What if I want my kids to be able to buy whatever video games they want? I'd have to go with him. I don't want to do that.
Yeah, and what if I want my kid to buy whatever vodka, machine guns, and cumshot videos that she wants? I'd have to get them for her. That's so fucking inconvenient. Boo hoo, whine whine whine.
But your entire argument suffers from a simple flaw -- you don't have kids, Alleria! I find it very interesting that the people here who actually have kids don't think this is as awful as you do.
What if I'm of the sort who believes that kids should be allowed to play whatever video games they want?
Then you get your ass down to the K-Mart and buy the game for them. Problem solved. But I'll bet $20 that this is a moot question and you don't have any kids, Alleria.
In fact, I'll make a blanket statement right here -- I suspect that 95+% of people posting that this is evil censorship don't have kids. In other words, this isn't your problem (unless you're under 17). And don't give me some "slippery slope" argument. As long as K-Mart is carding people who buy violent games, that means that they'll still carry the games, which is a better result than lots of stores have chosen.
I have a zero year old daughter, and I don't see any problem with having stores card kids who try to buy mature products -- alcohol, tobacco, firearms, DVDs, video games, whatever. If I want my kid to have that stuff, I'll buy it for them.
I just can't figure out why what we do seems to bother you
The problem with Deja is that what it used to be was so damn useful to me, and frankly I am very skeptical about Deja's willingness and/or ability to bring the historical record back to life. I haven't been to Deja since I realized the archive was shut down, but before that happened I was using it quite frequently. I even set up a goofy "My Deja" home page and looked at the list of Deja communities. If that doesn't fit your definition of a portal site, you'd have to be a pointy haired marketroid. Perhaps Deja took that stuff down in the past several months? I wouldn't know.
Suggestion: if maintaining a complete Usenet archive takes up too many servers, just restore the formally-created, tale-endorsed Big 7 groups (preferably dating back to their net.* ancestors). That would be enough for me to use Deja again. But if you don't restore the archive, you'd be better off giving up the domain name and starting over as a different company, because right now Deja has negative mindshare.
ObAmazon: I, for one, am not loyal to any particular e-tailer -- if Amazon's prices aren't the lowest, I go somewhere else. Heck, not even meta-store engines -- I routinely use Shopper, MySimon, DealTime, etc before forking over a single line of text. I really ought to write a meta-meta tool for myself.
the other thing we do besides Usenet is comparison shopping
More accurately, the only thing you do is a comparison shopping "portal". Deja used to have a great Usenet archive, but it's been MIA for a long Long LONG time.
This Amazon debate is really pointless until we can establish what criteria they're using. If the price changes are strictly random in order to test buyer elasticity, that's really no different than any retail store using different prices and different "SALE!" signs on different days. It just happens much FASTER -- each new web hit instead of each day.
if they'll find the guy in the beta program that leaks it to a pirate group...
The September release will be a rather open beta, so that's not a big deal. If laptop hard drive prices drop below $15 per Gb, I'll expand my Wallstreet and give it a whirl. But it'll probably be full of bug catcher code and be too slow for serious use.
The Developer Preview releases that have been going out for a while now -- those are private, so of course they're all available on Hotline and various WareZ sites. One fun quirk: its Open Firmware thinks different than regular MacOS. So I've been having great fun with idiots who post to comp.sys.mac.misc that they can't uninstall OS X. Since the only people who should have it right now are serious Mac programmers, anyone asking that question is a pirate kiddie.
Say that "Joe's Cars" was a well-known nationwide business like Coca-Cola, then your domain would be :
http://joescars.co.us
So in your plan, all nationally known businesses must relocate to Colorado?
It really is a shame that.us isn't used more. The registrars really need to relax the rulings, and allow local groups to buy domains at the State level (so the names don't get so stupidly long). The key, IMO, would be rules to prevent out-of-state squatting. If you're not from around here, we take the name back.
...how about an intro for someone who already knows the major Unix commands, but has never INSTALLED their own copy on a machine before?
I've used *nix accounts since the mid-1980's, but I was never an admin. I've got several Gb of unformatted space to play with on my Mac clone, and I'd like to try BSD, but I just don't know where to begin.
At least Bush isn't being two-faced when it comes to the source of his money.
True. And when he's elected, we know the next 4 to 8 years of the USA's transportation will be heavy on petroleum. That's what happens when TWO Texas oilmen move into the White House (and the little gray house down the street, technically).
