It's long been a dream of mine, and an occasional quest, to be able to visit BBSes like in the good old days, the early 90s, when games like Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, aka LORD, were the best thing going "online." Heck, online actually meant on-a-phone-line then.
These days almost every BBS still around is accessible through telnet. The problem with using these BBSes with a Mac is the view, especially if you use the Mac Terminal application. The colored DOS-based text that made all of the once-fancy graphics possible on BBSes just doesn't display properly on a Mac, not without a good amount of research and downloads and settings adjustments.
There is one program out there that seems to be a silver bullet for this problem though, a program so old it looks like it is DOS-based, even though it works great on the OS X platform. It's called SyncTERM, available at http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/. SyncTERM takes some getting used to, as its interface is simple, with just enough menus and settings to get the job done. What it does do superbly is display extended ASCII text and ANSI special effects, all of the fancy characters that are in the VT-100 font family you probably took for granted when your system ran on DOS, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95.
If you really enjoyed those old BBSes and miss some of the door games that made them a part of your life, but haven't found a way to display all of that colored text properly on your modern Mac, give SyncTERM a shot. What makes it even cooler is the program is free. No charge. It's available on plenty of operating systems too, not just Mac OS X.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Pirate Bay's crime no greater than the industry fighting it
If The Pirate Bay's founders aren't in jail right now, it's because the world doesn't believe what they're doing is wrong enough for them to go to jail.
All the same, the very name of the site is an allusion to being almost explicitly used for illegal purposes. They break the law by facilitating the breaking of the law by others. The problem with this particular law, regarding copyrights, is that it seems public perception is that intellectual property isn't worth nearly as much as street value, especially when it comes to music.
There's good reason for this gut feeling. If a company can create a product for pennies, as is the case with digital music, but charges $15 for it, that company is reaping too much profit, by consumer standards.
For a while, consumers didn't have much choice. If you wanted to have a good-quality copy of a song, you HAD to buy it. You couldn't make one yourself, because the consumer grade recording equipment that was around up until about 15 years ago frankly sucked at reproducing good sound, in part because the sound quality wasn't that good in the first place: cassette tapes.
Once the MP3 file format was developed and popularized, reproducing songs became as easy for consumers to do as it was for the record companies. That meant most of the work that record companies were charging us for was no longer in their hands. So why, then, should we pay just as much for the music?
In fact, we're still doing just that. Look at the price of a song on iTunes. The new stuff costs $1.29. Extrapolate that over an album of a dozen songs, a fair average, and you've got the equivalent of a CD retailing for $15.48.
This doesn't make any sense, though. That price doesn't come with a nice little booklet or anything to hold onto at all. It comes with a shitload of electrons. Sure, it's more convenient, for which people are willing to pay. The problem with this equation is that it's just as convenient for the record companies, if not more so. They don't have to physically create products for iTunes. They just give iTunes permission to make copies of the record company's material, yet somehow the same amount of money is being charged for the product.
So why do people download music for free? Because fuck the recording industry, that's why. Anyone can see they're not playing fair. If it costs them a fraction of what it used to to get music to the customer, where's the savings? There's no savings, and it's because the record industry believes it's entitled to keep charging the same if not more than it did when it had to manufacture CDs, album covers, CD booklets, cases, package them, ship them to distributors who shipped them to sub-distributors who shipped them to music shops, who paid rent or a mortgage for retail rack space to sell these things.
So why aren't The Pirate Bay's founders in jail? Because the average person deep down thinks their accuser, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is just as much a criminal, if not more so.
All the same, the very name of the site is an allusion to being almost explicitly used for illegal purposes. They break the law by facilitating the breaking of the law by others. The problem with this particular law, regarding copyrights, is that it seems public perception is that intellectual property isn't worth nearly as much as street value, especially when it comes to music.
There's good reason for this gut feeling. If a company can create a product for pennies, as is the case with digital music, but charges $15 for it, that company is reaping too much profit, by consumer standards.
