It that sounds almost exactly like Jello Biafra, tho:)
I tend to disagree with Nader more than I agree with him, probably because I'd get the butt end of the deal from many of his stances. Then again, I don't exactly agree with, well, pretty much anything from Jello (of Dead Kennedy's fame), although he is pretty funny, in a demented sort of way.
Both have fairly radical views on how to 'fix' the US government, but neither is "extreme" if you compare them to, say, a Hitler or Al Qaeda. Nader and Jello try to work within (or somewhat within, in Jello's case) the confines of the system to reform it (diplomacy), where radical extremists work from the outside to destroy it (war, murder). I think Bush is fairly extremist, probably because of 9/11, and pushes hard for military action to face threats rather than diplomacy. Saddam is far worse, though, killing anyone who voices dissent, including several relatives, some of which just thought he was crazy and didn't have political ambition (at least, that's what I've read). Saddam also has use genocidal attacks against the Kurds both using conventional weapons and banned poison gasses which the US, unfogivably, sold him (chemicals in the case of the gasses) and then looked the other way when he used them.
It's even worse than that - no chemical cleaners of any kind can be used. Shampoo and soap? nope (for the most part). No varnishes or treated woods or treated carpets (and most non-natural carpet fibers, for that matter).
I know a guy with this in Wisconsin - he grew up near a chemical plant that spilled toxic chems into the water table. That company basically pays for everything he (and his less probematic brother) need, as well as everyone else who grew up in that neighborhood before the cleanup (they still ship in bottled water to every house).
It's really funny in a sick sort of way whenever I go to his house - I'm toxically allergic to his pets and dust/dustmites, and he's allergic to the chems on our clothes (or our deoderant, shampoo, etc). For some reason matter/antimatter comes to mind...
So, in in layman's terms, if you took a pencil and held it in front of yourself without moving it, the argument is valid for 4 (or possibly more) dimensions, but as soon as you move it, the argument is not always valid because at some point in time, the value is valid and at others it is not (think like a film strip with each frame being a snapshot of 3-space -- if we had holo-projectors it'd be a better example - as soon as you change the angle in the frame, the example doesn't work anymore).
I'm actually using my CG knowledge/experience to understand most of this stuff, so I apologize if I'm wrong. I actually failed the math class some of this stuff was in the first time (OK, a D, but close enough), then realized it was useful for computer graphics, retook the class and got an easy A (specifically, eigenvalues and vectors, matrices and their associated cross and dot products and derivatives). It's much easier to understand stuff when you have a practical use for it;)
I get audible pops when my monitor switches resolutions (say 1024x768 to 800x600) or when I switch heads (it's dual head - er, in english, it switches between two computers to display on the same monitor). I have another monitor that makes no noise whatsoever. I believe this is similar or the same as the magnetic field thread (physical switching occuring)...
My knowledge of LCDs is very out of date, but I suspect if it supports multiple resolutions and doesn't display a shrunken image, there must be some kind of state change as well. All the portables I've ever used just used a portion of the screen if the resolution was higher than allowed (so 800x600 screen showing 640x480 would draw in the middle of the 800x600 screen but still be the same size).
I work for a dictatorship that has a zero tolerance no alchohol policy. Thankfully we're far enough removed from our parent that we still have celebratory release parties, but it's a lot more paranoid and sneaky than the all out bashes we used to have.
I suspect the Mormons have their fingers in our HR...
You can speed up animations a lot by pressing the shift key in civ 3. This is really handy when you want to watch some events, like your battleship battle, but not watch two enemies duke it out with 400 tanks.
The only problem I had here was the damn Windows StickyKeys program kept launching after pressing shift 5 times in a row, even after I told it to stay off.
Clear Channel does make a fortune promoting shows, but Live music is still where musicians make their money, not record sales. If you buy a $20 ticket, $10 goes to promotion, tickets and expenses, and $10 goes to the band.
