Hear Microsoft tremble! Now I can run free Office products on a free OS without it looking like crap!!! Someone check and see how much the temperature just dropped in Redmond!
Now if only I could get my damned PPP connection working in my Mandrake install so that I could read/. without booting into Windows or switching the modem to another machine *sigh*
I can think of plenty of web sites that I would kick in a small amount of money to support. Good search engines, Slashdot, X-Entertainment, hell, I would even pay for some decent web-based email access that would let me use my own domain name without spamming me and selling their profile of me to everyone they could.
Instead, everyone wants to turn the internet into the adver-net. Whatever. People who spend lots of time online often do so because they are sick of other forms of advertising-supported media. For the most part, all we get from advertising-supported media is biased journalism, and prime time programming kept as bland and formulaic as possible to prevent conservative protest from scaring advertisers.
I want the internet to be like PBS, without all the silly concerts and endless reruns of "Are You Being Served?." The cool web sites would have a link where I can kick in some money every year to keep them going, like many do already with t-shirts, mugs, ThinkGeek, etc.
The big companies fronting web sites like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN need to stop viewing the web as a source of easy advertising revenue, and instead see it as a vehicle of expression, and we need to help them do it. Keep pushing against the tide of oligarchic monopolists and their attempts at global economic domination by just ignoring them. If enough people ignore them, they might just run out of money and go away.
"There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like"
This problem isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. Sony has a playstation underground magazine that comes on 2-4 CD's quarterly, and usually contains multiple demos. Subscribers also get numerous demo versions of assorted PSX games mailed to them.
You can also pick up demo versions of PSX and Dreamcast games in their official magazines.
Of course, these options pale in comparison to just downloading the demos, but then again, it can often be easier and faster to just go buy a magazine than to spend numerous hours pulling the demos down via a modem.
As Apple hardware continues to become more and more overpriced in comparison to PCs, digital music, image, and video editing keeps shifting to Windows, and OS X moves to UNIX, what reason do people have to buy a Mac?
The Mac user interface. And if someone can make Linux as easy and as pretty, Apple will be in very deep shit.
The RBL screws over all the customers of an ISP that hosts companies that sell bulk emailing software.
GOOD.
Eventually RBL use will continue to grow and grow, and the customers of the blocked ISPs will find new ISPs that have the decency to tell anyone who has anything to do with spamming just where to stick it.
I hope the RBL wins this case, and I hope Media3 finally breaks down and kicks off the spammers, and spam software makers, who will in turn keep getting kicked from one ISP to the next until they go under from lack of a decent online presence.
Any director knows that working with a license is hard. But a D&D liscense is terrible to work with, because there multiple official worlds, hundreds of official rulebooks, and thousands of pieces of official fiction.
Compound that with the limitless supply unlicensed D&D supplements out there, and you realize quickly that if the movie was taken seriously, it would please no one.
So they chose to make a comedy. The movie has the kind of silly plot that would come from a teenage guy dungeon master trying to give his players an epic adventure. Nothing more than a silly parody of "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings," it is clear that no attempt was made to win an Oscar.
The acting is overdone, and all given a terribly unrealistic bent, as it would be done coming from the mouths of gamers. One characters death results in his friend's greatly overacted grief, and it send the entire audience into a minute long laughing fit.
Throw in the endless gay jokes (A good example is a man dressed head to toe in black leather, with blue lipstick and a shaved head, saying "Give me the rod.") and a drunk dwarf and the movie becomes what it always should have been - a screenplay of a D&D session.
"Discount retailers are responding by lowering prices dramatically -- sometimes cheaper-than-wholesale."
Too bad the music only retailers are doing the opposite. Chains like Sam Goody's, Coconuts, Waves Music, and other are now moving prices on albums to the highest prices ever. It is not uncommon to see a new album on "sale" for $17.99 at these stores, with regular prices in the $18.00-$20+ range.
