I think there's something wrong with the idea that $600 is a cheap-ish computer. I've built 2 computers in the last 2 years, and, including the graphics cards, neither one of them came to $600 dollars. Now maybe it's just because I build budget boxes (since I don't need to play Doom3), but seriously... $600 is a hefty chunk of change. Especially when you're only getting the box (no mouse, no keyboard, no printer, no moniter, etc). Even with the less-crappy HD, it's not worth what they're asking.
Besides, why would I buy a computer? I have one of those.
--Jimmy
Heh, My parents were long-lived anti-establishment hippies, and my mother didn't believe we needed to get SSN until we were old enough to work. When she registered us for public school, she left the fields blank. When they called her on it, she said simply, "I"m an anarchist." and the woman replied, "I'll put that under regligion."
My brothers and I were finally forced to get cards when we entered highschool, because, they argued, we could potentially be in situations where we'd be earning money (working for the school, or participating in a work program), and therefore they had to have it.
The SSN place was very confused, and the woman kept asking my mother, "So, when did they lose their cards?"
You're running on the assumption that PT always works. It doesn't. It can't.
From my own personal experience:
I have lived in two different cities. Salt Lake, with an easy to use, intuitive city grid, and pittsburgh which has streets winding in through and around the terrain like a mad train layout.
In Salt Lake, PT is an option, as everything is relatively easy to get to, and there are lots bus routes with which to take. In Pittsburgh, outside of the downtown area, PT is really not usable, due to the streets being too convoluted.
To get from my house to the closest college (which was about a 15 minute drive), I had to start out by walking a mile to the nearest bus stop (and due to the fact that I had to go entirely over a hill in the process, I can fairly say it was uphill both ways:D). The bus would take me to a plaza where I had to wait for almost an hour for the next bus to come. All in all, it took me nearly 2 hours to commute via busses when 15 minutes was all I needed.
The real reason this happened was because the busses were geared towards what most people needed, which was to go downtown. I wasn't heading downtown, so my path was much more convuluted and difficult than it probably needed to be. If the busses were altered to accomedate me and my needs, it would be at the expense of almost everyone else...
But like I said, Pittsburgh was a convoluted city. I can't image London, which suffers many of the same problems street wise, and has the added difficulty of being an old city when pittsburgh was new, could easily meet everyone's needs every time.
Public Transportation must meet the majority's needs, which means that, to maybe 20% of the population (guessing), it's less than useless.
And just for the record: I have no car. If it weren't for my bicycle and the bus, I wouldn't be able to get around.
Heh, since I UNLOCKED it with a tiny bit of code (an simple.ESM file that had no graphics), it's fair to say that it did indeed ship with the game. However, that being said, they're...well...just nipples.
I'm not a pixel-perv or anything like that. I installed the original nudity patch on Morrowind simply because I dislike the ugly bra they put on 'em. I did the same with Oblivion.
That being said, the sheer nastiness of many of the missions leads me to believe that it deserves its M, and probably should've gotten it to begin with. Not for nipplage, but for the violence. However, that's the fault of the ESRB and not Bethesda. And certainly not Take Two. Other than publishing the game, I'm not sure what they really had to do with it.
Ya know, back when my Brother and I lived in Pittsburgh, it was the same feeling. We were freshly moved and trying to keep the game alive (without the rest of our old group), and had very little luck. I was told there were hundreds of gamers in the area, and total I gamed with 2. The first defined the "mouth-breathing dweeb", and the second was a very intellegent dope. We finally just grabbed friends out of the community college and started force feeding a rules-lite version of GURPS to them:D. I don't know what it is about that city. Back in salt lake, and I know of at least 4 different groups besides my own that games frequently. And that's without even looking for them.
If I was still in pittsburgh, I'd happily offer to game:P.
I installed Debian linux on my backup computer about 3 months ago. For my convenience, it comes with the GUI already installed. However, to install the drivers for my graphics card, I have to exit the graphical shell. I still can't figure out how to do that.
And then there's the installation of the.deb packages. To get those to work, I have to download the package, open up the command window and type in the installation manually. If I double click it from the file menu, it opens it like you would a zip file, and there's no way to get it to install. They also have a nice convenient program that installs files for me. Except that half the time, after it installs, I have no clue where to find it, and end up using the file manager to dig it out of the Bin folder.
Windows is, in a lot of ways crappier, no argument from me. Especially if you look at M$ who's holding all the cards. However, without any type of standards and organization, simple things become a chore. Linux needs an Ease of Use workover before I can be comfortable using it, and needs a lot more before I could, say, switch my dad's machine over to it. He still uses AOL because he finds other IPs too complex.