Pretty much any live show ticket is split 50-50, with the venue paying expenses out of their half (musicians always pay record companies out of their tiny percentage). Keep in mind that touring musicians have a expenses for things such as roadies, sound engineer(s) and promoter(s), but usually those jobs are also based on percentages - so out of the 50% the musicians earn, 10-20% goes to roadies, 15% to manager/promoter, and 15% to sound engineer. None of it goes to power for the venue, ordinances and licenses, ticket printing and distrobution, promotional advertising, etc., all of which the record company would add to your half.
You might think that the venue loses out, because 50% probably doesn't pay for everything, and you're right - but venues make up the other money (actually pretty much all their profit) with concession sales and a percentage on T-Shirt and CD sales in the venue. I think the fact that record companies don't have this second source of income is why they expense everything to the bands. Bands usually make some profit on CD and T-Shirt sales done through a venue (my band did, at least - actually, almost all of our profits were through T-Shirts, because ticket costs usually only covered our touring expenses), but all concession sales go to the venue.
I was writing assembly and hacking BBSs when I was 12, and I eventually got in some trouble for it. Fortunately, I got it out of my system by 16...
A few things I'd tell myself:
Don't give Eric bomb plans you stripped out of the online Anarchist Cookbook. He'll photo copy them and start selling them in the library, then you'll get fingered and have a long chat with the cops. Be thankful nobody will know anything about Columbine for 15 years, and that you didn't give him the big book.
The phone company will fix their system next year and the latest black box plans you have don't work, anyway, so give up on it already.
Ordering 40000 tons of Sulfuric Acid from that chemical site you hack in 2 1/2 years and sending it to your Jr High is probably not the wisest of ideas. Send it to a different Jr High.
Tell your hacker friends to avoid the grade computer, as it will get them banned from the school computers, suspended, and almost expelled.
You will have justice for those black-eyes and bruised ribs - the asshole star quarterback will become a 300+ pound alchoholic with a dead end job in a couple of years, paying child support from his minimum wage to those two kids he fathers at 16. He will still be living with his parents at 30.
Find a doctor that will give you an alternative medicine to Theophyllin (sp?), as it is the reason you're known as the spaz in Jr High (note that theophyllin is one of the two other uppers in tea besides caffeine, and I was on 2600mg/day for asthma, which is a HUGE amount - imagine taking a 1000mg tablet of no-doze twice a day). And stay away from the mile run in 45 degree (F) weather, the hospital visit and near death experience isn't worth it. Tell the dumbass PE teacher who forces you to run it to go F*ck himself and take the F in that run - you'll get one anyway (oh, I so want to tell him that, even today:)
No dating advice - you'll screw up a lot, but it'll work out in the end.
Most sites that accept PINs, including ATMs will reject any card where the user has failed to enter a valid PIN number a certain number of times. The ones that suck in the card will "eat the card" and you won't even get it back. Others will just reject the card after that point (on any machine - the card won't validate at the central office). Basically, you get to make 3-5 educated guesses... Now since you'd have 2.2 million cards to work with, you should guess about 22 cards with each pass using just dumb luck, or about 60-100 cards in your 3-5 stabs at each password.
As for hashing a PIN number, you could even hash it into random data and give positional information for the true key as part of the hash.
I'm a deadbeat, then (guess I need to start saying dude...).
I agree with you on the credit limit thing - my wife had almost $33000 in debt, most on a single card (a Discover card) when I met her, and she only earned $32000/yr at that time. She was making minimal payments (yet nearly equal to my house payment) monthly and paying off very little principal.
I was just the opposite - I've only paid one interest payment ever, and that because mail took nearly two weeks to get to the CC company because of the Halloween blizzard of 1992 (and no, they didn't let it slide because of the weather - even though I bitched about it). I got my first and only increase ever about 4 months after that - from $3000 to $4250. My brother, with the exact same card and usually a standing balance, has the maximum $50000 limit. My credit rating is outstanding (when I applied for my home equity loan, the lady said she'd never seen one that high), so they sure aren't basing it on that.