In the long run, this is likely to kill the music only retailers. Because the Best Buys of the world can dedicate more floorspace to albums than most record stores, they have a much larger selection.
This will eventually kill the small store chains, leaving only the giants to compete. At that point people will only be able to go to those stores for music, allowing prices to move back up.
Of course if we can make sure that the RIAA does not manage to get legal control of all online music distribution it will be a moot point, as musicians will slowly become more and more able to sell online...
Sci-Fi Dune had its ups and downs. The biggest downs were the costumes. Half the costumes looked like they had been pulled right out of 70s and 80s Sci-Fi, making it very hard not to think I was watching Star Wars or BattleStar Galactica. Add the fact that the actor playing Paul Atreides bears a good resemblance to RoTJ era Mark Hammill, without the dated hairstyle, and you can see where a lot of the design influence was drawn from.
Other costumes in Dune were pretty weak, too. The Harkonnen costumes were all obviously drawn from fuedal Japan, but with a bright shiny look that took away the evil nature one would expect from the harkonnen. Add in that the Harkonnen were more often than not bathed in deep red light and they were looking more like victims of bad taste than the devilish men they could have been.
Better done was the imperial court. The victorian look of the emperor and his daughter went over reasonably well at time, although his decidedly 19th century office seemed a little ridiculous for a man in charge of the Universe.
Also lost was the dark, forboding sense that lead one to feel something epic was happening. Everything was so brightly lit and so beautiful that it underscored all of the hardship, evil, and opression that created a mighty crescendo that built to an explosive climax in the Lynch film. As much as Lynch did wrong, one thing he did right was bring in H.R. Giger to do design work, and it should have been done again here.
That said, I still enjoyed the movie. It went much deeper than the last one, filling in many gaps. It also made it clear that this is not just a "happily ever after" tale, and that there would be much more to the story of Dune. The acting was good, and it all made sense, without all of the little things here and there being cut to save time like the had in the Lynch film.
Now if only it would come out on DVD with no commercials!
"The bug is the most effective and least likely to be discovered, said James Atkinson, head of Granite Island Group, a private electronic security and surveillance firm in Gloucester, Mass. The device, Atkinson said, is about the size of a sugar cube." No big deal. Just buy one of those cool new clear keyboards from the people that make Mac knock off products (Unless you already own a Mac.). The FBI will have to do a little better now that this one was exposed, as every computer literate criminal (Not to mention those of us that the government wants to make into criminals.) will likely spot this one out there.
"...Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2..."
Katz, you know enough about tech to know that this comment complete crap. How can you expect us to take you seriously when you can quote a guy who spouts drivel like this, expecting us to believe that the Playstation 2 is some sort of miracle machine that can revolutionize our lives?
One thing I do like about Katz, he always makes the rest of us feel smarter!
Television broadcasting companies are already planning to take over the net as the broadband user base expands. What happens in four years when cablemodem and DSL are everywhere (Not to mention much faster than now.), fiber connections are making inroads to the home, and Microsoft releases new versions of Media Player that won't allow desktop users to fast forward past commercials embedded in video clips (If you think that will not happen, try to skip that FBI warning before a DVD.)?
This ruling is a joke. It might last until the next winter Olympics, bit in 2004 the Olympics WILL be on the web in video format.
Need I go on? Netscape is a joke. AOL keeps the name going as it makes marketing iPlanet easier, but is afraid to make Netscape too good. Make Netscape too, good, AOL users will want it integrated into AOL. Take Netscape out of AOL, Microsoft leaves AOL out of Windows.
The worst part is the dedication of the Mozilla programmers. Those people keep sinking tons of time and effort into Mozilla, hoping to improve Netscape. Imagine what we might get if all of that talent were dedicated to producing something totally new.
Those awful kids. First, they started reading. Then came that whole radio thing. After that they started doing that funny dancing. And television- don't get me started! And now this video game generation, I tell ya, the world is coming to an end! This is going to redefine our culture!
