Exactly!
I have an 8 year old 400mhz G4 that is still up and running (one of the firewire ports doesn't work, but that's the only real hardware problem it has) as we speak. It was my primary computer until I finally upgraded to an iMac G5 about 2 years ago.
I recently put Yellow Dog Linux on it, as I'm taking some *nix classes and wanted a box at home to do projects on and such. Still runs great!
Some of your points are fair, (aftermarket video cards are a problem for Macs, though there are a few out there you can put in on your own and have them be compatible) but you can certainly put more than just a hard drive into a MacPro.
You can put any number of PCI cards in there, though these days I'm not really clear what you would need to put in there that isn't likely already built in, but I guess if you wanted to put in a fiberchannel card, or extra firewire ports or something you could do that.
I can't speak to the situation with failed drives in MacPro's, but that sounds a little odd. Older Mac towers certainly don't work that way.
You also don't have to pay Apple for RAM upgrades, you can (and I have) do it yourself on any model of Mac, without voiding any warranties or anything like that. Yes Apple charges you out the ass for RAM upgrades, but you don't have to pay them for it, you can do it yourself. All computer makers charge too much for RAM, Apple is no different (though they might charge slightly more than some other companies), but just like with Dell or Gateway or whatever, you don't have to pay them for it if you don't want to.
Well, I'm not sure that they could never be updated again, people seem to have been updating hackintoshes (and that's effectively what these are) for some time, albeit slowly and with some amount of work.
They could also just put another OS on them, like Windows or (this is Slashdot after all) some flavor of Linux.
Ah yes. I remember Power Computing too. Made some good clones (of course theirs were authorized), I really shouldn't have let my parents give away our old one, it was a nice piece of computing history (especially in the history of Apple/Macs).
As a fellow member of the Nintendo Generation (I much prefer that name to "Generation Y") I agree that this is one of the major problems with science education today. I was lucky enough to go through a pretty decent school system where they did actually encourage us to do fun and interesting science. My 8th grade science teacher, and high school cross country coach, was always setting things on fire and blowing up stuff, and showing us how to do the same (with a good lecture on the safety issues too of course).
I also remember one time long after I was in his class, walking around the school with some friends after school and running into him outside. He had a bunch of stuff set up and just said "Hey want to see something really cool?!" and then proceeded to drop some elemental sodium into a bucket of water. It was pretty damn cool, and he was just doing this on his own time!
I also had a chem/physics teacher later who helped us learn to blow glass and do all kinds of other cool stuff.
Actually I think people who are really busy are the people that Netflix is most helpful for (it certainly is for me as there isn't the stress about watching something quickly and I don't have to make trips to the video store), and probably the customers that Netflix would want to keep the most. Anything that can make the people who watch movies slowly happier and more likely to stay with you would be a good business decision.
Can you not see how separate queues are easier? Sure you can manage an account the way you mention here, but it's easier to just let everyone manage their own queue, and not worry about what other people are doing, or having to check what's up next on the queue every time you return a movie because someone else might have moved something else up.
That seems like a lot of extra work for the customer to get at best partial functionality. I don't know about you but I have hundreds of movies in my queue, I wouldn't want to go through and tag each one with who it's for, just so I could get some of that functionality back.
Netflix is pretty obsessed with improving their recommendation system (or at least they act like they are with their prize and such). Won't this make that significantly more difficult? Sure a few people who use this feature will get separate accounts, but I'd be willing to bet the majority will either cancel or just make due with one account. Suddenly having 2 or 3 or more people's queues merged is going to make it a lot more difficult to figure out what individual people actually want and like.
Thank you!
If the old code is causing a problem then they just need to wait longer and figure out how to work around it or re-implement it with new code that won't get in the way.
They actually simply require that you beleive in some higher power, it doesn't really matter what. There are plenty of Jewish members and troops sponsored by Synagogues, Mosques and other religious organizations.
That doesn't excuse the national organizations stance on atheism or homosexuality, but just for accuracy's sake thought I'd point it out.
I'm glad to hear this.
I certainly didn't like the National policy when I was moving up through scouts, but my troop was pretty open minded, several members were atheists and were never really made to feel uncomfortable, and sexual orientation never really came up and even if it had I doubt it would have been a problem.
The national policies suck, but troops largely run themselves, so if you can find a reasonable open minded troop I wouldn't worry too much about the national policies which are really largely irrelevant on the ground.
I do think all of those systems sound pretty interesting, and I've looked into them some, but haven't actually played much with any but Palladium/Rifts. I love the "content" of Rifts and such, but man that rules system is BROKEN. Every time we tried to play things were just so horribly unbalanced and difficult to do that we generally gave up after a session or two.