If you have access to the inside of the computer, all you used to (and still for some manufacturers?) need to do is pop out a single chip. I used to do this occasionally when fixing computers (for a major PC manufacturer), usually because the password was forgotten and they needed it reset (meaning a new chip, unless they no longer wanted power on password, in which case all you needed to do was pop the chip and throw it away), or they were having controller problems (drives can be swapped into non-protected test bays easily enough, and can be surface scanned and write tested even if the contents are scrambled). Unless you have a lock on your case this security was pretty much useless.
The manufacturer security password you're talking about may be the "new" way of doing this (apparently in CMOS, not a separate EPROM), so popping the chip is unnecessary. I'd hate to think that's true, unless it's usable only by a EPROM reader, because anyone who gets that password can get in (and hackers will have that password published on 40 different sites two weeks before the machine hits market). I'm pretty sure invalidating the CMOS wouldn't reset the security chip, at least not on the machines I worked on about 7-8 years ago (BIOS upgrades didn't do it, at least).
Trash is perhaps too harsh of word, unless you mean having no artistic or literary merit (sounds like porn), which some people believe, but I think most adults view them as "for kids." I never was much of a comics collector (preferring art to content such as Warlock 5, although I did collect some early TMNT and The Tick comics), but many friends (not always girlfriends) in college asked me "You collect that kid stuff?" when they saw my 2 dozen or so comic books.
One (male) friend even said that about an issue of Heavy Metal with a half naked woman in chain mail on the front (Royo)... Playboy collecting hypocrite:P
I heard the same thing about Magic (the Gathering) when it first came out, then watched the bashers get hooked like crack addicts. I still only have about 200 cards (mostly betas, at that). One of those people (actually, the same guy who bashed my comics above) had about 25000. He did sell a couple of cases to pay for his wedding...
probably cleaning...
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 2, Funny
She was probably cleaning and shoved the powerbook into the oven to wipe a counter or something.
Don't laugh - my wife did this to a tray full of tupperware (so she could clean the sink and counters) and it ruined her oven.
My original Mediaone cable modem contract stated that, but the AT&T contract is a bit more ambiguous. Essentially, it say that it isn't supported unless you pay for it (which is just fine with me - I don't need their support unless the line goes down).
Several DSL providers explicitly prohibited NAT translation when I was considering that as an option, all routing through either Qwest or Covad (the only providers left in my area). I'm not sure if that was because of Qwest/Covad policies, or the actual ISP policies, though. I never considered either seriously because they had expensive, slow connections compared to my old DSL & ISP, Northpoint + PhoenixDSL (Qwest still has slower connections than Northpoint + Phoenix, and nearly 4 years have past since Phoenix sold out and Northpoint went bankrupt - so what does that tell you?).
ha - I'd be happy to hear Avril on our alt stations (Minneapolis). At least sk8r boy (however that's spelled) sounds sorta punk/newwavish.
Our stations won't play that, or unarguably alternative artists like Poe or 311. Instead, we get John Mayer, the Indigo Girls, the GAWDAWFUL Shawn Mullins (same riff, same voice on all songs... - if you don't like one, you won't like any), Sheryl Crow, the Corrs w/Bono, and others that all sound exactly like that. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind them sometimes, I just like some stylistic variety.
Then again, if I had my way, some Zeppelin and Bauhaus would be "flashbacks," not 80s pop...
yeah, I was vastly disappointed with FreeCiv, too, but some other games are coming along nicely, even though they have a long way to go yet. Take Vegastrike - I messed around with it 6 months ago and then again about 2 weeks ago. The progress made is phenomenal but it still has a long ways to go before it's commercial caliber. Some developers at least are putting enough time in to make Windows and Mac installers that don't take a degree to understand.
Arianne, was recently revived from the dead and is updated regularly again. The project is currently moving from 2D to 3D graphics, so it may be a while for a release. Freecraft is pretty stable even using none of the W*rcr*ft or St*rcr*ft files, but the graphics need work (fcmp needs help). Then again, Freecraft is based on commercial software...
The bottom line is that games take a tremendous amount of work to complete and open source developers rarely commit to long term projects. If they find a few dedicated people, it could turn out great.
I was disappointed with the Parsec LAN test, but I'm hoping the game has made a ton of progress since I tried it last (a couple of years ago already). The screenshots certainly look better than back then...