A bit of history: when Jimmy Carter was elected, he walked from the Capitol to the White House rather than take a limo. Shortly after moving in, he installed solar panels on the roof. He was THE Environmental President (and sucked at most other parts of the job). When Reagan moved in 4 years later, he tore the solar panels down, both symbolically and literally. Clinton was too much of a waffle wimp to try putting them back.
What does the future hold for alternative power (along with Microsoft, spotted owls, the obscenely wealthy, gays, and various others)? We'll find out in November.
If she knows what will happen and does it anyway, she's accepting the consequences,
I'm betting that you don't have any kids, Ketzer.
I have a zero year old daughter. I doubt I'll ever use censorware to block her net connection in a few years (maybe some sort of anticommercialist filter though, to block the adverts), but damn straight am I going to keep her away from older sleazeballs when the time comes.
Another aspect of hardcore Darwinism is the protection of one's genetic investment -- aka parenting.
consider your time and productivity and the ability to depend on your computer valuable.
True, true. Luckily, in 1997 I was just a humble schoolteacher, so my time wasn't very valuable and the powerbook wasn't essential to my work. 5 weeks of downtime (plus 5 hours of travel and 5 gallons of gas) spread over 2 years wasn't a bad price for a G3 upgrade.
Now I'm a techie, so if my powerbook dies I'll be in the deep stuff. Hasn't happened yet (knock on polycarbonate).
True story: I was fortunate enough to buy a 5300 in 1996 at the now-defunct ComputerCity. The sales guy managed to talk me into the extended warranty. Thank you sales guy!!!
Within 2 years, the display burned out 3 times, the motherboard & power manager once each, and it was all repaired for free. The last time I took it in for service (to a Tandy office, since ComputerCity was long gone), they officially threw in the towel and wrote me a check for the original purchase price. It was almost exactly enough to buy a Wallstreet (1998 Powerbook G3).
Try doing THAT with a junker from E-Machines or the other bottom-of-the-line PC makers. Even truly BAD Apples offer a competitive Total Cost of Ownership, thanks to buybacks. Funny, but true.
Why is everyone getting so worked up just to discuss the RUMOR of a possible TITLE? And it's almost certainly false? And it doesn't reveal anything about the plot that we didn't already know? And the movie itself is NOT likely to be great, but merely LESS MEDIOCRE than Episode 1? Is this really worth discussing?
Of course, here I am posting about the damn thing.
It would not make sense for SETI to pick up plans for a transportation device for a single person.
You're right. In the book, the blueprints were designed for a group of 6 to 8 people, which requires not much more space than a single person transport but is obviously more useful.
Of course, the entire crew selection was shiny happy SETI-loving scientists who were roundly disbelieved by the rest of the world when they told their tales. Also, they were allowed to pack their own supplies for the mission, and none of them thought to bring durable recording equipment (such as instant cameras, CD-R, or sterile containers). Easily the lowest point of the novel for me. It was one of very few instances where I liked the movie adaptation more than the original.
Personally, I worry that C is an absolute speed limit, and humanity ends up stuck in this solar system until we die when the Sun burns out. Billions of years of work all erased -- that would suck.
And while I'm posting anyways, I have a question about Otakon -- why is it so dang expensive? I would have loved to drop by for a couple hours and browse for some DVDs, but the door price was over $20.
Yeah, yeah, I'm know I'm not a real otaku. But why doesn't a big con like that set aside a section as an admission-free space for vendors to sell goodies to the public at large? The Baltimore Convention Center has 7 Halls, 4 Ballrooms, and 50 meeting rooms, and I'm pretty sure Otakon rented the whole thing that weekend.
my wife has an old Mac (LC II I think), and if it's as simple as you make it out to be, I think I've got my firewall!
You'll have trouble; the LC only has room for one card. That's not bad, considering the entire LC literally fits inside a medium pizza box, but a NAT/Firewall really works a lot better with two ethernet cards (one for the LAN, one for the outbound line).
On the cheap, you could try a secondhand Quadra ($80) with two NuBus cards ($35 each).
I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be?
Bah, that's nothing. You want spam? Comcast @Home will show you what spam really means. 3 months ago I ordered a cable modem so I could telecommute (there's something about a newborn baby that makes one want to stay home from work).
The cable technician arrived at 10am, and had to drill some holes, finished up around noon. I reconfigure my email client and take a look -- the first spam advert arrived at 11am!!! I could not even use the cable yet, but I had already received junk mail.
I still have to check it every now and then, just to "Select All, Delete" so the accumulated mail doesn't cut into my disk quota.