That being said I still love the Rifts world an campaign setting, and loved buying and reading the books, just not actually playing.
If Palladium dramatically overhaul their rules and redo Rifts, I'd be pretty excited to try it out!
This has been my impression as well. I do play 3.5 which I think is generally more fun than 2nd edition, but I'm really looking forward to much faster and ideally more fun combat, sometimes 3.5 battles could take multiple hours if things go complicated, and that is probably my biggest problem with 3/3.5, how often everything stops while everyone tries to look up a rule and then try to figure out how to apply it to the current situation. This is not just in combat, it pops up in plenty of other situations too. I'm really looking forward to the simplified rules in 4th edition so we can get one with telling the story, and still have fun and exciting combat.
That sounds like a fun magic mechanic. I might talk to my DM about trying to implement something like that in our current campaign. We already have some flexibility in creating our own spells and powers and such (with consulation of course) but that could make it even more interesting.
Good idea, and something that can easily be appended onto nearly any game system or edition!
I think you have some good points here but... Please NO ONE take anything from Palladium! At least mechanically...
Palladium has some great flavor-content but good lord that rule system is terrible...
I use a widget on dashboard to check local weather conditions/forcasts fairly often (I use a third party widget that gives me conditions at a site near my house rather than the one OSX comes with which is somewhat less accurate).
I use the calculator fair often, and it can be a decent way to check movie times when you want to do that.
There are also some widgets that are hooked up to RSS feeds, though I dont' use those too much anymore.
Finally there is the Hypnotoad widget. All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Interesting. I've actually had very few problems with DD-WRT but, I've generally been doing fairly simple things like using one as a wireless bridge to my basement for devices without wireless cards (like an XBox, or a roommate who refuses to get a wireless card for his laptop). I do know that as time has gone by DD-WRT has generally (in my experience) gotten more stable.
I haven't upgraded to v24 yet, but... well I guess we'll see how stable it is!
I may try Tomato out on my spare router (which is currently not being used for anything as my set up has changed) just to see what it's like and how I like it. Thanks for the info!
You could also use the same router and
DD-WRT Which I've had a lot of luck using.
I've actually never tried Tomato. What advantages does it have over something like DD-WRT?
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Have the system requirements for Starcraft II/Diablo III been released?
Exactly! I have an 8 year old 400mhz G4 that is still up and running (one of the firewire ports doesn't work, but that's the only real hardware problem it has) as we speak. It was my primary computer until I finally upgraded to an iMac G5 about 2 years ago. I recently put Yellow Dog Linux on it, as I'm taking some *nix classes and wanted a box at home to do projects on and such. Still runs great!
Some of your points are fair, (aftermarket video cards are a problem for Macs, though there are a few out there you can put in on your own and have them be compatible) but you can certainly put more than just a hard drive into a MacPro. You can put any number of PCI cards in there, though these days I'm not really clear what you would need to put in there that isn't likely already built in, but I guess if you wanted to put in a fiberchannel card, or extra firewire ports or something you could do that. I can't speak to the situation with failed drives in MacPro's, but that sounds a little odd. Older Mac towers certainly don't work that way. You also don't have to pay Apple for RAM upgrades, you can (and I have) do it yourself on any model of Mac, without voiding any warranties or anything like that. Yes Apple charges you out the ass for RAM upgrades, but you don't have to pay them for it, you can do it yourself. All computer makers charge too much for RAM, Apple is no different (though they might charge slightly more than some other companies), but just like with Dell or Gateway or whatever, you don't have to pay them for it if you don't want to.
Well, I'm not sure that they could never be updated again, people seem to have been updating hackintoshes (and that's effectively what these are) for some time, albeit slowly and with some amount of work. They could also just put another OS on them, like Windows or (this is Slashdot after all) some flavor of Linux.
Ah yes. I remember Power Computing too. Made some good clones (of course theirs were authorized), I really shouldn't have let my parents give away our old one, it was a nice piece of computing history (especially in the history of Apple/Macs).
I'm not sure if McCain would really have much of an attack point there. He didn't vote on the bill at all.
I don't know anyone who thinks anything like that.
As a fellow member of the Nintendo Generation (I much prefer that name to "Generation Y") I agree that this is one of the major problems with science education today. I was lucky enough to go through a pretty decent school system where they did actually encourage us to do fun and interesting science. My 8th grade science teacher, and high school cross country coach, was always setting things on fire and blowing up stuff, and showing us how to do the same (with a good lecture on the safety issues too of course). I also remember one time long after I was in his class, walking around the school with some friends after school and running into him outside. He had a bunch of stuff set up and just said "Hey want to see something really cool?!" and then proceeded to drop some elemental sodium into a bucket of water. It was pretty damn cool, and he was just doing this on his own time! I also had a chem/physics teacher later who helped us learn to blow glass and do all kinds of other cool stuff.