For a while, consumers didn't have much choice. If you wanted to have a good-quality copy of a song, you HAD to buy it. You couldn't make one yourself, because the consumer grade recording equipment that was around up until about 15 years ago frankly sucked at reproducing good sound, in part because the sound quality wasn't that good in the first place: cassette tapes.
Once the MP3 file format was developed and popularized, reproducing songs became as easy for consumers to do as it was for the record companies. That meant most of the work that record companies were charging us for was no longer in their hands. So why, then, should we pay just as much for the music?
In fact, we're still doing just that. Look at the price of a song on iTunes. The new stuff costs $1.29. Extrapolate that over an album of a dozen songs, a fair average, and you've got the equivalent of a CD retailing for $15.48.
This doesn't make any sense, though. That price doesn't come with a nice little booklet or anything to hold onto at all. It comes with a shitload of electrons. Sure, it's more convenient, for which people are willing to pay. The problem with this equation is that it's just as convenient for the record companies, if not more so. They don't have to physically create products for iTunes. They just give iTunes permission to make copies of the record company's material, yet somehow the same amount of money is being charged for the product.
So why do people download music for free? Because fuck the recording industry, that's why. Anyone can see they're not playing fair. If it costs them a fraction of what it used to to get music to the customer, where's the savings? There's no savings, and it's because the record industry believes it's entitled to keep charging the same if not more than it did when it had to manufacture CDs, album covers, CD booklets, cases, package them, ship them to distributors who shipped them to sub-distributors who shipped them to music shops, who paid rent or a mortgage for retail rack space to sell these things.
So why aren't The Pirate Bay's founders in jail? Because the average person deep down thinks their accuser, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is just as much a criminal, if not more so.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Marriage Ref: An Uncomfortable Comedy
NBC's The Marriage Ref attracted about a minute's worth of attention before it dawned on me like an avalanche of revulsion that a reality show about marital problems is doomed to vapid, pointless commentary and awkward one-liners, and that this show was a platform for comedians to joke about subjects that are inherently unfunny.
In a flash of dread I contemplated, amid the chuckles of celebrities and flashes of couples' faces, what married couples would pass the audition to be on this show. It was immediately apparent that the producers would never allow couples with real problems on the show, because of how unpleasant such a spectacle would be as to see them hash out their problems.
Marital discord falls into two categories: transparently superficial problems that can be worked out in a conversation, and deep-seated concerns that result in counseling or divorce. There's something to be said by quickly broaching concerns about a spouse, to avoid a small concern building into a major one. A TV show isn't the venue best-suited to such a resolution. That's a private conversation at home.
It's uncomfortable to watch a live-action show where the jokes aren't funny, because you get the uneasy feeling too often that you're being lied to. The lies come in the form of phony laughter and phony smiles, from the joke-makers and the couples, who, if they really have a problem, shouldn't be laughing.
So why, then, would a comedian as well-regarded as Jerry Seinfeld develop, let alone agree to star in, a show that's inherently unfunny? There's no good one-liner to answer that.
In a flash of dread I contemplated, amid the chuckles of celebrities and flashes of couples' faces, what married couples would pass the audition to be on this show. It was immediately apparent that the producers would never allow couples with real problems on the show, because of how unpleasant such a spectacle would be as to see them hash out their problems.
Marital discord falls into two categories: transparently superficial problems that can be worked out in a conversation, and deep-seated concerns that result in counseling or divorce. There's something to be said by quickly broaching concerns about a spouse, to avoid a small concern building into a major one. A TV show isn't the venue best-suited to such a resolution. That's a private conversation at home.
It's uncomfortable to watch a live-action show where the jokes aren't funny, because you get the uneasy feeling too often that you're being lied to. The lies come in the form of phony laughter and phony smiles, from the joke-makers and the couples, who, if they really have a problem, shouldn't be laughing.
So why, then, would a comedian as well-regarded as Jerry Seinfeld develop, let alone agree to star in, a show that's inherently unfunny? There's no good one-liner to answer that.
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