Then it is clearly a depreciated asset. Why don't their bean counters take this into account? Take for instance company X. It spends $10 million to develop a whiz-bang new game and gets loads of people to buy it and it's rated the #1 game of the year, etc. Now, 5-10 years from now the company still has that game under copyright but the graphics are piss poor, the gaming experience sucks, and no one on earth would ever want to buy it except maybe to relive old memories of the fun they had. Unfortunately since it is so old it is no longer available. Company X won't even sell it if you ask for it because it'd cost them more in distribution media than it'd be worth. So why do the bean counters and stockholders continue to count it as an asset? Nobody wants to buy it, nobody HAS bought it in years, it is horribly outdated, and is generally worthless. The money you once spent on R&D to build the game has long since been returned in sales. What is the point of not just releasing it to the public for the few thousand people out there that might have a passing interest in playing it for a couple hours just for old times sake? Personally I loved "Dragonlance: Heroes of the Lance" when I used to play it on my XT with CGA graphics and I think it'd be nifty to be able to whip it out to see how funny it'd be on a PIII-500. Unfortunately it was distributed on 5 1/4" floppies... I have no 5 1/4" drive nor will I buy one anymore and I'm sure the disks are long since corrupted after 10 years. So what am I to do? Ask TSR to send me a copy? Doubtful.
Umm.. no offense, but haven't you ever heard of tagging the messages and hitting delete? Sort your mail by subject (assuming they were all the same subject since they were "identitical") and just mark them all and hit delete.
Rather than looking into new and innovative ways to increase a CPUs power like Sun does with their Ultrasparc line or Digital did with their Alphas or even AMD has done with their line of chips, they just try to keep shrinking the size of the transitors, pumping more of them into the CPU, and ramping up the clock speed. When are they going to learn that the x86 architecture is dead dead dead? I REALLY hope they don't screw up Merced.. err.. Itanium by keeping the prices too artificially high. I'd really like to see that technology move into consumer PCs instead of just servers. We need a stepping stone out of the x86 world while preserving the cost factor that makes x86 based systems a more palatable choice over the higher end and more expensive workstations.
Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature:
-a Listen to packets on/dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).
I've heard of someone nearly strangling their officemate though after they left it running on their system while they were out of the office all day. Talk about driving you nuts. Definitely NOT birds chirping or owls hooting.. more like screeching.;-)
Exactly. I've setup a domain and colocated mail server for my family and friends to use as an SMTP server and POP/IMAP server so they don't have to deal with the inept ISPs' tech support. So now with ISPs apparently starting to block outbound port 25 it gets a little annoying... but no matter. The SMTP server can just as easily also listen on 1025 or 2025 or whatever easily bypassing their lame filtering. Personally I'm of the opinion that an ISP that you pay for should do NO filtering other than private IP and anti-spoofing of their address space and let the end user deal with the spam, NetBIOS traffic, etc. ISPs shouldn't be in the business of blocking anything they should be in the business of providing you the fastest, most reliably open internet access that you can get for your money.
Well, I think the spammers have gotten what they wanted. Spam has become so commonplace many people just accept it as fact and ignore it. This is probably the only long term solution that's going to ever work. Let the spam come to you and delete it without reading it. What I personally find offensive is when a spammer sends a message with faked addresses with a subject of something I may actually have been waiting to hear from about from a legitimate business only to have me open it up and find out it is some lame spam. Oh well.
Well, you're correct on that account. I can't believe spammers do ANY type of targetted advertising. If they did I wouldn't be receiving spam in Russian for some Asian porn site, or the numerous "accept credit cards on your website" (don't have a website) spam, or the "buy our list of 6 million email addresses" spam. Just looking through my spam folder, I think it's time to reverse my procmail recipe and just start blocking ALL e-mail and only accepting stuff from addresses I know about. I'd get a far better signal to noise ratio.