You're lucky - the first 3 versions of MS-Surgeon(tm) accidentally removed the heart, liver, and kidneys of patients. Dr. Gates defended this by stating these releases were still in "Clinical Studies" and that these people would have died from brain failure anyway.
Version 3.1, while much more usable and accurate, had a nasty habit of crashing during surgery, and the 4 minute reboot time usually meant the patient bled to death or had brain damage from lack of oxygen, as the mechanical part had a nasty habit of falling on the patient's jugular.
They finally seemed to be getting things right with Surgeon 2000(tm), but then they had to take the next step, Surgeon XP(tm). Surgeon XP(tm) had two variants, a Hospital version and a Home version. The Home version was lobotomized of a lot of important features, and often leaves its victims in a "dumbed down" state (I would guess that you used this version, or the 3.1 version). That coupled with the patient registration system, which ensures that Surgeon Home(tm) and Surgeon Hospital(tm) are only being used by one patient have resulted in many people sticking with Surgeon 2000(tm).
I agree (I think) - if Windows supports ICC, the results always comes out far too red for me. I need to use third party software to get any reasonable results.
That said, my WinXP box with third party filter and my OS X Jaguar box produce similar results on the same printer. My Win98 box without any color correction looks like it is suffering from internal bleeding.
Paint Shop Pro is a great program, but it is Windows only, so unless you're comparing it to emulated Windows on the mac, you won't have much success.
GIMP lacks some of the OOTB appeal of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro - the basic package lacks such basic things as red-eye reduction filters which are pretty much standard in other packages. To do Red Eye, I had to grab a filter off this page
I bought Photoshop 3 when I was in college (much cheaper for students), and still find it better for some things than Paint Shop Pro (even being 3 generations out of date). As a whole, PSP gives me what I need these days, which is mainly web graphics and some digital photo editing (I don't have their photo touchup package yet, though), and is much cheaper. On the other hand, Photoshop is a much more "complete" solution, where Jasc sells a bunch of individual packages targeting certain types of people, so if you do lots of different types of graphics design, you might be better off with Photoshop.
yeah, but distrobution and retail markups make up a good chunk, as well. As you said, artists usually end up with squat (songwriters get paid better than artists, but artists/songwriters still get paid squat). The good, low risk money was in becoming a songwriter and NOT a musician/performer - they make 10 cents a song rather than 1 cent (you may need to adjust that number for 8 years of inflation). This rate is set by some organization, I think ASCAP in America, but it's been a while since I dealt with it.
Remember that retail stores typically double the prices, so your $15 CD is bought by them for $7.50, ~$3-4 is taken by the distributor, unless the record company is also the distributor (Time Warner, for instance), and the remaining $4.00 is split between the artist and the record company, usually 98% recording company, 2% artist. The record company then claims most of their money was spent on promotional and distrobution costs (which may also get taken out of the artist's paycheck).
Record companies claim to take the risk, which they do, to a degree, by fronting money for recording, but I seriously doubt many of them don't break even, as they still expect the artist to pay back expenses out of their 2%, and if they don't break even they "lost" money. Major artists can get 20-50% of the cash rather than 2%, but I don't know any of them (I know a lot of bankrupt bands, tho).
There are other forms of marketing besides telemarketing, and I'm sure the post office will NEVER implement a "do not mail" list (since most of their money is from junk - er, bulk - mail).
There's always passing out leaflets, sticking cards in car windows, stapling posters onto telephone poles, and spamming. At least with those, I can look at them at my convenience (if at all), and not the sales person's (if I get another friggin call during dinner...)
I've done direct sales, and quite frankly, I hope they go down next (nearly all are slightly superior to retail store products that go for nearly 10x the price). I won't give direct sales people leads in the hope that their markets dry up.
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interesting...
most Linux geeks I know are married (including myself). Working a UNIX heavy tech job probably draws more of that sort...
I have to manage my wife's money - she's to money what a heatsink is to heat. Now if she'd only stop overheating (er, bouncing checks)...
Root-Mean-Squared didn't make a lot of sense.