I never really got into MMORPG-ing, specifically because of the lack of change in environment. One of the things I really love about Oblivion was completing a recent quest where I helped two brothers reclaim an ogre-infested abandoned farm. The next time I visited them (in game terms, about a week later), they had cleaned up the farm completely, turning it from a wrecked unlivable ruin (with skeletons in the attic) to a nice clean farm. I felt all good inside.
Contrast that with World Of Warcraft, where after killing 20-some murlocs in an area (for a quest), I got sent back into that same area to collect their heads. The original murlocs were of course gone by this point, and new ones has spawned in their place. I killed those murlocs, and had them respawn behind me as I went. When I was all done, I had commited good ol' fashioned Murloc genoside, and it didn't even matter at all. That irked me. A lot. As in... I quit the game.
Alright, enough talk. I'm going to go finish clearing out my new manorhouse of Evil Spirits.:D.
--Jimmy
See, you obviously don't get it. Luke Skywalker's early life is really interesting. Ya know, back before he learned to use the force, joined the rebellion, and blew up a death star. What you don't realize is that the "New Hope" period in Luke's life was a bit of a downer for him. When he was complaining about not being able to go to the Academy, he was being sarcastic.
Besides, Everyone knows that Tatooine is the hotbed of adventure. That's why The Empire Stikes Back was the best of the star wars films.
Now if you will excuse me, I think I'm gonna go shoot myself.
--Jimmy
I think it's quite possible that the vast majority of us who have never been to Africa, and have never walked through these villages that have no power have no F*ck'n clue what we're talking about. We see the kids on the commercials with the announcer who says "For the price of a cup of coffee, you can make a child's life better", and we think we know all about how it is. But we don't.
Frankly, I'd rather see each child get the laptops than get anything else, since the entire goal of the project is education. Getting people educated and thinking goes a long way towards helping them make a better world.
I must say I'm impressed with any game that requires you to do hours and hours of useless monster-killing, and then bans you for trying to make it less teidious:P.
I don't think most people feel resistance to study.
The resistance is to the next step. The one where the government says, "now that we know that it influences children, and that it's bad for them, we must do what we can to protect them! Think of those poor innocent babies playing Doom and then shooting their sisters! Think of the terror! oh, isn't it terrible? you must be willing to do something to save those poor innocent children! Those poor babies walking around with those bloodied murderous hands. Our poor nation of childrent-turned-killers, where violence is the rage, and no one reamains safe! Our poor innocent children! You want to save them right? you want to help them, right?"
How is announcing the # of downloads different than McDonalds bragging about the number of burgers served? Yes, if we think about it, we can fairly say that not every download was unique, but we can also say that not every McDonalds burger that was sold was sold to a single person. We don't get mad at McDonalds for that, though (we get mad cause those "Billions of Burgers" have all been crappy:P).
That being said, 150 million downloads is a significant number. First off, it's big. I mean really really big. But Secondly, it's a sign that people are still using Firefox. For every time that the same person downloads another copy of firefox, that person is quietly saying that Firefox works for them. That's pretty significant.
All that being said, saying the "Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control" in this regard is over-hype, and actually worse than bragging about a downloads number. It's creating a major false-impression. I thought the title meant that the FireFox community was fracturing and that 2.0 was going to be seriously delayed or some such. I thought that they were turning into a porn-download-machine (more than it already is, being able to connect to the internet:P), or taking money from microsoft to sabotage their own product. I thought they were hatching a scheme to turn everyone's computers into nodes for the ultimate evil planet-controlling network, and demanding that the world leaders give them $$$$$ or we'll all be blown straight to hell. Something.
Saying "yay, yay, 150+ million downloads. Microsoft sucks. we rock. Go us." is not sickly out of control. Maybe immature...maybe.
When you place your order, they say "If your billing and shipping addresses are different, there may be delays to your order." meaning that when you MOVE you need to let your BANK know so they can update that.
If you don't, shit like that happens when people do their jobs correctly at places like NewEgg.
See, the point was not that the credit card's info was wrong. I had entered a second credit card (I had placed previous orders at newegg.com with an older card), and that second card had a different billing address, which I entered. When the order was complete, they (and why I do not know) tossed out the billing address for the second card and instead used the billing address for the first card (this didn't work because I had moved, and as such removed that billing address from my bank's records. The BANK was correct, it was newegg that fouled up).
Even at that, I'm not too upset. Mistakes happen. I would've been able to correct this in a few seconds without a problem if they had let me talk to them on the phone or responded promptly to my emails. My irritation comes with them telling me I have "3 days to correct the problem" and then ignoring me for those days (they did respond to the email, but only after they cancelled the order). I followed every procedure they had in place to fix the problem, and they didn't fix it. I don't know any excuse that justifies that.