Why would they make such a horrible movie? I would much rather see R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy brought to the theater! Now THAT is an action movie all the way through it. I would love to see Drizzt Do'Urden brought to life and set off hacking and slashing giants and demons.;-)
Works fine here in Ameritech land in Cleveland, OH. I generally just dial the full 10 digits anyway since my work is in one area code and most people I call are in another. I've used the 10 digits within the same area code and it works fine as well. No long distance charges. I assume the system is smart enough to know the number you're dialing from is not long distance from the number you're dialing.;-)
Well, from that we can conclude that the majority of the hot tech stocks last year are on the verge of collapsing. Look at LNUX for example, a 52 week high of 320, down to 8 23/32 today. ETYS, 52 week high of 57 1/2.. trading now at 1 13/32. In reality, like many of us were saying a year ago, the bubble HAD to burst. These ridiculous IPO's where a stock went from $30/share to $300/share were totally inflated. I think now we can finally sit back and ride out the upcoming recession (which is part of the naturally occurring business cycle and doesn't have anything to do with who is in office.. whether it be George H.W. Bush or Clinton or George W. Bush. Recessions happen and we are going to have one shortly (if it hasn't already begun).
Well, other than support (which isn't much of a plus in the case of Red Hat really), you can get the exact same thing from a $2 Cheapbytes or LSL CD of Red Hat. It saves you the time downloading it and gives you the full release you could get from their FTP site. *shrug*
I was thinking about that this morning. There's nothing at all stopping a third party from electing a President. Unfortunately there hasn't been any third party candidates worth voting for in the last 40 years. Someone as liberal as Nader or as flippin crazy as Ross Perot is NEVER going to appeal to anyone but a bunch of staunch supporters. These guys need to learn to appeal to everyone in the nation. You NEED to be hypocritical and pander to both sides to be a politician. Didn't your mother tell you never to trust a lawyer or a politician??:-)
The area where the Florida Supreme Court *did* act outside the law, in fact, rewrote the law, is extending the certification deadline to November 26th. I realize many people don't obey the laws anymore and liberals more than anyone tend to view them with a fuzzy looking glass when reading them, but this is a clear case of the Florida Supreme Court rewriting that specific law to change the deadline to November 26th. They don't have that power! They can rule the law unconstitutional but they can't go rewriting it! That's a power reserved for the Florida Legislature. I think this election is so screwed up at this point the only way to solve it will be for the US Congress to appoint the President and Vice President. Any other way will result in endless court cases and muckracking. The United States Constitution clearly has provisions for that and it should be exercised at this point. We need a concise and clear resolution to this situation.
You mean correcting the voter ID number on the absentee ballot REQUEST FORM? The ballots were never modified. In fact, the request forms were properly filled out and signed by the requestors. The only problem were many of them had the wrong voter ID numbers. They were corrected upon receipt for clerical purposes. It has no bearing on the validity of their ballot they cast. Of course, Al "We just want to count all the votes" Gore would love to have those votes thrown out. I really pity him though if he does become President because thousands of military absentee ballots were thrown out. Generally your troops don't look too favorably over a President that was elected by throwing away their votes. I'd be amazed if he got through two months in office without somebody from the military (or ex-military) assassinating him. Don't worry though, the Florida legislature will NOT allow that to happen. George W. Bush will be inaugurated as President on January 20th. This is just hand waving and ranting on the part of the democrats. It doesn't mean jack.
You have quite a conspiracy theory going there mister. There was also a president once upon a time that was elected during a time of controversy. He had another Daley working for him at that time and the election was riddled with scandal of corruption and fraud. That president went on to be one of the most popular. So.. why aren't you condemning the 1960 election of JFK? If Nixon had ordered a recount and been as stubborn as Gore is being these days he may very well have become the President.
Of course, it all doesn't matter in the long run. George W. Bush was the certified winner in Florida. All of these court cases are merely exercises in electoral law for the hundreds of lawyers down there to liven up their resumes. The election was over on November 7th. Bush won. The recount on November 14th... Bush won. The hand recounts in 2 highly democratic counties that were cherrypicked for Gore. Bush still won. Al Gore reminds me of the Black Knight from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail. "There. The recount shows I win.. conceed." "No it didn't." "Yes it did! The numbers are right here!" "Tis but a scratch. My army of lawyers will overturn that."
For some quite-upsetting material about the USA's becoming a police state (illegal to wear gas masks...) see The Utne Reader (Nov.-Dec. 2K, Page 30). Thanks, guys, for allowing anon posts!