:)
Now I get it
It that sounds almost exactly like Jello Biafra, tho :)
I tend to disagree with Nader more than I agree with him, probably because I'd get the butt end of the deal from many of his stances. Then again, I don't exactly agree with, well, pretty much anything from Jello (of Dead Kennedy's fame), although he is pretty funny, in a demented sort of way.
Both have fairly radical views on how to 'fix' the US government, but neither is "extreme" if you compare them to, say, a Hitler or Al Qaeda. Nader and Jello try to work within (or somewhat within, in Jello's case) the confines of the system to reform it (diplomacy), where radical extremists work from the outside to destroy it (war, murder). I think Bush is fairly extremist, probably because of 9/11, and pushes hard for military action to face threats rather than diplomacy. Saddam is far worse, though, killing anyone who voices dissent, including several relatives, some of which just thought he was crazy and didn't have political ambition (at least, that's what I've read). Saddam also has use genocidal attacks against the Kurds both using conventional weapons and banned poison gasses which the US, unfogivably, sold him (chemicals in the case of the gasses) and then looked the other way when he used them.
No, but you will need to re-activate Windows XP if you've got it :)
I almost expect to start needing to file forms in triplicate with them... is it just me, or is Microsoft well on their way to becoming a Bureaucracy?
It's even worse than that - no chemical cleaners of any kind can be used. Shampoo and soap? nope (for the most part). No varnishes or treated woods or treated carpets (and most non-natural carpet fibers, for that matter).
I know a guy with this in Wisconsin - he grew up near a chemical plant that spilled toxic chems into the water table. That company basically pays for everything he (and his less probematic brother) need, as well as everyone else who grew up in that neighborhood before the cleanup (they still ship in bottled water to every house).
It's really funny in a sick sort of way whenever I go to his house - I'm toxically allergic to his pets and dust/dustmites, and he's allergic to the chems on our clothes (or our deoderant, shampoo, etc). For some reason matter/antimatter comes to mind...
So, in in layman's terms, if you took a pencil and held it in front of yourself without moving it, the argument is valid for 4 (or possibly more) dimensions, but as soon as you move it, the argument is not always valid because at some point in time, the value is valid and at others it is not (think like a film strip with each frame being a snapshot of 3-space -- if we had holo-projectors it'd be a better example - as soon as you change the angle in the frame, the example doesn't work anymore).
;)
I'm actually using my CG knowledge/experience to understand most of this stuff, so I apologize if I'm wrong. I actually failed the math class some of this stuff was in the first time (OK, a D, but close enough), then realized it was useful for computer graphics, retook the class and got an easy A (specifically, eigenvalues and vectors, matrices and their associated cross and dot products and derivatives). It's much easier to understand stuff when you have a practical use for it
I get audible pops when my monitor switches resolutions (say 1024x768 to 800x600) or when I switch heads (it's dual head - er, in english, it switches between two computers to display on the same monitor). I have another monitor that makes no noise whatsoever. I believe this is similar or the same as the magnetic field thread (physical switching occuring)...
My knowledge of LCDs is very out of date, but I suspect if it supports multiple resolutions and doesn't display a shrunken image, there must be some kind of state change as well. All the portables I've ever used just used a portion of the screen if the resolution was higher than allowed (so 800x600 screen showing 640x480 would draw in the middle of the 800x600 screen but still be the same size).
maybe at a competing company -
I work for a dictatorship that has a zero tolerance no alchohol policy. Thankfully we're far enough removed from our parent that we still have celebratory release parties, but it's a lot more paranoid and sneaky than the all out bashes we used to have.
I suspect the Mormons have their fingers in our HR...
You can speed up animations a lot by pressing the shift key in civ 3. This is really handy when you want to watch some events, like your battleship battle, but not watch two enemies duke it out with 400 tanks.
The only problem I had here was the damn Windows StickyKeys program kept launching after pressing shift 5 times in a row, even after I told it to stay off.
Clear Channel does make a fortune promoting shows, but Live music is still where musicians make their money, not record sales. If you buy a $20 ticket, $10 goes to promotion, tickets and expenses, and $10 goes to the band.
