the worst thing in the world... Unless that's your phone, too.
Also keep in mind VoIP doesn't "trace" you if you call 911, at least not yet.
Read my fucking post. I'm not talking about registering Photoshop online. I'm talking about accessing multiplayer games via legit serial numbers (like Battle.net, which I clewarly mentioned.) Two totally different things. Idiot.
You think there weren't millions of pre-teen boys who played Vice City on their Playstation 2's?
Anyway, as violent as GTA Advance may be, it's hard to get in too much of an uproar over cutesy, simplistic 2-d sprites. And really, it's no more violent than dozens of NES/SNES/Genesis games like Narc, Smash TV, Metal Gear etc... From the looks of it the instruction manual will be more incendiary than the game itself.
Can you still have sex with prostitutes, by the way?
There is one, and only one copy protection scheme that is truly effective-- registering online with a serial number.
I've played quite a few games acquired... Not so legitimately. None of them had a copy protection scheme that couldn't be easily bypassed. But with the better games-- Star and Warcraft, Call of Duty, Unreal, etc. I paid full price for copies so I could play multiplayer online. AFAIK there's no way to "hack" Battle.net so that you don't need a unique and registered SN.
This is the direction developers should turn. No copy protection at all on their games, let us copy our disks for backup and do full installs and put the game CD's safely away. If the game is good, we'll want to play online and you WILL get your money.
Which ones? I've had quite a few not work without the actual CD in place... Leaving me, of course, to use cracks... Call of Duty comes to mind immediately, as well as Warcraft and NWN.
It's a horrible protection scheme, by the way. Having to keep the CD in place as a "key" to play the game is IMO intrusive and a pain-in-the-ass. CD's scratch, they take time to load and switch, and, most of all, they wear down the drive... Optical drives are usually the first thing to go in a computer, and since I rely heavily on being able to burn DVD's for work I'd rather use the Superdrive as infrequently as possible.
You should'a warned us you're linking to a porn site.
Regardless, it's not the same thing at all. An unprotected gallery on photobucket is much more fair game than stealing someone's memory card and platering it all over the web.
Posting entire found pictures (actually an entire collection), especially if used with a profit motive, with no permission from the photographer and the subjects is just asking for an incredibly brutal pounding in court.
Except there is no profit motive here. And it's posted basically anonymously, by some guy with a gmail account to a blog hosting site (Sure you can probably track down his IP address, assuming he doesn't take precautions, but still, identity will be hard to prove.)
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
True, but you're not taking into account the fact that a new PC can be hard for pretty damn cheap. Yes, lots of people have more power and features than they will need, but it usually makes more sense to buy new-- and to be under warranty for a while, and not have to worry about inheriting someone else's problem-- than to save a couple hundred bucks seeking out a used beater. Especially for a small business, where they may not have an IT expert on staff and where a crashed hard drive or other failure could shut them down for a day. Not that a new computer can't be a lemon, but you do have a little more peace of mind. Or at least, perceived peace of mind.
(Whether running XP is a smart choice is of course a whole 'nother matter...)
And, a new computer can grow with the business and serve other functions beyond the terminal-- you don't know that someone at the store isn't using it to develop their website or do some desktop publishing, or whatever else might come along.
The rest are, yes, worthless, but you might be able to pull in a few hundred for that G3 Powerbook (I forget the model-years, but if it's a Pismo I see them for $300-500, Lombards for $200-400, Wallstreets from $150-300.)
Either way, those are nice 'Books. I loved my Wallstreet, it had the best keyboard of any notebook I've ever owned and the dual-battery capacity is sorely missed.
As much as I liked him on TV, I like the radio show better... Without the time constraints of a half hour show he can go much deeper into topics.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
Uh... Every Honda owner? The depreciation of Hondas is about the same as for Macs, which is "not all that much."
But I still think this is a fun movie to catch on TV. I mean, yeah, it's really cheesy, but does this deserve the Road House treatment?
