> Remember folks, many, if not most, of the *IAAs victims are technically guilty.
Generously put, I would say maybe half. And guilty of stealing a couple hundred bucks worth of music at most. We'll continue being generous, treble damages, and it still doesn't even come close to the shakedown amount for settling, let along the hundreds of thousands they're suing for, based on numbers they patently made up for the sole purpose of creating as much fear and damage as possible.
I have no sympathy for thieves, but I have even less for the RIAA. They need to go down, hard.
GURPS, yikes. Very nice character creation system, but one-second combat rounds? Micromanagement beyond belief and an awesome headache for a GM. I never met a GM who ran GURPS combat by the book. Ever read the GURPS Hi-Tech worldbook and see how much die-rolling you would have to do with artillery? It's almost comical. I'll take something like White Wolf's storyteller system -- my favorite part of it is how it encourages "specializing" your basic attributes (something you can do with GURPS advantages/disadvantages to a degree, but WW left more to the GM while still giving him numbers to fall back on)
Rifts and the Palladium games were damn fun -- Megadamage FTW! And I always liked the magic/technology backstory and brutal post-apocalyptic atmosphere better than the silliness of shadowrun. But the ne plus ultra of munchkin gaming: Champions. I remember buying whole bricks of d6 just for that game.
Things I really loved were the damage charts in ICE games though, like the ones in Spell Law: I recall the maximum result for concussion damage was something like "Foe is reduced to a gelatinous mass. Get a spatula."
DVD-RAM isn't dead, it's just niche -- Panasonic DVRs use them (along with DVD+/-R and DVD-RW, though oddly enough not DVD+RW). It's the only format in those players that can playback and record at the same time (thus enabling tivo-like live timeshifting). Not quite as convenient as a HDD-based player, but cheaper. You can pick up DVD-RAM drives for PC's too.
I too think dual-format players are going end up the norm for the HD formats for quite a while.
Discman players were notoriously finicky. These days, you can practically sandpaper the bottom of a CD and it will play flawlessly. Still, a circular scratch along a track will cause problems, since it'll refract the laser over a longer path than a perpendicular scratch that might cause just a one-bit error. And if you scratch the label you're pretty screwed.
I just recently had to download a pirate (arr!) copy of a game that I had on CD because it caught in the tray (damn you lite-on, fix that mechanism!) and gouged the label side. Ah well, I never liked using my CD as a dongle anyway.
> Valve amps, and vinyl don't clip when subjected to out-of-bounds input. Instead, they distort
Oh for godsake, clipping is distortion. It's just that the clipping on a tube amp is more gradual, and thus is less of a square wave than a transistor amp.
Sending full-blast headphone output into line input is a great way to fry the pre-amp stage on a cheap amp. Better ones have limiters, so on those you won't get distortion, you'll get nothing at all.
As for "warmth", it's all a subjective experience. Whatever sounds good is whatever is best. Some remaining old folks probably like the tinny scratchy sound of a victrola more than anything else, because to them that's what records are supposed to sound like. Fidelity is pretty absolute though -- whatever's closest to a live performance.
If he doesn't want users that block ads, that's his prerogative. It's also his right to be a whiny little bitch about it, and finally it's his right to wonder why his pageviews are so low so that he can't attract any decent advertisers in the first place.
I suppose it's also his right to insert google ads or some obscure advertiser that isn't usually blocked, troll slashdot, and rake in the hits. Oh snap.
Sounds like you're looking for Seam. All the xml stuff is optional in Seam, so you'll actually come to like the xml configs for its good parts (like complex navigation rules) when you're not forced to use it for everything. No declaration needed, you don't even need "backing beans" or even a class for your page (take that, ASP.NET).
If you really want tight integration between page and code, there's wicket (which I frankly find awful) or Tapestry5 (which looks really nice, but it's not finished yet). Or if you prefer to just code guis straight to the web without all the multitier nonsense, there's no shortage of frameworks to choose from there, including GWT, Echo2, and Thinwire. There's even a few that will publish swing apps straight to the web, so you can design your page in Matisse. I don't personally recommend that approach, but it's there if you want it.
Here in San Francisco, I can guarantee that nobody ever says "hella" or uses surfer lingo (then again the surfers here wear wetsuits -- the water's COLD in northern cal). In fact, the local slang here is virtually nada -- maybe it's because of the awesomely whitebread nature of the Bay Area (minus Oakland).
> Amex hires some good cutomer reps in India. They tell you their real name and don't hide their accent.