Pretty much any live show ticket is split 50-50, with the venue paying expenses out of their half (musicians always pay record companies out of their tiny percentage). Keep in mind that touring musicians have a expenses for things such as roadies, sound engineer(s) and promoter(s), but usually those jobs are also based on percentages - so out of the 50% the musicians earn, 10-20% goes to roadies, 15% to manager/promoter, and 15% to sound engineer. None of it goes to power for the venue, ordinances and licenses, ticket printing and distrobution, promotional advertising, etc., all of which the record company would add to your half.
You might think that the venue loses out, because 50% probably doesn't pay for everything, and you're right - but venues make up the other money (actually pretty much all their profit) with concession sales and a percentage on T-Shirt and CD sales in the venue. I think the fact that record companies don't have this second source of income is why they expense everything to the bands. Bands usually make some profit on CD and T-Shirt sales done through a venue (my band did, at least - actually, almost all of our profits were through T-Shirts, because ticket costs usually only covered our touring expenses), but all concession sales go to the venue.
bah, 12 is plenty old -
:)
I was writing assembly and hacking BBSs when I was 12, and I eventually got in some trouble for it. Fortunately, I got it out of my system by 16...
A few things I'd tell myself:
Don't give Eric bomb plans you stripped out of the online Anarchist Cookbook. He'll photo copy them and start selling them in the library, then you'll get fingered and have a long chat with the cops. Be thankful nobody will know anything about Columbine for 15 years, and that you didn't give him the big book.
The phone company will fix their system next year and the latest black box plans you have don't work, anyway, so give up on it already.
Ordering 40000 tons of Sulfuric Acid from that chemical site you hack in 2 1/2 years and sending it to your Jr High is probably not the wisest of ideas. Send it to a different Jr High.
Tell your hacker friends to avoid the grade computer, as it will get them banned from the school computers, suspended, and almost expelled.
You will have justice for those black-eyes and bruised ribs - the asshole star quarterback will become a 300+ pound alchoholic with a dead end job in a couple of years, paying child support from his minimum wage to those two kids he fathers at 16. He will still be living with his parents at 30.
Find a doctor that will give you an alternative medicine to Theophyllin (sp?), as it is the reason you're known as the spaz in Jr High (note that theophyllin is one of the two other uppers in tea besides caffeine, and I was on 2600mg/day for asthma, which is a HUGE amount - imagine taking a 1000mg tablet of no-doze twice a day). And stay away from the mile run in 45 degree (F) weather, the hospital visit and near death experience isn't worth it. Tell the dumbass PE teacher who forces you to run it to go F*ck himself and take the F in that run - you'll get one anyway (oh, I so want to tell him that, even today
No dating advice - you'll screw up a lot, but it'll work out in the end.
Most sites that accept PINs, including ATMs will reject any card where the user has failed to enter a valid PIN number a certain number of times. The ones that suck in the card will "eat the card" and you won't even get it back. Others will just reject the card after that point (on any machine - the card won't validate at the central office). Basically, you get to make 3-5 educated guesses... Now since you'd have 2.2 million cards to work with, you should guess about 22 cards with each pass using just dumb luck, or about 60-100 cards in your 3-5 stabs at each password.
As for hashing a PIN number, you could even hash it into random data and give positional information for the true key as part of the hash.
I'm a deadbeat, then (guess I need to start saying dude...).
I agree with you on the credit limit thing - my wife had almost $33000 in debt, most on a single card (a Discover card) when I met her, and she only earned $32000/yr at that time. She was making minimal payments (yet nearly equal to my house payment) monthly and paying off very little principal.
I was just the opposite - I've only paid one interest payment ever, and that because mail took nearly two weeks to get to the CC company because of the Halloween blizzard of 1992 (and no, they didn't let it slide because of the weather - even though I bitched about it). I got my first and only increase ever about 4 months after that - from $3000 to $4250. My brother, with the exact same card and usually a standing balance, has the maximum $50000 limit. My credit rating is outstanding (when I applied for my home equity loan, the lady said she'd never seen one that high), so they sure aren't basing it on that.
