PhraudulentOne - Slashdot User

Comment Re:No - Move Forward Instead (Score 1) 267

by PhraudulentOne on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @09:49AM (#41892713) Attached to: Is It Time To Commit To Ongoing Payphone Availability?

I work for a telco, and this is our solution to the whole payphone and related maintenance cost situation:

Make the payphones *free*

Maintenance costs stemmed from people bashing the phones, sticking crap in the coin slots, tugging on the handset, taking the speakers out, etc.

We welded the coin slots shut, and made the phones entirely free (local calls obviously). There is no credit card slot, no intelligence. You need to use a calling card, or call collect if you want to make a long distance call.

It is just a steel case that makes free local calls. In years passed, we may go out and get a bunch of quarters from the phone, but then spend a couple of hours repairing it. We made virtually nothing. Now we make nothing, but we spend nothing. People are happy, we haven't had to go and fix or repair a phone since we made them free. People stopped wrecking them.

Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362

Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:42PM from the new-is-relative dept.

sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"

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