Where in the USA is it illegal to wear a gas mask? Can you post a link to a story on this or were you just making that up?
Except Bill Gates will retire to a private island nation with hundreds of slave women meeting his every need while he burns hundred dollar bills in his fireplace to keep warm at night.;-)
Well, if I had any business sense whatsoever that's the avenue I'd be taking right now. Jump start a quick dot-com, make a few million bucks off lusers investing in my company's stock that has no chance of succeeding which a dismal business plan, then retiring at the age of 25 to live on a nice island in the Carribbean sipping cool drinks on the beach while thousands of people lose a few thousand dollars out of their 401k's or stock portfolios because my business failed miserably. I love the Internet generation!
Good point considering almost all of these places are small sites that have no where near the redundancy and hardware that Slashdot has to deal with their effect. One of these little web sites off a fractional T-1 getting slashdotted could take down the site (and any other sites that may have been hosted on that link) down for at least a day. Irresponsible.
I'm not sure saying that to "NRA nuts" and "Klanners" would help your cause. More likely you'll find yourself being hanged from a tree in the middle of downtown by the Sheriff while the rest of the community watches and applauds.
Electors ARE chosen from the MOST dedicated supporters of their particular party. They don't go randomly pick out Joe Shmoe from a bar and make him an elector. It's almost always someone strongly tied to the party in that state. As another poster mentioned, there have only been 9 electors in history that have changed. AFAIK there has never been a case where an elector changing his vote has effected the outcome of an election though.
Jikes! Imagine if we DID have a real democracy! 60% of the population wouldn't bother to vote on major issues. 85% probably wouldn't vote on routine issues. "Oooh.. you see now Grandma... you voted to eliminate social security there on this butterfly ballot. What you really wanted to choose was this third hole down here.. "increase social security by $1000 billion.":-)
Well, there aren't "months" to worry about. The electors must be named by December 12th I believe. December 18th they cast their votes for President. Once that is done, the game is over. The loser will need to collect his marbles, go home, and sulk in the corner. Or become President of Harvard or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, assuming you need a computer anyway to read these, why not just read your kid the free version from Project Gutenburg itself?
Then it is clearly a depreciated asset. Why don't their bean counters take this into account? Take for instance company X. It spends $10 million to develop a whiz-bang new game and gets loads of people to buy it and it's rated the #1 game of the year, etc. Now, 5-10 years from now the company still has that game under copyright but the graphics are piss poor, the gaming experience sucks, and no one on earth would ever want to buy it except maybe to relive old memories of the fun they had. Unfortunately since it is so old it is no longer available. Company X won't even sell it if you ask for it because it'd cost them more in distribution media than it'd be worth. So why do the bean counters and stockholders continue to count it as an asset? Nobody wants to buy it, nobody HAS bought it in years, it is horribly outdated, and is generally worthless. The money you once spent on R&D to build the game has long since been returned in sales. What is the point of not just releasing it to the public for the few thousand people out there that might have a passing interest in playing it for a couple hours just for old times sake? Personally I loved "Dragonlance: Heroes of the Lance" when I used to play it on my XT with CGA graphics and I think it'd be nifty to be able to whip it out to see how funny it'd be on a PIII-500. Unfortunately it was distributed on 5 1/4" floppies... I have no 5 1/4" drive nor will I buy one anymore and I'm sure the disks are long since corrupted after 10 years. So what am I to do? Ask TSR to send me a copy? Doubtful.
Umm.. no offense, but haven't you ever heard of tagging the messages and hitting delete? Sort your mail by subject (assuming they were all the same subject since they were "identitical") and just mark them all and hit delete.
Rather than looking into new and innovative ways to increase a CPUs power like Sun does with their Ultrasparc line or Digital did with their Alphas or even AMD has done with their line of chips, they just try to keep shrinking the size of the transitors, pumping more of them into the CPU, and ramping up the clock speed. When are they going to learn that the x86 architecture is dead dead dead? I REALLY hope they don't screw up Merced.. err.. Itanium by keeping the prices too artificially high. I'd really like to see that technology move into consumer PCs instead of just servers. We need a stepping stone out of the x86 world while preserving the cost factor that makes x86 based systems a more palatable choice over the higher end and more expensive workstations.
Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature: /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).
;-)
-a Listen to packets on
I've heard of someone nearly strangling their officemate though after they left it running on their system while they were out of the office all day. Talk about driving you nuts. Definitely NOT birds chirping or owls hooting.. more like screeching.
Exactly. I've setup a domain and colocated mail server for my family and friends to use as an SMTP server and POP/IMAP server so they don't have to deal with the inept ISPs' tech support. So now with ISPs apparently starting to block outbound port 25 it gets a little annoying... but no matter. The SMTP server can just as easily also listen on 1025 or 2025 or whatever easily bypassing their lame filtering. Personally I'm of the opinion that an ISP that you pay for should do NO filtering other than private IP and anti-spoofing of their address space and let the end user deal with the spam, NetBIOS traffic, etc. ISPs shouldn't be in the business of blocking anything they should be in the business of providing you the fastest, most reliably open internet access that you can get for your money.
Well, I think the spammers have gotten what they wanted. Spam has become so commonplace many people just accept it as fact and ignore it. This is probably the only long term solution that's going to ever work. Let the spam come to you and delete it without reading it. What I personally find offensive is when a spammer sends a message with faked addresses with a subject of something I may actually have been waiting to hear from about from a legitimate business only to have me open it up and find out it is some lame spam. Oh well.
Well, you're correct on that account. I can't believe spammers do ANY type of targetted advertising. If they did I wouldn't be receiving spam in Russian for some Asian porn site, or the numerous "accept credit cards on your website" (don't have a website) spam, or the "buy our list of 6 million email addresses" spam. Just looking through my spam folder, I think it's time to reverse my procmail recipe and just start blocking ALL e-mail and only accepting stuff from addresses I know about. I'd get a far better signal to noise ratio.
Why would they make such a horrible movie? I would much rather see R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy brought to the theater! Now THAT is an action movie all the way through it. I would love to see Drizzt Do'Urden brought to life and set off hacking and slashing giants and demons. ;-)
Works fine here in Ameritech land in Cleveland, OH. I generally just dial the full 10 digits anyway since my work is in one area code and most people I call are in another. I've used the 10 digits within the same area code and it works fine as well. No long distance charges. I assume the system is smart enough to know the number you're dialing from is not long distance from the number you're dialing. ;-)
Well, from that we can conclude that the majority of the hot tech stocks last year are on the verge of collapsing. Look at LNUX for example, a 52 week high of 320, down to 8 23/32 today. ETYS, 52 week high of 57 1/2.. trading now at 1 13/32. In reality, like many of us were saying a year ago, the bubble HAD to burst. These ridiculous IPO's where a stock went from $30/share to $300/share were totally inflated. I think now we can finally sit back and ride out the upcoming recession (which is part of the naturally occurring business cycle and doesn't have anything to do with who is in office.. whether it be George H.W. Bush or Clinton or George W. Bush. Recessions happen and we are going to have one shortly (if it hasn't already begun).
Well, other than support (which isn't much of a plus in the case of Red Hat really), you can get the exact same thing from a $2 Cheapbytes or LSL CD of Red Hat. It saves you the time downloading it and gives you the full release you could get from their FTP site. *shrug*
I was thinking about that this morning. There's nothing at all stopping a third party from electing a President. Unfortunately there hasn't been any third party candidates worth voting for in the last 40 years. Someone as liberal as Nader or as flippin crazy as Ross Perot is NEVER going to appeal to anyone but a bunch of staunch supporters. These guys need to learn to appeal to everyone in the nation. You NEED to be hypocritical and pander to both sides to be a politician. Didn't your mother tell you never to trust a lawyer or a politician?? :-)
The area where the Florida Supreme Court *did* act outside the law, in fact, rewrote the law, is extending the certification deadline to November 26th. I realize many people don't obey the laws anymore and liberals more than anyone tend to view them with a fuzzy looking glass when reading them, but this is a clear case of the Florida Supreme Court rewriting that specific law to change the deadline to November 26th. They don't have that power! They can rule the law unconstitutional but they can't go rewriting it! That's a power reserved for the Florida Legislature. I think this election is so screwed up at this point the only way to solve it will be for the US Congress to appoint the President and Vice President. Any other way will result in endless court cases and muckracking. The United States Constitution clearly has provisions for that and it should be exercised at this point. We need a concise and clear resolution to this situation.