If you have access to the inside of the computer, all you used to (and still for some manufacturers?) need to do is pop out a single chip. I used to do this occasionally when fixing computers (for a major PC manufacturer), usually because the password was forgotten and they needed it reset (meaning a new chip, unless they no longer wanted power on password, in which case all you needed to do was pop the chip and throw it away), or they were having controller problems (drives can be swapped into non-protected test bays easily enough, and can be surface scanned and write tested even if the contents are scrambled). Unless you have a lock on your case this security was pretty much useless.
The manufacturer security password you're talking about may be the "new" way of doing this (apparently in CMOS, not a separate EPROM), so popping the chip is unnecessary. I'd hate to think that's true, unless it's usable only by a EPROM reader, because anyone who gets that password can get in (and hackers will have that password published on 40 different sites two weeks before the machine hits market). I'm pretty sure invalidating the CMOS wouldn't reset the security chip, at least not on the machines I worked on about 7-8 years ago (BIOS upgrades didn't do it, at least).
Trash is perhaps too harsh of word, unless you mean having no artistic or literary merit (sounds like porn), which some people believe, but I think most adults view them as "for kids." I never was much of a comics collector (preferring art to content such as Warlock 5, although I did collect some early TMNT and The Tick comics), but many friends (not always girlfriends) in college asked me "You collect that kid stuff?" when they saw my 2 dozen or so comic books.
:P
One (male) friend even said that about an issue of Heavy Metal with a half naked woman in chain mail on the front (Royo)... Playboy collecting hypocrite
I heard the same thing about Magic (the Gathering) when it first came out, then watched the bashers get hooked like crack addicts. I still only have about 200 cards (mostly betas, at that). One of those people (actually, the same guy who bashed my comics above) had about 25000. He did sell a couple of cases to pay for his wedding...
She was probably cleaning and shoved the powerbook into the oven to wipe a counter or something.
:)
Don't laugh - my wife did this to a tray full of tupperware (so she could clean the sink and counters) and it ruined her oven.
Ok, now laugh
My original Mediaone cable modem contract stated that, but the AT&T contract is a bit more ambiguous. Essentially, it say that it isn't supported unless you pay for it (which is just fine with me - I don't need their support unless the line goes down).
Several DSL providers explicitly prohibited NAT translation when I was considering that as an option, all routing through either Qwest or Covad (the only providers left in my area). I'm not sure if that was because of Qwest/Covad policies, or the actual ISP policies, though. I never considered either seriously because they had expensive, slow connections compared to my old DSL & ISP, Northpoint + PhoenixDSL (Qwest still has slower connections than Northpoint + Phoenix, and nearly 4 years have past since Phoenix sold out and Northpoint went bankrupt - so what does that tell you?).
ha - I'd be happy to hear Avril on our alt stations (Minneapolis). At least sk8r boy (however that's spelled) sounds sorta punk/newwavish.
Our stations won't play that, or unarguably alternative artists like Poe or 311. Instead, we get John Mayer, the Indigo Girls, the GAWDAWFUL Shawn Mullins (same riff, same voice on all songs... - if you don't like one, you won't like any), Sheryl Crow, the Corrs w/Bono, and others that all sound exactly like that. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind them sometimes, I just like some stylistic variety.
Then again, if I had my way, some Zeppelin and Bauhaus would be "flashbacks," not 80s pop...
yeah, I was vastly disappointed with FreeCiv, too, but some other games are coming along nicely, even though they have a long way to go yet. Take Vegastrike - I messed around with it 6 months ago and then again about 2 weeks ago. The progress made is phenomenal but it still has a long ways to go before it's commercial caliber. Some developers at least are putting enough time in to make Windows and Mac installers that don't take a degree to understand.
Arianne, was recently revived from the dead and is updated regularly again. The project is currently moving from 2D to 3D graphics, so it may be a while for a release. Freecraft is pretty stable even using none of the W*rcr*ft or St*rcr*ft files, but the graphics need work (fcmp needs help). Then again, Freecraft is based on commercial software...