I've been inching towards moving from my WiNAZI OS to Linux since they announced that you'll have to prove you own your copy of WiNAZI to get any updates. This was furthered when I found out that Corel now owns PSP (sniffle), that M$ was doing their cheap tactics again (OEM bundling, Forced Upgrades, forced hardware based DRM, Required OEM software replacement duirng MB upgrades, etc), and...hell the list goes on and on. M$ is not ever going to be a decent company, and now that the Linux builds are actually getting easier to use, I've got precious little reason to stay.
But, to get to my point, I've been exploring lots of Open Source Alternatives like Inkskape, GIMP, Songbird, etc. And for the most part I've been pretty impressed.
The programs I like so far are:
GIMPshop (I can't stand The GIMP's standard interface, though even with GIMPshop I miss PSPs ease of use and intuitive interface)
InkScape - Intuitive Vector Editing. I adore it. I more than adore it. I highly recommend it.
Firefox - Seriously, I will never use IE again (except, of course, to download FireFox:D)
OpenOffice.Org - Version 2 is everything that Version 1 was not (functional, stable, etc). And being free of that damn paperclip (or dog..I think it's a dog now) is only points on its side.
Those are just my opinions though.
A quick question: does anyone know what the best OS media player there is? I do have a lovely music collection I'd like to keep.
Slashdot Mirror
Says You
Myspace? Bah.
/. ???
How many of us post on
I think there's something wrong with the idea that $600 is a cheap-ish computer. I've built 2 computers in the last 2 years, and, including the graphics cards, neither one of them came to $600 dollars. Now maybe it's just because I build budget boxes (since I don't need to play Doom3), but seriously... $600 is a hefty chunk of change. Especially when you're only getting the box (no mouse, no keyboard, no printer, no moniter, etc). Even with the less-crappy HD, it's not worth what they're asking. Besides, why would I buy a computer? I have one of those. --Jimmy
Us AMD Zealots are doing just fine :D.
Ya know, hollywood doesn't need your help coming up with campy end-o-the-earth scenarioes. didn't you see The Core?
--Jimmy
Look, I wrote my own sig.
P.S. Please accept my next submission.
--Jimmy
Here's the afore-mentioned World of Warcraft - The Internet is for porn video.
Courtesy of Google Video.
--Jimmy
When it comes to Google, I'm thoroughly Agnostic.
--Jimmy
Heh, My parents were long-lived anti-establishment hippies, and my mother didn't believe we needed to get SSN until we were old enough to work. When she registered us for public school, she left the fields blank. When they called her on it, she said simply, "I"m an anarchist." and the woman replied, "I'll put that under regligion."
My brothers and I were finally forced to get cards when we entered highschool, because, they argued, we could potentially be in situations where we'd be earning money (working for the school, or participating in a work program), and therefore they had to have it.
The SSN place was very confused, and the woman kept asking my mother, "So, when did they lose their cards?"
--Jimmy
You're running on the assumption that PT always works. It doesn't. It can't.
:D). The bus would take me to a plaza where I had to wait for almost an hour for the next bus to come. All in all, it took me nearly 2 hours to commute via busses when 15 minutes was all I needed.
From my own personal experience:
I have lived in two different cities. Salt Lake, with an easy to use, intuitive city grid, and pittsburgh which has streets winding in through and around the terrain like a mad train layout.
In Salt Lake, PT is an option, as everything is relatively easy to get to, and there are lots bus routes with which to take. In Pittsburgh, outside of the downtown area, PT is really not usable, due to the streets being too convoluted.
To get from my house to the closest college (which was about a 15 minute drive), I had to start out by walking a mile to the nearest bus stop (and due to the fact that I had to go entirely over a hill in the process, I can fairly say it was uphill both ways
The real reason this happened was because the busses were geared towards what most people needed, which was to go downtown. I wasn't heading downtown, so my path was much more convuluted and difficult than it probably needed to be. If the busses were altered to accomedate me and my needs, it would be at the expense of almost everyone else...
But like I said, Pittsburgh was a convoluted city. I can't image London, which suffers many of the same problems street wise, and has the added difficulty of being an old city when pittsburgh was new, could easily meet everyone's needs every time.
Public Transportation must meet the majority's needs, which means that, to maybe 20% of the population (guessing), it's less than useless.
And just for the record: I have no car. If it weren't for my bicycle and the bus, I wouldn't be able to get around.