Certainly not. I guarantee there is no line in The Last Starfighter as disturbing as Swayze's rival delivers before their big showdown... "I used to fuck guys like you in prison!"
RIP is right. Phil Hartman was an amazing talent, yet so low-key it was easy to take him for granted. His death not only ended the great Newsradio, but pretty much marked the end of The Simpsons being any good IMO.
And it's too bad he's not around now, because he would have made an amazing Dick Cheney. Put a bald wig and glasses on him and they would look almost exactly alike.
I haven't played with it much but it seems to do what it says (which is to record any audio playing on your Mac.)
Don't forget Digital 8. And possibly even the Minidisc, which has had some success but certainly never took off like they had hoped.
Aren't Blu-Ray disks in protective cartridges? Everything I've seen so far indicates this...
Their pricing plans...
* eMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/40 downloads
* eMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/65 downloads
* eMusic Premium: $19.99 per month/90 downloads
Yes, it works out to as low as 22 cents a song. But I still won't be using this service. At least, not until you can buy by-the-song.
I can't guarantee there will be 40-90 songs I will want in a given month. If the majors won't support it-- which would mean not just the new crap I could care less about, but just about every song from the 60's, 70's and 80's I would want-- then I foresee downloading a lot of new independent stuff I wouldn't otherwise care about, and probably would never listen to. In the end I would likely be paying $10 a month for a handful of downloads... And they don't even stack, so if you miss a month, they're gone...
Then again, if my tastes leaned towards indie rock and eclectic compilations-- meaning, if I was still a 23-year old hipster-- then I might check it out. So, good luck.
... But I have much higher hopes for this game than I do for Episode 3.
Though there were a few flops, Lucas has had a great track record with their games. Many of them actually had more depth to their stories than any of the movies.
Amazing how such a stupidly simple game could be so captivating to a primitive audience. Are we smarter these days or just more jaded?
Oh yeah. I remember back then, all those primitive fools wasting quarters on that stupidly simple game. I used to shout, "Stop wasting your time, you idiots! Don't you know in thirty years we will be achieving perfect shadows at 30fps in our first person shooters and immersing ourselves in massive MMPORGS?"
Oh and and a few years before that my family was so stupid that we-- get this-- owned a black and white TV that got five channels with an ANTENNA. Stupid family, so primitive. We should'a thrown it away until HDTV and broadband cable became readily available.
Why does everybody on Slashdot trash everything that Microsoft ever did like it's worse than slime, but celebrate the X-box because of Halo and some other mediocre games? It's totally antithetic.
The X-box is praised (when it's praised) for a number of reasons-- the games, the graphics, the ease of modding and ability to turn it into a desktop.
And I'm glad it's praised. It means some Slashdotteers are open-mided and realize Microsoft isn't just Windows, and that we don't have to declare everything they produce "evil" because we don't like their OS.
Anyway last time I checked there wasn't a mandtae on what we were supposed to think. There are people here who seem ready to forgive Real, for God's sake...!
Why does everybody on Slashdot trash everything that Microsoft ever did like it's worse than slime, but celebrate the X-box because of Halo and some other mediocre games? It's totally antithetic. The X-box is praised (when it's praised) for a number of reasons-- the games, the graphics, the ease of modding and ability to turn it into a desktop. And I'm glad it's praised. It means some Slashdotteers are open-mided and realize Microsoft isn't just Windows, and that we don't have to declare everything they produce "evil" because we don't like their OS. Anyway last time I checked there wasn't a mandtae on what we were supposed to think. There are people here who seem ready to forgive Real, for God's sake...!
...everyone knows people get iPods because they help you get mod points on Slashdot. Speaking of which, I got my iPod last month and haven't seen any yet.
Ah, so the "free iPod!" pyramid scheme worked after all.
Mine isn't. Well, it is for general usage, but my DSL is down for one reason or another a few hours every month. I've never had a cable modem but if it's anything like my horrible spotty Adelphia digital cable (which seems to be out a few hours a week, and has constant lags and glitches) I would expect the same.