The bottom line is that games take a tremendous amount of work to complete and open source developers rarely commit to long term projects. If they find a few dedicated people, it could turn out great.
I was disappointed with the Parsec LAN test, but I'm hoping the game has made a ton of progress since I tried it last (a couple of years ago already). The screenshots certainly look better than back then...
You're lucky - the first 3 versions of MS-Surgeon(tm) accidentally removed the heart, liver, and kidneys of patients. Dr. Gates defended this by stating these releases were still in "Clinical Studies" and that these people would have died from brain failure anyway.
Version 3.1, while much more usable and accurate, had a nasty habit of crashing during surgery, and the 4 minute reboot time usually meant the patient bled to death or had brain damage from lack of oxygen, as the mechanical part had a nasty habit of falling on the patient's jugular.
They finally seemed to be getting things right with Surgeon 2000(tm), but then they had to take the next step, Surgeon XP(tm). Surgeon XP(tm) had two variants, a Hospital version and a Home version. The Home version was lobotomized of a lot of important features, and often leaves its victims in a "dumbed down" state (I would guess that you used this version, or the 3.1 version). That coupled with the patient registration system, which ensures that Surgeon Home(tm) and Surgeon Hospital(tm) are only being used by one patient have resulted in many people sticking with Surgeon 2000(tm).
I agree (I think) - if Windows supports ICC, the results always comes out far too red for me. I need to use third party software to get any reasonable results.
That said, my WinXP box with third party filter and my OS X Jaguar box produce similar results on the same printer. My Win98 box without any color correction looks like it is suffering from internal bleeding.
GIMP lacks some of the OOTB appeal of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro - the basic package lacks such basic things as red-eye reduction filters which are pretty much standard in other packages. To do Red Eye, I had to grab a filter off this page
I bought Photoshop 3 when I was in college (much cheaper for students), and still find it better for some things than Paint Shop Pro (even being 3 generations out of date). As a whole, PSP gives me what I need these days, which is mainly web graphics and some digital photo editing (I don't have their photo touchup package yet, though), and is much cheaper. On the other hand, Photoshop is a much more "complete" solution, where Jasc sells a bunch of individual packages targeting certain types of people, so if you do lots of different types of graphics design, you might be better off with Photoshop.
> I still have it, after all, where could I possibly sell it?
:)
OOOOH oooh! - I know! - eBay! There's always a sucker buying junk there!
oh, wait, that was a rhetorical question, wasn't it?
yeah, but distrobution and retail markups make up a good chunk, as well. As you said, artists usually end up with squat (songwriters get paid better than artists, but artists/songwriters still get paid squat). The good, low risk money was in becoming a songwriter and NOT a musician/performer - they make 10 cents a song rather than 1 cent (you may need to adjust that number for 8 years of inflation). This rate is set by some organization, I think ASCAP in America, but it's been a while since I dealt with it.
Remember that retail stores typically double the prices, so your $15 CD is bought by them for $7.50, ~$3-4 is taken by the distributor, unless the record company is also the distributor (Time Warner, for instance), and the remaining $4.00 is split between the artist and the record company, usually 98% recording company, 2% artist. The record company then claims most of their money was spent on promotional and distrobution costs (which may also get taken out of the artist's paycheck).
Record companies claim to take the risk, which they do, to a degree, by fronting money for recording, but I seriously doubt many of them don't break even, as they still expect the artist to pay back expenses out of their 2%, and if they don't break even they "lost" money. Major artists can get 20-50% of the cash rather than 2%, but I don't know any of them (I know a lot of bankrupt bands, tho).
There are other forms of marketing besides telemarketing, and I'm sure the post office will NEVER implement a "do not mail" list (since most of their money is from junk - er, bulk - mail).
There's always passing out leaflets, sticking cards in car windows, stapling posters onto telephone poles, and spamming. At least with those, I can look at them at my convenience (if at all), and not the sales person's (if I get another friggin call during dinner...)
I've done direct sales, and quite frankly, I hope they go down next (nearly all are slightly superior to retail store products that go for nearly 10x the price). I won't give direct sales people leads in the hope that their markets dry up.