You mean correcting the voter ID number on the absentee ballot REQUEST FORM? The ballots were never modified. In fact, the request forms were properly filled out and signed by the requestors. The only problem were many of them had the wrong voter ID numbers. They were corrected upon receipt for clerical purposes. It has no bearing on the validity of their ballot they cast. Of course, Al "We just want to count all the votes" Gore would love to have those votes thrown out. I really pity him though if he does become President because thousands of military absentee ballots were thrown out. Generally your troops don't look too favorably over a President that was elected by throwing away their votes. I'd be amazed if he got through two months in office without somebody from the military (or ex-military) assassinating him. Don't worry though, the Florida legislature will NOT allow that to happen. George W. Bush will be inaugurated as President on January 20th. This is just hand waving and ranting on the part of the democrats. It doesn't mean jack.
You have quite a conspiracy theory going there mister. There was also a president once upon a time that was elected during a time of controversy. He had another Daley working for him at that time and the election was riddled with scandal of corruption and fraud. That president went on to be one of the most popular. So.. why aren't you condemning the 1960 election of JFK? If Nixon had ordered a recount and been as stubborn as Gore is being these days he may very well have become the President.
Of course, it all doesn't matter in the long run. George W. Bush was the certified winner in Florida. All of these court cases are merely exercises in electoral law for the hundreds of lawyers down there to liven up their resumes. The election was over on November 7th. Bush won. The recount on November 14th... Bush won. The hand recounts in 2 highly democratic counties that were cherrypicked for Gore. Bush still won. Al Gore reminds me of the Black Knight from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail. "There. The recount shows I win.. conceed." "No it didn't." "Yes it did! The numbers are right here!" "Tis but a scratch. My army of lawyers will overturn that."
For some quite-upsetting material about the USA's becoming a police state (illegal to wear gas masks...) see The Utne Reader (Nov.-Dec. 2K, Page 30). Thanks, guys, for allowing anon posts!
Where in the USA is it illegal to wear a gas mask? Can you post a link to a story on this or were you just making that up?
Except Bill Gates will retire to a private island nation with hundreds of slave women meeting his every need while he burns hundred dollar bills in his fireplace to keep warm at night. ;-)
Well, if I had any business sense whatsoever that's the avenue I'd be taking right now. Jump start a quick dot-com, make a few million bucks off lusers investing in my company's stock that has no chance of succeeding which a dismal business plan, then retiring at the age of 25 to live on a nice island in the Carribbean sipping cool drinks on the beach while thousands of people lose a few thousand dollars out of their 401k's or stock portfolios because my business failed miserably. I love the Internet generation!
Good point considering almost all of these places are small sites that have no where near the redundancy and hardware that Slashdot has to deal with their effect. One of these little web sites off a fractional T-1 getting slashdotted could take down the site (and any other sites that may have been hosted on that link) down for at least a day. Irresponsible.
I'm not sure saying that to "NRA nuts" and "Klanners" would help your cause. More likely you'll find yourself being hanged from a tree in the middle of downtown by the Sheriff while the rest of the community watches and applauds.
Electors ARE chosen from the MOST dedicated supporters of their particular party. They don't go randomly pick out Joe Shmoe from a bar and make him an elector. It's almost always someone strongly tied to the party in that state. As another poster mentioned, there have only been 9 electors in history that have changed. AFAIK there has never been a case where an elector changing his vote has effected the outcome of an election though.
Jikes! Imagine if we DID have a real democracy! 60% of the population wouldn't bother to vote on major issues. 85% probably wouldn't vote on routine issues. "Oooh.. you see now Grandma... you voted to eliminate social security there on this butterfly ballot. What you really wanted to choose was this third hole down here.. "increase social security by $1000 billion." :-)
Well, there aren't "months" to worry about. The electors must be named by December 12th I believe. December 18th they cast their votes for President. Once that is done, the game is over. The loser will need to collect his marbles, go home, and sulk in the corner. Or become President of Harvard or something.