I'm not a 3D developer, but I have looked at Pixels 3D (from Pixels.net), Vision 3D and Strata 3D (both from Strata3d.com). All of those full versions were sent out on various MacAddict CDs. I realize 3DMax is a pro-level tool, hence way beyond these apps. But how does the gMax feature set compare?
There are a few things that I think anyone interested in this port of Sid Meier's Planetary Pack should know:
You left out "What networking protocol does it use for multiplay?" I don't suppose it's compatible with either DirectPlay (Win) or NetSprockets (Mac)?
There are roughly 25,000 lines of Intel assembly in SMAC, making the convertion [to PPC] a major undertaking.
This conversion has already been done, by Brad Oliver at Westlake Interactive. I realize there would still be technical hassles converting from Mac APIs, not to mention licensing and payment issues. But don't say that it's just too hard to do.
I discussed this mysterious 6th square in the previous/. thread. My personal suspicion is that the space should correspond to the ultra-compact but professional-powered G4 Cube -- e.g. subnotebook.
Something that the Excite News article completely failed to discuss is power consumption. The G4 is of course a miser compared to P3 or Athlon, but it puts out way more heat than a G3. Perhaps you could make a PowerBook G4 without the AltiVec unit, but in that case what would be the point?
you must mean Dr. Michael W. "I want to patent your genes" Hunkapiller, huh?
No. Celera is run by Craig Ventner. PEB makes the sequencers that are used by Celera (and everyone else in genome research). Katz used the correct analogy once, then he threw it away.
PEB is to Celera as Cisco is to Microsoft.
Re:Here's the Real Facts
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 2
Since this is being posted several days into the story, I doubt anyone will read it. Nevertheless, here's a link to further coverage on The Register.
Hint: the first word refers to a male bovine. Get a grip, people! For starters, Radeon cards for Mac will not be ready until September -- two months from now. So there is NO way they were supposed to be in the Cube, which is on sale now.
It's perfectly believable that Jobs was planning to let ATI show off Radeon during his Keynote, then snubbed them for leaks. Steve is known to be a vindictive SOB. But that's just one f***ing speech, 10 minutes of PR, not a complete shift of manufacturing!
Even if he wanted to, there is no way that Apple's Board of Directors would let Steve purposefully weaken the product line out of spite. Remember, they're answerable to the shareholders, and no matter how it looks on stage, Apple is not a one man corporation.
BTW, your mom is brighter than average. I do distance education, and the percentage of Windows-using parents who don't know how to right-click is staggering.
Re:One space left in the Mac product matrix...
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 1
Why on earth would you try to balance paper on top of an 8" square surface 12 (or so) inches off your desk?
But it's such an obviously cute pedestal. Like a little ottoman, or vase stand, or temporary paper tray. It's going to happen. So I'm wondering what thermal protection Apple has prepared, if any.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and what if I want my kid to buy whatever vodka, machine guns, and cumshot videos that she wants? I'd have to get them for her. That's so fucking inconvenient. Boo hoo, whine whine whine.
But your entire argument suffers from a simple flaw -- you don't have kids, Alleria! I find it very interesting that the people here who actually have kids don't think this is as awful as you do.
Then you get your ass down to the K-Mart and buy the game for them. Problem solved. But I'll bet $20 that this is a moot question and you don't have any kids, Alleria.
In fact, I'll make a blanket statement right here -- I suspect that 95+% of people posting that this is evil censorship don't have kids. In other words, this isn't your problem (unless you're under 17). And don't give me some "slippery slope" argument. As long as K-Mart is carding people who buy violent games, that means that they'll still carry the games, which is a better result than lots of stores have chosen.
I have a zero year old daughter, and I don't see any problem with having stores card kids who try to buy mature products -- alcohol, tobacco, firearms, DVDs, video games, whatever. If I want my kid to have that stuff, I'll buy it for them.
The problem with Deja is that what it used to be was so damn useful to me, and frankly I am very skeptical about Deja's willingness and/or ability to bring the historical record back to life. I haven't been to Deja since I realized the archive was shut down, but before that happened I was using it quite frequently. I even set up a goofy "My Deja" home page and looked at the list of Deja communities. If that doesn't fit your definition of a portal site, you'd have to be a pointy haired marketroid. Perhaps Deja took that stuff down in the past several months? I wouldn't know.
Suggestion: if maintaining a complete Usenet archive takes up too many servers, just restore the formally-created, tale-endorsed Big 7 groups (preferably dating back to their net.* ancestors). That would be enough for me to use Deja again. But if you don't restore the archive, you'd be better off giving up the domain name and starting over as a different company, because right now Deja has negative mindshare.
