Even when it was Babbage's we opened the display copy of a given console game, and when we'd sell that copy (which was rare unless we were trying to sell through a discontinued item) we'd seal it in shrink wrap and tell the customer, but still treat it as new. (Babbage's didn't deal in used games until after I left in '94 or so, so we really didn't have a provision for discounting like that). The other copies of the game were in their full boxes behind the counter. Customers were generally OK with that, because it's not like the carts were being heavily pounded on before they were sold, and 95 times out of 100 if you were buying a game it was the brand new copy anyway, at least if you were buying a game for a current system.

If we wanted to try a game we had to use the copy that was already opened, and we had to be on the ball about not saving anything to the carts, not that that was generally a problem (this was back in the days where you generally typed in a code to get back to a given point in the game.)

For PC games, we could take them home for demo and re-shrink them to our hearts' content, with two exceptions: 1) if the box had a security seal, or 2) if the disks came in a sealed envelope inside the box. Then it was hands off. Returned games were re-shrinked and sold as new, unless they had one of the aforementioned security seals (or the materials had visible wear or something was missing), then it was returned to the manufacturer. Babbage's had such a liberal return policy at the time this was pretty much the only real way they wouldn't completely lose their shirt on returns - you could buy a $50 game, wait a few months, bring it back with the receipt, and get the $50 back, even though by then it was $15 or $10 and we were putting it back on the shelf at that price.

Yes, I know that Ion Storm blew it with the next two in the series, so while it's possible, few developers do it any more.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution doesn't come out until the end of the month. Do you know something we don't? I've been hearing nothing but good things about it, especially from the PC gaming press.

To be fair a LOT of that was hardware cartridge costs because the game was so big. A good double digit percentage of classic game costs was the cart itself.

Wing Commander came out a whopping three weeks before The Matrix, and yes, virtually no one saw it, because it sucked. And I would bet that a majority of the paid admissions were there for the Star Wars Episode 1 trailer and nothing else.

Lost In Space, released a full _year_ earlier, had a similar frozen object effect, but neither it nor Wing Commander took it to the level that The Matrix did - unlike the Matrix, which integrated the effect multiple times into a world that was built on physics that made the imagery possible, both the aforementioned movies used it once, briefly, as little more than a throwaway - and if I recall, it was a simple pan, not a full or partial orbit.

Regardless, ask anyone what effect they remember from Lost In Space (assuming they saw it) and they're going to talk to you about the horrible monkey character. People remember the effects that leave an impression on them, good or bad.

Because they have hardware sales and support contracts to fall back on. When the minicomputer market started to tank, for example, IBM repositioned the AS/400s (or whatever they're calling them now) as a bulletproof machine to run multiple dozen Linux instances on, and they provide support as a service.

Microsoft sells you a software package (a current version of Windows or Office) and then don't see another dime from you until it's time to buy the next version of that software - assuming you do that, of course. Yeah there are businesses that got sucked into Software Assurance but I can't imagine any smart small to medium sized business doing that anymore - why pay a fee that gets you "free upgrades" when the next upgrade cycle is after your contract expires?

That honor, in my humble opinion would be the Post's December 13, 2007 headline:

IKE 'BEATS' TINA TO DEATH

Reporting the death of Ike Turner of a cocaine overdose.

That one made me actually laugh out loud.

Sweet merciful Jesus. If I could give you 100 mod points, I would.

Actually that's not quite true. If there's a security update for your version of IOS you can get the fixed version for the asking from them, no contract necessary. You have to specifically say "I have version 12.2(10) and bug report xxxxxx metions a IP DOS attack vector, I'm requesting 12.2(24)" or whatever. This includes taking you up to a new major or minor version if whatever you're on is deprecated, but again, only if it's a security related patch as opposed to a bugfix. You're stuck with whatever feature set you're on though. They won't take you from IP to IP Plus (or whatever they're calling it now) for free.

What you cannot do is buy a blanked-out Cisco device from Ebay (or company acquisition) and then just go download a firmware image for it. But then again, I've never really encountered any vendor that would let you do that.

ISP I worked for until 18 months ago never once bought an IOS license, we'd buy Ciscos off of Ebay and they generally had IOS images on them that needed updates, we'd E-mail Cisco TAC and get what we needed and be off to the races.

Welcome to my friends list, fellow "The Tick" reader/watcher. (Which is it, out of curiosity?)

No they didn't. Baud=bitrate only in 110/300 bps era modems. 9600bps (V.32) modems were at 2400 baud but using 4 bits per symbol. Even in the post-1990 modems with trellis modulation the baudrate never cracked 3,429 but with V.34bis we were at 33.6kbps. That was the absolute maximum on an analog-only phone line. Anything past that (V.90/V.92) was one-directional PCM which you could only get away with because modern POTS lines are carried on a digital infrastructure.

CRTs are "outdated" because businesses want to sell LCDs. Flat and light is sexy. And LCDs sold like crazy back when the image quality was dramatically inferior to a CRT, and it took them years to catch up.

You make it sound as if this has already happened.

Done in one. You can even train ISC DHCP to give out different pools based on the primary IP address of the gateway for a particular VLAN. At that point all you have to worry about are keeping the pools "fed".

We're talking about the cat food you grab off the shelf when you have no cat food at home, the one your cat likes is sold out, you don't know enough to tell the difference between the ones you see in front of you and you're late for supper so you grab the one with the logo you recognize because it's a symptom of the human condition that things that are familiar are deemed safer than things that are not familiar.

No, the whole "my pet died even though I fed it name brand food" thing kind of blew the lid off of quality=expensive. My cats get the store-brand cat food, and they love it. If they're out of that, I get the next stuff up on the price scale. Either you have a cat that will mow through anything you put in front of her (mine) or a cat that's so finicky that it's a coin flip no matter what you buy. Under those conditions why would you pay $5 a bag for Meow Mix knowing your cat might hate it and prefer $2.50 Alley Cat instead?

Now when presented with two or three choices and they're all the same or similar price you're going to go with the one you've heard of, that's true.

I don't know if Cisco still does this but at one point you would get a plethora of accents not because of outsourcing but because they were bouncing your call to whatever call center was currently between 9 AM to 5 PM local time. So if you're in Chicago at 4 AM and you call the support line you're going to get someone in Australia. Basically allowed them to have only one shift of support spread out around the world rather than keeping a particular call center running 24/7.