More to the point, Amex hires a company that doesn't force the Indian reps to hide their name or accent. I'm sure Amex neither knows nor cares about the corporate culture of their call-center offshorer.
Last time I called Microsoft tech support, it was the same deal. I think now that everyone knows the call centers are in India now, the offshorers don't make an effort to hide it.
I remain unconvinced. You not only don't have a smoking gun, you don't even have relevant evidence other than the fact that one of the products mentioned was a shampoo. Feel free to reply with something else, I may or may not bother to look.
All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
Luckily smarter people like Bernoulli were eventually born, who found that lift doesn't actually work like that.
> I saw a couple of kids who couldn't figure out how to get the maximum bounce out of a trampoline.
Possibly they were just having fun, even if it wasn't at maximum efficiency.
Parallel parking is a coordination and depth perception thing. I know plenty of geniuses who suck at it. All you sound like is a crotchety old coot who thinks his generation was the smartest one.
There are some truly nifty plugins for Eclipse: Mylar comes immediately to mind. Exadel Studio has some decent functionality, but it's grotesquely slow and not terribly stable either. And JBoss IDE always struck me as a few miscellaneous plugins that didn't really accomplish anything. The Hibernate stuff is all right if you're using the xml files, but I use JPA, and it's useless there.
All I really want are some clicky wizard dialogs for the functionality in seam-gen, and a decent stable IDE for Drools/JBossRules (which I don't think RHDS even includes).
Netbeans would be a more ideal IDE except for how it makes you really regret it if you subvert the bureacracy of the "add new file" wizard in a project. With eclipse, I can just drag new files in and hit refresh. That and Netbeans still has no TestNG plugin (the existing one always sucked, and doesn't even work in recent versions). I suppose I could pay for IDEA if I was still doing Java full time.
Free market fundamentalists are fundamentally (heh) wrong when they assume that the existing markets are already operating under ideal conditions. The specific one here is called the "Fallacy of Perfect Information", which should be more or less self-explanatory: that the market still doesn't know that antibacterial products are bad for them, or at best useless. The economy of information is actually a pretty fascinating theory in itself, and got some economists a nobel prize for it, so I imagine you could google for it to learn more.
Eventually, the market does learn: you don't see oat bran hyped all that much anymore after it was soundly debunked -- a bit of a shame actually, because the fiber in general is still really good for you -- so I do imagine that we'll see less triclosan-containing soap on the shelves soon. As for the people who can't find any non-antibacterial soap, I suggest that they find a better supermarket. Even the major brands like Dial and SoftSoap have varieties that don't have any triclosan (like my favorite, the Shea Butter one). They don't advertise its lack, it just isn't on the ingredient label.
Still, if the stuff is really that useless, then advertisers should be forbidden to claim it has antibacterial properties.
Seconded -- the peppermint soap is the best (just don't get it in your eyes). Ever read the labels on those? Doc Bronner was a wee bit of a kook... Great soap though.
If you upgrade your PC, you can migrate your old XP over, even if it's OEM. As in migrate, you can't use it on the old PC anymore. The only OEM installs you can't do this for are volume OEMs, like Dell or HP. If you have a boxed (or more likely, skinny shrinkwrap envelope) version of OEM XP, you have a "System Builder" OEM version, and you're fully entitled to migrate it. You might have to speak to a helpdesk drone to get a new key, but they'll give it to you without any hassle at all.
Yes, activation is a bitch. No, you don't have to buy separate copies repeatedly. Yes, I'm sure they count on the confusion to sell more copies.
They could begin there and port the look-n-feel of their Vista. They could even continue using their beloved C:\, D:\ file system nomenclature on top of the native "everything is a directory off of root (/)" structure.
It already works that way, and it even uses forward slashes (in addition to backslashes), and windows already goes to great lengths to pile the drive letters on top through a number of nasty hacks. Drive letters don't bother me at all, because there's plenty of ways to avoid them. Global "magic filenames" like PRN or NUL or CON bug me to no end, and I'd like to think they got rid of them in Vista, but I severely doubt it. I know that they live in the \GLOBAL?? namespace in the Object Manager, but I haven't the slightest idea how to delete them (and I imagine things would break all over if I did)
Slashdot Mirror
> An actor and a physicist?
Mayam Bialik has a PhD in Neuroscience. Actress and brain surgeon?
> Remember folks, many, if not most, of the *IAAs victims are technically guilty.
Generously put, I would say maybe half. And guilty of stealing a couple hundred bucks worth of music at most. We'll continue being generous, treble damages, and it still doesn't even come close to the shakedown amount for settling, let along the hundreds of thousands they're suing for, based on numbers they patently made up for the sole purpose of creating as much fear and damage as possible.