ObAmazon: I, for one, am not loyal to any particular e-tailer -- if Amazon's prices aren't the lowest, I go somewhere else. Heck, not even meta-store engines -- I routinely use Shopper, MySimon, DealTime, etc before forking over a single line of text. I really ought to write a meta-meta tool for myself.
More accurately, the only thing you do is a comparison shopping "portal". Deja used to have a great Usenet archive, but it's been MIA for a long Long LONG time.
This Amazon debate is really pointless until we can establish what criteria they're using. If the price changes are strictly random in order to test buyer elasticity, that's really no different than any retail store using different prices and different "SALE!" signs on different days. It just happens much FASTER -- each new web hit instead of each day.
The September release will be a rather open beta, so that's not a big deal. If laptop hard drive prices drop below $15 per Gb, I'll expand my Wallstreet and give it a whirl. But it'll probably be full of bug catcher code and be too slow for serious use.
The Developer Preview releases that have been going out for a while now -- those are private, so of course they're all available on Hotline and various WareZ sites. One fun quirk: its Open Firmware thinks different than regular MacOS. So I've been having great fun with idiots who post to comp.sys.mac.misc that they can't uninstall OS X. Since the only people who should have it right now are serious Mac programmers, anyone asking that question is a pirate kiddie.
So in your plan, all nationally known businesses must relocate to Colorado?
It really is a shame that .us isn't used more. The registrars really need to relax the rulings, and allow local groups to buy domains at the State level (so the names don't get so stupidly long). The key, IMO, would be rules to prevent out-of-state squatting. If you're not from around here, we take the name back.
...how about an intro for someone who already knows the major Unix commands, but has never INSTALLED their own copy on a machine before?
I've used *nix accounts since the mid-1980's, but I was never an admin. I've got several Gb of unformatted space to play with on my Mac clone, and I'd like to try BSD, but I just don't know where to begin.
True. And when he's elected, we know the next 4 to 8 years of the USA's transportation will be heavy on petroleum. That's what happens when TWO Texas oilmen move into the White House (and the little gray house down the street, technically).
A bit of history: when Jimmy Carter was elected, he walked from the Capitol to the White House rather than take a limo. Shortly after moving in, he installed solar panels on the roof. He was THE Environmental President (and sucked at most other parts of the job). When Reagan moved in 4 years later, he tore the solar panels down, both symbolically and literally. Clinton was too much of a waffle wimp to try putting them back.
What does the future hold for alternative power (along with Microsoft, spotted owls, the obscenely wealthy, gays, and various others)? We'll find out in November.I'm betting that you don't have any kids, Ketzer.
I have a zero year old daughter. I doubt I'll ever use censorware to block her net connection in a few years (maybe some sort of anticommercialist filter though, to block the adverts), but damn straight am I going to keep her away from older sleazeballs when the time comes.Another aspect of hardcore Darwinism is the protection of one's genetic investment -- aka parenting.
True, true. Luckily, in 1997 I was just a humble schoolteacher, so my time wasn't very valuable and the powerbook wasn't essential to my work. 5 weeks of downtime (plus 5 hours of travel and 5 gallons of gas) spread over 2 years wasn't a bad price for a G3 upgrade.
Now I'm a techie, so if my powerbook dies I'll be in the deep stuff. Hasn't happened yet (knock on polycarbonate).
True story: I was fortunate enough to buy a 5300 in 1996 at the now-defunct ComputerCity. The sales guy managed to talk me into the extended warranty. Thank you sales guy!!!
Within 2 years, the display burned out 3 times, the motherboard & power manager once each, and it was all repaired for free. The last time I took it in for service (to a Tandy office, since ComputerCity was long gone), they officially threw in the towel and wrote me a check for the original purchase price. It was almost exactly enough to buy a Wallstreet (1998 Powerbook G3).
Try doing THAT with a junker from E-Machines or the other bottom-of-the-line PC makers. Even truly BAD Apples offer a competitive Total Cost of Ownership, thanks to buybacks. Funny, but true.
Why is everyone getting so worked up just to discuss the RUMOR of a possible TITLE? And it's almost certainly false? And it doesn't reveal anything about the plot that we didn't already know? And the movie itself is NOT likely to be great, but merely LESS MEDIOCRE than Episode 1? Is this really worth discussing?
Of course, here I am posting about the damn thing.
You're right. In the book, the blueprints were designed for a group of 6 to 8 people, which requires not much more space than a single person transport but is obviously more useful.