Videos? On MTV? It has been a while since you've watched MTV hasn't it?
Actually I think people who are really busy are the people that Netflix is most helpful for (it certainly is for me as there isn't the stress about watching something quickly and I don't have to make trips to the video store), and probably the customers that Netflix would want to keep the most. Anything that can make the people who watch movies slowly happier and more likely to stay with you would be a good business decision.
Can you not see how separate queues are easier? Sure you can manage an account the way you mention here, but it's easier to just let everyone manage their own queue, and not worry about what other people are doing, or having to check what's up next on the queue every time you return a movie because someone else might have moved something else up.
That seems like a lot of extra work for the customer to get at best partial functionality. I don't know about you but I have hundreds of movies in my queue, I wouldn't want to go through and tag each one with who it's for, just so I could get some of that functionality back.
Netflix is pretty obsessed with improving their recommendation system (or at least they act like they are with their prize and such). Won't this make that significantly more difficult? Sure a few people who use this feature will get separate accounts, but I'd be willing to bet the majority will either cancel or just make due with one account. Suddenly having 2 or 3 or more people's queues merged is going to make it a lot more difficult to figure out what individual people actually want and like.
Thank you! If the old code is causing a problem then they just need to wait longer and figure out how to work around it or re-implement it with new code that won't get in the way.
They actually simply require that you beleive in some higher power, it doesn't really matter what. There are plenty of Jewish members and troops sponsored by Synagogues, Mosques and other religious organizations. That doesn't excuse the national organizations stance on atheism or homosexuality, but just for accuracy's sake thought I'd point it out.
I'm glad to hear this. I certainly didn't like the National policy when I was moving up through scouts, but my troop was pretty open minded, several members were atheists and were never really made to feel uncomfortable, and sexual orientation never really came up and even if it had I doubt it would have been a problem. The national policies suck, but troops largely run themselves, so if you can find a reasonable open minded troop I wouldn't worry too much about the national policies which are really largely irrelevant on the ground.
I do think all of those systems sound pretty interesting, and I've looked into them some, but haven't actually played much with any but Palladium/Rifts. I love the "content" of Rifts and such, but man that rules system is BROKEN. Every time we tried to play things were just so horribly unbalanced and difficult to do that we generally gave up after a session or two. That being said I still love the Rifts world an campaign setting, and loved buying and reading the books, just not actually playing. If Palladium dramatically overhaul their rules and redo Rifts, I'd be pretty excited to try it out!
Thanks for doing this. Saves me a lot of time trying to do it. Only I probably wouldn't have done it as elegantly.
This has been my impression as well. I do play 3.5 which I think is generally more fun than 2nd edition, but I'm really looking forward to much faster and ideally more fun combat, sometimes 3.5 battles could take multiple hours if things go complicated, and that is probably my biggest problem with 3/3.5, how often everything stops while everyone tries to look up a rule and then try to figure out how to apply it to the current situation. This is not just in combat, it pops up in plenty of other situations too. I'm really looking forward to the simplified rules in 4th edition so we can get one with telling the story, and still have fun and exciting combat.
That sounds like a fun magic mechanic. I might talk to my DM about trying to implement something like that in our current campaign. We already have some flexibility in creating our own spells and powers and such (with consulation of course) but that could make it even more interesting. Good idea, and something that can easily be appended onto nearly any game system or edition!
I think you have some good points here but... Please NO ONE take anything from Palladium! At least mechanically... Palladium has some great flavor-content but good lord that rule system is terrible...
I use a widget on dashboard to check local weather conditions/forcasts fairly often (I use a third party widget that gives me conditions at a site near my house rather than the one OSX comes with which is somewhat less accurate). I use the calculator fair often, and it can be a decent way to check movie times when you want to do that. There are also some widgets that are hooked up to RSS feeds, though I dont' use those too much anymore. Finally there is the Hypnotoad widget. All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Interesting. I've actually had very few problems with DD-WRT but, I've generally been doing fairly simple things like using one as a wireless bridge to my basement for devices without wireless cards (like an XBox, or a roommate who refuses to get a wireless card for his laptop). I do know that as time has gone by DD-WRT has generally (in my experience) gotten more stable. I haven't upgraded to v24 yet, but... well I guess we'll see how stable it is! I may try Tomato out on my spare router (which is currently not being used for anything as my set up has changed) just to see what it's like and how I like it. Thanks for the info!
You could also use the same router and DD-WRT Which I've had a lot of luck using. I've actually never tried Tomato. What advantages does it have over something like DD-WRT?