I have no sympathy for thieves, but I have even less for the RIAA. They need to go down, hard.
I've never looked at 4th edition GURPS. What are the major differences between it and the third?
That's disloyal commie mutant subversive traitors, citizen. Please report to reactor shielding manufacture for reassignment.
GURPS, yikes. Very nice character creation system, but one-second combat rounds? Micromanagement beyond belief and an awesome headache for a GM. I never met a GM who ran GURPS combat by the book. Ever read the GURPS Hi-Tech worldbook and see how much die-rolling you would have to do with artillery? It's almost comical. I'll take something like White Wolf's storyteller system -- my favorite part of it is how it encourages "specializing" your basic attributes (something you can do with GURPS advantages/disadvantages to a degree, but WW left more to the GM while still giving him numbers to fall back on)
Rifts and the Palladium games were damn fun -- Megadamage FTW! And I always liked the magic/technology backstory and brutal post-apocalyptic atmosphere better than the silliness of shadowrun. But the ne plus ultra of munchkin gaming: Champions. I remember buying whole bricks of d6 just for that game.
Things I really loved were the damage charts in ICE games though, like the ones in Spell Law: I recall the maximum result for concussion damage was something like "Foe is reduced to a gelatinous mass. Get a spatula."
DVD-RAM isn't dead, it's just niche -- Panasonic DVRs use them (along with DVD+/-R and DVD-RW, though oddly enough not DVD+RW). It's the only format in those players that can playback and record at the same time (thus enabling tivo-like live timeshifting). Not quite as convenient as a HDD-based player, but cheaper. You can pick up DVD-RAM drives for PC's too.
I too think dual-format players are going end up the norm for the HD formats for quite a while.
Discman players were notoriously finicky. These days, you can practically sandpaper the bottom of a CD and it will play flawlessly. Still, a circular scratch along a track will cause problems, since it'll refract the laser over a longer path than a perpendicular scratch that might cause just a one-bit error. And if you scratch the label you're pretty screwed.
I just recently had to download a pirate (arr!) copy of a game that I had on CD because it caught in the tray (damn you lite-on, fix that mechanism!) and gouged the label side. Ah well, I never liked using my CD as a dongle anyway.
> Valve amps, and vinyl don't clip when subjected to out-of-bounds input. Instead, they distort
Oh for godsake, clipping is distortion. It's just that the clipping on a tube amp is more gradual, and thus is less of a square wave than a transistor amp.
Sending full-blast headphone output into line input is a great way to fry the pre-amp stage on a cheap amp. Better ones have limiters, so on those you won't get distortion, you'll get nothing at all.
As for "warmth", it's all a subjective experience. Whatever sounds good is whatever is best. Some remaining old folks probably like the tinny scratchy sound of a victrola more than anything else, because to them that's what records are supposed to sound like. Fidelity is pretty absolute though -- whatever's closest to a live performance.
If he doesn't want users that block ads, that's his prerogative. It's also his right to be a whiny little bitch about it, and finally it's his right to wonder why his pageviews are so low so that he can't attract any decent advertisers in the first place.
I suppose it's also his right to insert google ads or some obscure advertiser that isn't usually blocked, troll slashdot, and rake in the hits. Oh snap.
Sounds like you're looking for Seam. All the xml stuff is optional in Seam, so you'll actually come to like the xml configs for its good parts (like complex navigation rules) when you're not forced to use it for everything. No declaration needed, you don't even need "backing beans" or even a class for your page (take that, ASP.NET).
If you really want tight integration between page and code, there's wicket (which I frankly find awful) or Tapestry5 (which looks really nice, but it's not finished yet). Or if you prefer to just code guis straight to the web without all the multitier nonsense, there's no shortage of frameworks to choose from there, including GWT, Echo2, and Thinwire. There's even a few that will publish swing apps straight to the web, so you can design your page in Matisse. I don't personally recommend that approach, but it's there if you want it.
Here in San Francisco, I can guarantee that nobody ever says "hella" or uses surfer lingo (then again the surfers here wear wetsuits -- the water's COLD in northern cal). In fact, the local slang here is virtually nada -- maybe it's because of the awesomely whitebread nature of the Bay Area (minus Oakland).
> Amex hires some good cutomer reps in India. They tell you their real name and don't hide their accent.
More to the point, Amex hires a company that doesn't force the Indian reps to hide their name or accent. I'm sure Amex neither knows nor cares about the corporate culture of their call-center offshorer.