I think this is one of the best examples of Katz's work so far - pure crap. More proof that/. only keeps him on because they serve out so many ads to all of us that bitch about how much we can't stand the bastard.
You obviously never tried to beat a Konami game without cheats.
Konami has always been infamous for making arcade "coin munchers," games designed to give the player little chance of getting ahead without constantly feeding the machine quarters. In multiplayer games, instead of players getting an advantage, Konami games just get harder.
Many of Konami's console efforts were just arcade ports, without the ability to feed in quarters.Compounding the problem, many home players were young children that had a much harder time with the games than the adult arcade players.
Thus, the cheat codes were left in after development to give the players a chance. Damned if they didn't come in handy, too.
I can walk into the mall 15 minutes away and get a copy for $19.95 USD. I dunno where you guys live, but if you live in the US, move out of the sticks, fellas:)
His reserve has not been met even with the auction at over $16,000 US. He obviously is a hard core game nut who is just dumping a ton of crap games with some of the extra systems he has collected over the years. By selling it all off he will rake in a ton of cash, replace anything he sold that he really wanted to keep at a used game store cheap, and still have enough loot leftover to buy a playstation 2 and a new honda civic.
I don't care what excuse he has, anyone stupid enough to sell all of those games is obviously suffering from a sudden lack of common sense. I hope some good friends of his do whatever it takes to bring the poor bastard to his senses and keep him from doing something that no man could ever forgive himself for.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear Microsoft tremble! Now I can run free Office products on a free OS without it looking like crap!!! Someone check and see how much the temperature just dropped in Redmond!
/. without booting into Windows or switching the modem to another machine *sigh*
Now if only I could get my damned PPP connection working in my Mandrake install so that I could read
I can think of plenty of web sites that I would kick in a small amount of money to support. Good search engines, Slashdot, X-Entertainment, hell, I would even pay for some decent web-based email access that would let me use my own domain name without spamming me and selling their profile of me to everyone they could.
Instead, everyone wants to turn the internet into the adver-net. Whatever. People who spend lots of time online often do so because they are sick of other forms of advertising-supported media. For the most part, all we get from advertising-supported media is biased journalism, and prime time programming kept as bland and formulaic as possible to prevent conservative protest from scaring advertisers.
I want the internet to be like PBS, without all the silly concerts and endless reruns of "Are You Being Served?." The cool web sites would have a link where I can kick in some money every year to keep them going, like many do already with t-shirts, mugs, ThinkGeek, etc.
The big companies fronting web sites like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN need to stop viewing the web as a source of easy advertising revenue, and instead see it as a vehicle of expression, and we need to help them do it. Keep pushing against the tide of oligarchic monopolists and their attempts at global economic domination by just ignoring them. If enough people ignore them, they might just run out of money and go away.
"There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like"
This problem isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. Sony has a playstation underground magazine that comes on 2-4 CD's quarterly, and usually contains multiple demos. Subscribers also get numerous demo versions of assorted PSX games mailed to them.
You can also pick up demo versions of PSX and Dreamcast games in their official magazines.
Of course, these options pale in comparison to just downloading the demos, but then again, it can often be easier and faster to just go buy a magazine than to spend numerous hours pulling the demos down via a modem.
Who sent the first piece of spam?
The Freon!
I wish I was in moderator mode right now, because this post describes exactly how I feel, and would get all my points.
As Apple hardware continues to become more and more overpriced in comparison to PCs, digital music, image, and video editing keeps shifting to Windows, and OS X moves to UNIX, what reason do people have to buy a Mac?
The Mac user interface. And if someone can make Linux as easy and as pretty, Apple will be in very deep shit.
"Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?"
It certainly did. Make sure to thank AMD for pushing ahead to 1GHz, and scaring intel into doing a half-assed job of getting there.
The RBL screws over all the customers of an ISP that hosts companies that sell bulk emailing software.
GOOD.