Of course, the entire crew selection was shiny happy SETI-loving scientists who were roundly disbelieved by the rest of the world when they told their tales. Also, they were allowed to pack their own supplies for the mission, and none of them thought to bring durable recording equipment (such as instant cameras, CD-R, or sterile containers). Easily the lowest point of the novel for me. It was one of very few instances where I liked the movie adaptation more than the original.
Personally, I worry that C is an absolute speed limit, and humanity ends up stuck in this solar system until we die when the Sun burns out. Billions of years of work all erased -- that would suck.
As explained on Lawrence Eng's fan page, that voice is in fact called Whisper, and it comes standard on every Mac.
And while I'm posting anyways, I have a question about Otakon -- why is it so dang expensive? I would have loved to drop by for a couple hours and browse for some DVDs, but the door price was over $20.
Yeah, yeah, I'm know I'm not a real otaku. But why doesn't a big con like that set aside a section as an admission-free space for vendors to sell goodies to the public at large? The Baltimore Convention Center has 7 Halls, 4 Ballrooms, and 50 meeting rooms, and I'm pretty sure Otakon rented the whole thing that weekend.
You'll have trouble; the LC only has room for one card. That's not bad, considering the entire LC literally fits inside a medium pizza box, but a NAT/Firewall really works a lot better with two ethernet cards (one for the LAN, one for the outbound line).
On the cheap, you could try a secondhand Quadra ($80) with two NuBus cards ($35 each).The first bright spot is the former Kree base where several Eternals now live.
The second one is the colony of telepaths where Imra Ardeen will come from in the 29th century.
But I'm not sure about the third one...Bah, that's nothing. You want spam? Comcast @Home will show you what spam really means. 3 months ago I ordered a cable modem so I could telecommute (there's something about a newborn baby that makes one want to stay home from work).
The cable technician arrived at 10am, and had to drill some holes, finished up around noon. I reconfigure my email client and take a look -- the first spam advert arrived at 11am!!! I could not even use the cable yet, but I had already received junk mail.
I still have to check it every now and then, just to "Select All, Delete" so the accumulated mail doesn't cut into my disk quota.
I'm not a 3D developer, but I have looked at Pixels 3D (from Pixels.net), Vision 3D and Strata 3D (both from Strata3d.com). All of those full versions were sent out on various MacAddict CDs. I realize 3DMax is a pro-level tool, hence way beyond these apps. But how does the gMax feature set compare?
You left out "What networking protocol does it use for multiplay?" I don't suppose it's compatible with either DirectPlay (Win) or NetSprockets (Mac)?
There are roughly 25,000 lines of Intel assembly in SMAC, making the convertion [to PPC] a major undertaking.This conversion has already been done, by Brad Oliver at Westlake Interactive. I realize there would still be technical hassles converting from Mac APIs, not to mention licensing and payment issues. But don't say that it's just too hard to do.
I discussed this mysterious 6th square in the previous /. thread. My personal suspicion is that the space should correspond to the ultra-compact but professional-powered G4 Cube -- e.g. subnotebook.
Something that the Excite News article completely failed to discuss is power consumption. The G4 is of course a miser compared to P3 or Athlon, but it puts out way more heat than a G3. Perhaps you could make a PowerBook G4 without the AltiVec unit, but in that case what would be the point?
No. Celera is run by Craig Ventner. PEB makes the sequencers that are used by Celera (and everyone else in genome research). Katz used the correct analogy once, then he threw it away.
Since this is being posted several days into the story, I doubt anyone will read it. Nevertheless, here's a link to further coverage on The Register.
Hint: the first word refers to a male bovine. Get a grip, people! For starters, Radeon cards for Mac will not be ready until September -- two months from now. So there is NO way they were supposed to be in the Cube, which is on sale now.
It's perfectly believable that Jobs was planning to let ATI show off Radeon during his Keynote, then snubbed them for leaks. Steve is known to be a vindictive SOB. But that's just one f***ing speech, 10 minutes of PR, not a complete shift of manufacturing!
Even if he wanted to, there is no way that Apple's Board of Directors would let Steve purposefully weaken the product line out of spite. Remember, they're answerable to the shareholders, and no matter how it looks on stage, Apple is not a one man corporation.Well then, be a good son and buy your mom a tw o button scroll mouse.
BTW, your mom is brighter than average. I do distance education, and the percentage of Windows-using parents who don't know how to right-click is staggering.But it's such an obviously cute pedestal. Like a little ottoman, or vase stand, or temporary paper tray. It's going to happen. So I'm wondering what thermal protection Apple has prepared, if any.