--Jimmy
Heh, since I UNLOCKED it with a tiny bit of code (an simple .ESM file that had no graphics), it's fair to say that it did indeed ship with the game. However, that being said, they're...well...just nipples.
I'm not a pixel-perv or anything like that. I installed the original nudity patch on Morrowind simply because I dislike the ugly bra they put on 'em. I did the same with Oblivion.
That being said, the sheer nastiness of many of the missions leads me to believe that it deserves its M, and probably should've gotten it to begin with. Not for nipplage, but for the violence. However, that's the fault of the ESRB and not Bethesda. And certainly not Take Two. Other than publishing the game, I'm not sure what they really had to do with it.
--Jimmy
When you consider the fact that people aren't upset by the boobies, but by the specific nipples themselves, I have to most definately disagree.
:D.
last I checked these hairy things on my chest were nipples too
--Jimmy
Ya know, back when my Brother and I lived in Pittsburgh, it was the same feeling. We were freshly moved and trying to keep the game alive (without the rest of our old group), and had very little luck. I was told there were hundreds of gamers in the area, and total I gamed with 2. The first defined the "mouth-breathing dweeb", and the second was a very intellegent dope. We finally just grabbed friends out of the community college and started force feeding a rules-lite version of GURPS to them :D. I don't know what it is about that city. Back in salt lake, and I know of at least 4 different groups besides my own that games frequently. And that's without even looking for them.
:P.
If I was still in pittsburgh, I'd happily offer to game
--Jimmy
I installed Debian linux on my backup computer about 3 months ago. For my convenience, it comes with the GUI already installed. However, to install the drivers for my graphics card, I have to exit the graphical shell. I still can't figure out how to do that.
.deb packages. To get those to work, I have to download the package, open up the command window and type in the installation manually. If I double click it from the file menu, it opens it like you would a zip file, and there's no way to get it to install. They also have a nice convenient program that installs files for me. Except that half the time, after it installs, I have no clue where to find it, and end up using the file manager to dig it out of the Bin folder.
And then there's the installation of the
Windows is, in a lot of ways crappier, no argument from me. Especially if you look at M$ who's holding all the cards. However, without any type of standards and organization, simple things become a chore. Linux needs an Ease of Use workover before I can be comfortable using it, and needs a lot more before I could, say, switch my dad's machine over to it. He still uses AOL because he finds other IPs too complex.
But that's just my 2 cents.
--Jimmy
You don't think that Gates would say anything publicly before buying all the rights if the algorithm were any good, do you? :)
Besides, Microsoft's only been known to buy companies. This whole "licensing technology" thing confuses them.
--Jimmy
I never really got into MMORPG-ing, specifically because of the lack of change in environment. One of the things I really love about Oblivion was completing a recent quest where I helped two brothers reclaim an ogre-infested abandoned farm. The next time I visited them (in game terms, about a week later), they had cleaned up the farm completely, turning it from a wrecked unlivable ruin (with skeletons in the attic) to a nice clean farm. I felt all good inside.
:D.
Contrast that with World Of Warcraft, where after killing 20-some murlocs in an area (for a quest), I got sent back into that same area to collect their heads. The original murlocs were of course gone by this point, and new ones has spawned in their place. I killed those murlocs, and had them respawn behind me as I went. When I was all done, I had commited good ol' fashioned Murloc genoside, and it didn't even matter at all. That irked me. A lot. As in... I quit the game.
Alright, enough talk. I'm going to go finish clearing out my new manorhouse of Evil Spirits.
--Jimmy
See, you obviously don't get it. Luke Skywalker's early life is really interesting. Ya know, back before he learned to use the force, joined the rebellion, and blew up a death star. What you don't realize is that the "New Hope" period in Luke's life was a bit of a downer for him. When he was complaining about not being able to go to the Academy, he was being sarcastic.
Besides, Everyone knows that Tatooine is the hotbed of adventure. That's why The Empire Stikes Back was the best of the star wars films.
Now if you will excuse me, I think I'm gonna go shoot myself.
--Jimmy
I think it's quite possible that the vast majority of us who have never been to Africa, and have never walked through these villages that have no power have no F*ck'n clue what we're talking about. We see the kids on the commercials with the announcer who says "For the price of a cup of coffee, you can make a child's life better", and we think we know all about how it is. But we don't.
Frankly, I'd rather see each child get the laptops than get anything else, since the entire goal of the project is education. Getting people educated and thinking goes a long way towards helping them make a better world.
--Jimmy
I've never been to Africa either.
I must say I'm impressed with any game that requires you to do hours and hours of useless monster-killing, and then bans you for trying to make it less teidious :P.