Eventually RBL use will continue to grow and grow, and the customers of the blocked ISPs will find new ISPs that have the decency to tell anyone who has anything to do with spamming just where to stick it.
I hope the RBL wins this case, and I hope Media3 finally breaks down and kicks off the spammers, and spam software makers, who will in turn keep getting kicked from one ISP to the next until they go under from lack of a decent online presence.
The D&D movie is a joke. But in a good way.
Any director knows that working with a license is hard. But a D&D liscense is terrible to work with, because there multiple official worlds, hundreds of official rulebooks, and thousands of pieces of official fiction.
Compound that with the limitless supply unlicensed D&D supplements out there, and you realize quickly that if the movie was taken seriously, it would please no one.
So they chose to make a comedy. The movie has the kind of silly plot that would come from a teenage guy dungeon master trying to give his players an epic adventure. Nothing more than a silly parody of "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings," it is clear that no attempt was made to win an Oscar.
The acting is overdone, and all given a terribly unrealistic bent, as it would be done coming from the mouths of gamers. One characters death results in his friend's greatly overacted grief, and it send the entire audience into a minute long laughing fit.
Throw in the endless gay jokes (A good example is a man dressed head to toe in black leather, with blue lipstick and a shaved head, saying "Give me the rod.") and a drunk dwarf and the movie becomes what it always should have been - a screenplay of a D&D session.
"Discount retailers are responding by lowering prices dramatically -- sometimes cheaper-than-wholesale."
Too bad the music only retailers are doing the opposite. Chains like Sam Goody's, Coconuts, Waves Music, and other are now moving prices on albums to the highest prices ever. It is not uncommon to see a new album on "sale" for $17.99 at these stores, with regular prices in the $18.00-$20+ range.
In the long run, this is likely to kill the music only retailers. Because the Best Buys of the world can dedicate more floorspace to albums than most record stores, they have a much larger selection.
This will eventually kill the small store chains, leaving only the giants to compete. At that point people will only be able to go to those stores for music, allowing prices to move back up.
Of course if we can make sure that the RIAA does not manage to get legal control of all online music distribution it will be a moot point, as musicians will slowly become more and more able to sell online...
"...when you can quote a guy..."
And if you had bothered to read my comment, you would have noticed that I was clearly complaining about Katz quoting that guy.
Sci-Fi Dune had its ups and downs. The biggest downs were the costumes. Half the costumes looked like they had been pulled right out of 70s and 80s Sci-Fi, making it very hard not to think I was watching Star Wars or BattleStar Galactica. Add the fact that the actor playing Paul Atreides bears a good resemblance to RoTJ era Mark Hammill, without the dated hairstyle, and you can see where a lot of the design influence was drawn from.
Other costumes in Dune were pretty weak, too. The Harkonnen costumes were all obviously drawn from fuedal Japan, but with a bright shiny look that took away the evil nature one would expect from the harkonnen. Add in that the Harkonnen were more often than not bathed in deep red light and they were looking more like victims of bad taste than the devilish men they could have been.
Better done was the imperial court. The victorian look of the emperor and his daughter went over reasonably well at time, although his decidedly 19th century office seemed a little ridiculous for a man in charge of the Universe.
Also lost was the dark, forboding sense that lead one to feel something epic was happening. Everything was so brightly lit and so beautiful that it underscored all of the hardship, evil, and opression that created a mighty crescendo that built to an explosive climax in the Lynch film. As much as Lynch did wrong, one thing he did right was bring in H.R. Giger to do design work, and it should have been done again here.
That said, I still enjoyed the movie. It went much deeper than the last one, filling in many gaps. It also made it clear that this is not just a "happily ever after" tale, and that there would be much more to the story of Dune. The acting was good, and it all made sense, without all of the little things here and there being cut to save time like the had in the Lynch film.
Now if only it would come out on DVD with no commercials!