Last time I called Microsoft tech support, it was the same deal. I think now that everyone knows the call centers are in India now, the offshorers don't make an effort to hide it.
> Sony had a $10k PS2 called the PA that recorded exactly what happened to every cycle on the cpu, gpu etc.
Ten grand is pretty small change for a game developer. Was it ever commonly used as a dev kit, or was it a tech demo?
I remain unconvinced. You not only don't have a smoking gun, you don't even have relevant evidence other than the fact that one of the products mentioned was a shampoo. Feel free to reply with something else, I may or may not bother to look.
All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
Luckily smarter people like Bernoulli were eventually born, who found that lift doesn't actually work like that.
> I saw a couple of kids who couldn't figure out how to get the maximum bounce out of a trampoline.
Possibly they were just having fun, even if it wasn't at maximum efficiency.
Parallel parking is a coordination and depth perception thing. I know plenty of geniuses who suck at it. All you sound like is a crotchety old coot who thinks his generation was the smartest one.
Now show me where it contains dioxanes.
There are some truly nifty plugins for Eclipse: Mylar comes immediately to mind. Exadel Studio has some decent functionality, but it's grotesquely slow and not terribly stable either. And JBoss IDE always struck me as a few miscellaneous plugins that didn't really accomplish anything. The Hibernate stuff is all right if you're using the xml files, but I use JPA, and it's useless there.
All I really want are some clicky wizard dialogs for the functionality in seam-gen, and a decent stable IDE for Drools/JBossRules (which I don't think RHDS even includes).
Netbeans would be a more ideal IDE except for how it makes you really regret it if you subvert the bureacracy of the "add new file" wizard in a project. With eclipse, I can just drag new files in and hit refresh. That and Netbeans still has no TestNG plugin (the existing one always sucked, and doesn't even work in recent versions). I suppose I could pay for IDEA if I was still doing Java full time.
Free market fundamentalists are fundamentally (heh) wrong when they assume that the existing markets are already operating under ideal conditions. The specific one here is called the "Fallacy of Perfect Information", which should be more or less self-explanatory: that the market still doesn't know that antibacterial products are bad for them, or at best useless. The economy of information is actually a pretty fascinating theory in itself, and got some economists a nobel prize for it, so I imagine you could google for it to learn more.
Eventually, the market does learn: you don't see oat bran hyped all that much anymore after it was soundly debunked -- a bit of a shame actually, because the fiber in general is still really good for you -- so I do imagine that we'll see less triclosan-containing soap on the shelves soon. As for the people who can't find any non-antibacterial soap, I suggest that they find a better supermarket. Even the major brands like Dial and SoftSoap have varieties that don't have any triclosan (like my favorite, the Shea Butter one). They don't advertise its lack, it just isn't on the ingredient label.
Still, if the stuff is really that useless, then advertisers should be forbidden to claim it has antibacterial properties.
> "... sodium laureth sulfate" -- a known carcinogen.
[[citation needed]]
Gosh, what stunning insight you have into maladaptive psychology. Really, you should do AM radio or something, you'd have a real audience for it.
Seconded -- the peppermint soap is the best (just don't get it in your eyes). Ever read the labels on those? Doc Bronner was a wee bit of a kook... Great soap though.
> What's shit to you isn't necessarily shit to other people.
Except for Uwe Boll movies. I'm pretty sure even Boll knows they're shit.
If you upgrade your PC, you can migrate your old XP over, even if it's OEM. As in migrate, you can't use it on the old PC anymore. The only OEM installs you can't do this for are volume OEMs, like Dell or HP. If you have a boxed (or more likely, skinny shrinkwrap envelope) version of OEM XP, you have a "System Builder" OEM version, and you're fully entitled to migrate it. You might have to speak to a helpdesk drone to get a new key, but they'll give it to you without any hassle at all.
Yes, activation is a bitch. No, you don't have to buy separate copies repeatedly. Yes, I'm sure they count on the confusion to sell more copies.
They could begin there and port the look-n-feel of their Vista. They could even continue using their beloved C:\, D:\ file system nomenclature on top of the native "everything is a directory off of root (/)" structure.
It already works that way, and it even uses forward slashes (in addition to backslashes), and windows already goes to great lengths to pile the drive letters on top through a number of nasty hacks. Drive letters don't bother me at all, because there's plenty of ways to avoid them. Global "magic filenames" like PRN or NUL or CON bug me to no end, and I'd like to think they got rid of them in Vista, but I severely doubt it. I know that they live in the \GLOBAL?? namespace in the Object Manager, but I haven't the slightest idea how to delete them (and I imagine things would break all over if I did)