Neither of these problems is so bad, but if a DSL glitch meant I couldn't use the phone either I would really be up shit creek. (I suppose most home VOIP users would also have a cell phone, but what about, say, businesses who rely on incoming calls?)
Land lines may be archaic but they are very dependable. Even when the power goes out, they're there. Since VOIP relies on both power and your broadband service-- both of which are prone to occasional glitches, especially if you live in a less-than-urban area-- I would never trust one to be my sole phone line.
Of course if I lived in an area where land lines were horribly expensive-- like the Caribbean, or areas of Europe and Asia-- VOIP would be a Godsend.
Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO
I don't think Wikipedia was ever meant to replace the traditional library. Its strength has always been in tracking popular culture and trends, cultures, pop artifacts and events that are recent and/or developing. The fact that Wikipedia is ever-changing is a good thing in that regard, because the topics it covers best are in the process of change too.
You find emulated GBA games to be superior on the PC?
GBA games are designed for simple controls on a tiny screen. Playing them on a PC is a horrible experience, the limited graphics become only more so.
Really I have yet to find an emulated game that wasn't more fuun when played on the console for which it was designed.
Amen. I spent a few years in the Midwest growing up where both thunderstorms and intense snow and ice could knock out power for days at a time. One particularly harsh ice storm knocked out power for a week. But the phones always worked...
Add to that you're connecting over broadband-- my DSL is out for half a day at least once a month, and my digital cable screws up for an hour or two almost every week. Not the worst thing in the world... Unless that's your phone, too.
Also keep in mind VoIP doesn't "trace" you if you call 911, at least not yet.
Read my fucking post. I'm not talking about registering Photoshop online. I'm talking about accessing multiplayer games via legit serial numbers (like Battle.net, which I clewarly mentioned.) Two totally different things. Idiot.
You think there weren't millions of pre-teen boys who played Vice City on their Playstation 2's?
Anyway, as violent as GTA Advance may be, it's hard to get in too much of an uproar over cutesy, simplistic 2-d sprites. And really, it's no more violent than dozens of NES/SNES/Genesis games like Narc, Smash TV, Metal Gear etc... From the looks of it the instruction manual will be more incendiary than the game itself.
Can you still have sex with prostitutes, by the way?
There is one, and only one copy protection scheme that is truly effective-- registering online with a serial number.
I've played quite a few games acquired... Not so legitimately. None of them had a copy protection scheme that couldn't be easily bypassed. But with the better games-- Star and Warcraft, Call of Duty, Unreal, etc. I paid full price for copies so I could play multiplayer online. AFAIK there's no way to "hack" Battle.net so that you don't need a unique and registered SN.
This is the direction developers should turn. No copy protection at all on their games, let us copy our disks for backup and do full installs and put the game CD's safely away. If the game is good, we'll want to play online and you WILL get your money.
Which ones? I've had quite a few not work without the actual CD in place... Leaving me, of course, to use cracks... Call of Duty comes to mind immediately, as well as Warcraft and NWN. It's a horrible protection scheme, by the way. Having to keep the CD in place as a "key" to play the game is IMO intrusive and a pain-in-the-ass. CD's scratch, they take time to load and switch, and, most of all, they wear down the drive... Optical drives are usually the first thing to go in a computer, and since I rely heavily on being able to burn DVD's for work I'd rather use the Superdrive as infrequently as possible.
You should'a warned us you're linking to a porn site.
Regardless, it's not the same thing at all. An unprotected gallery on photobucket is much more fair game than stealing someone's memory card and platering it all over the web.
Posting entire found pictures (actually an entire collection), especially if used with a profit motive, with no permission from the photographer and the subjects is just asking for an incredibly brutal pounding in court.
Except there is no profit motive here. And it's posted basically anonymously, by some guy with a gmail account to a blog hosting site (Sure you can probably track down his IP address, assuming he doesn't take precautions, but still, identity will be hard to prove.)