Yes. But all television commercials are louder, SCI-FI is just getting really, really bad about doing it.
"The bug is the most effective and least likely to be discovered, said James Atkinson, head of Granite Island Group, a private electronic security and surveillance firm in Gloucester, Mass. The device, Atkinson said, is about the size of a sugar cube." No big deal. Just buy one of those cool new clear keyboards from the people that make Mac knock off products (Unless you already own a Mac.). The FBI will have to do a little better now that this one was exposed, as every computer literate criminal (Not to mention those of us that the government wants to make into criminals.) will likely spot this one out there.
"...Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2..."
Katz, you know enough about tech to know that this comment complete crap. How can you expect us to take you seriously when you can quote a guy who spouts drivel like this, expecting us to believe that the Playstation 2 is some sort of miracle machine that can revolutionize our lives?
One thing I do like about Katz, he always makes the rest of us feel smarter!
Television broadcasting companies are already planning to take over the net as the broadband user base expands. What happens in four years when cablemodem and DSL are everywhere (Not to mention much faster than now.), fiber connections are making inroads to the home, and Microsoft releases new versions of Media Player that won't allow desktop users to fast forward past commercials embedded in video clips (If you think that will not happen, try to skip that FBI warning before a DVD.)?
This ruling is a joke. It might last until the next winter Olympics, bit in 2004 the Olympics WILL be on the web in video format.
Netscape 4.7 Netscape 6
Unstable Unstable
Weak interface Weak interface
Bloated Bloated
Weak security Weak security
Slow Slow
Need I go on? Netscape is a joke. AOL keeps the name going as it makes marketing iPlanet easier, but is afraid to make Netscape too good. Make Netscape too, good, AOL users will want it integrated into AOL. Take Netscape out of AOL, Microsoft leaves AOL out of Windows.
The worst part is the dedication of the Mozilla programmers. Those people keep sinking tons of time and effort into Mozilla, hoping to improve Netscape. Imagine what we might get if all of that talent were dedicated to producing something totally new.
Those awful kids. First, they started reading. Then came that whole radio thing. After that they started doing that funny dancing. And television- don't get me started! And now this video game generation, I tell ya, the world is coming to an end! This is going to redefine our culture!
/. only keeps him on because they serve out so many ads to all of us that bitch about how much we can't stand the bastard.
I think this is one of the best examples of Katz's work so far - pure crap. More proof that
You obviously never tried to beat a Konami game without cheats. Konami has always been infamous for making arcade "coin munchers," games designed to give the player little chance of getting ahead without constantly feeding the machine quarters. In multiplayer games, instead of players getting an advantage, Konami games just get harder. Many of Konami's console efforts were just arcade ports, without the ability to feed in quarters.Compounding the problem, many home players were young children that had a much harder time with the games than the adult arcade players. Thus, the cheat codes were left in after development to give the players a chance. Damned if they didn't come in handy, too.
I can walk into the mall 15 minutes away and get a copy for $19.95 USD. I dunno where you guys live, but if you live in the US, move out of the sticks, fellas :)
"Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, was NEVER released!"
??? I have a copy sitting about 2 feet away.
His reserve has not been met even with the auction at over $16,000 US. He obviously is a hard core game nut who is just dumping a ton of crap games with some of the extra systems he has collected over the years. By selling it all off he will rake in a ton of cash, replace anything he sold that he really wanted to keep at a used game store cheap, and still have enough loot leftover to buy a playstation 2 and a new honda civic.
Not a bad idea, actually...
I don't care what excuse he has, anyone stupid enough to sell all of those games is obviously suffering from a sudden lack of common sense. I hope some good friends of his do whatever it takes to bring the poor bastard to his senses and keep him from doing something that no man could ever forgive himself for.
Great googaly moogaly!!! People are already dumping Windows on the beloved Crusoe!
WHY GOD WHY???
Seriously though, it does amaze me the way Casio demos the Fiva running Windows. What a total waste of quality...