--Jimmy
(WoW Free since March 2nd, 2006)
I thought those two bloggers PROVED we knew nothing about how things work in China, regardless of the "Facts".
--Jimmy
no sig. Seriously. no sig.
I don't think most people feel resistance to study.
The resistance is to the next step. The one where the government says, "now that we know that it influences children, and that it's bad for them, we must do what we can to protect them! Think of those poor innocent babies playing Doom and then shooting their sisters! Think of the terror! oh, isn't it terrible? you must be willing to do something to save those poor innocent children! Those poor babies walking around with those bloodied murderous hands. Our poor nation of childrent-turned-killers, where violence is the rage, and no one reamains safe! Our poor innocent children! You want to save them right? you want to help them, right?"
"...Then give us more power."
--Joe
p.s. I'm biased, bitches.
How is announcing the # of downloads different than McDonalds bragging about the number of burgers served? Yes, if we think about it, we can fairly say that not every download was unique, but we can also say that not every McDonalds burger that was sold was sold to a single person. We don't get mad at McDonalds for that, though (we get mad cause those "Billions of Burgers" have all been crappy :P).
:P), or taking money from microsoft to sabotage their own product. I thought they were hatching a scheme to turn everyone's computers into nodes for the ultimate evil planet-controlling network, and demanding that the world leaders give them $$$$$ or we'll all be blown straight to hell. Something.
That being said, 150 million downloads is a significant number. First off, it's big. I mean really really big. But Secondly, it's a sign that people are still using Firefox. For every time that the same person downloads another copy of firefox, that person is quietly saying that Firefox works for them. That's pretty significant.
All that being said, saying the "Firefox Community, Sickly Out of Control" in this regard is over-hype, and actually worse than bragging about a downloads number. It's creating a major false-impression. I thought the title meant that the FireFox community was fracturing and that 2.0 was going to be seriously delayed or some such. I thought that they were turning into a porn-download-machine (more than it already is, being able to connect to the internet
Saying "yay, yay, 150+ million downloads. Microsoft sucks. we rock. Go us." is not sickly out of control. Maybe immature...maybe.
--Jimmy
It's kinda scarey how the terrorists want to steal copies of ROME too.
--Jimmy
"Kinda makes you think, donut."
When you place your order, they say "If your billing and shipping addresses are different, there may be delays to your order." meaning that when you MOVE you need to let your BANK know so they can update that.
:P
If you don't, shit like that happens when people do their jobs correctly at places like NewEgg.
See, the point was not that the credit card's info was wrong. I had entered a second credit card (I had placed previous orders at newegg.com with an older card), and that second card had a different billing address, which I entered. When the order was complete, they (and why I do not know) tossed out the billing address for the second card and instead used the billing address for the first card (this didn't work because I had moved, and as such removed that billing address from my bank's records. The BANK was correct, it was newegg that fouled up).
Even at that, I'm not too upset. Mistakes happen. I would've been able to correct this in a few seconds without a problem if they had let me talk to them on the phone or responded promptly to my emails. My irritation comes with them telling me I have "3 days to correct the problem" and then ignoring me for those days (they did respond to the email, but only after they cancelled the order). I followed every procedure they had in place to fix the problem, and they didn't fix it. I don't know any excuse that justifies that.
And yes, I'm a terrible speller.
--Jimmy
I've been inching towards moving from my WiNAZI OS to Linux since they announced that you'll have to prove you own your copy of WiNAZI to get any updates. This was furthered when I found out that Corel now owns PSP (sniffle), that M$ was doing their cheap tactics again (OEM bundling, Forced Upgrades, forced hardware based DRM, Required OEM software replacement duirng MB upgrades, etc), and...hell the list goes on and on. M$ is not ever going to be a decent company, and now that the Linux builds are actually getting easier to use, I've got precious little reason to stay.
:D)
But, to get to my point, I've been exploring lots of Open Source Alternatives like Inkskape, GIMP, Songbird, etc. And for the most part I've been pretty impressed.
The programs I like so far are:
GIMPshop (I can't stand The GIMP's standard interface, though even with GIMPshop I miss PSPs ease of use and intuitive interface)
InkScape - Intuitive Vector Editing. I adore it. I more than adore it. I highly recommend it.
Firefox - Seriously, I will never use IE again (except, of course, to download FireFox
OpenOffice.Org - Version 2 is everything that Version 1 was not (functional, stable, etc). And being free of that damn paperclip (or dog..I think it's a dog now) is only points on its side.
Those are just my opinions though.
A quick question: does anyone know what the best OS media player there is? I do have a lovely music collection I'd like to keep.
--Jimmy