If you're picking on my choice of words, good for you, I barely care.
Otherwise, either the site is going to have to pay for users' bandwidth, or some users will pay for the bandwidth. Perhaps what you're pointing out is that only some users could pay to support the site? In which case it would be like Fark.com, but without the ads. My point remains that someone is going to have to pay.
I did pay/. five dollars, but it was for the extra journal options, not for ads. I don't block any ads from pages so my subscription won't expire.
Like you say, other sites only offer premium services that cost at least $15 a year. I simply do not feel the site is worth that much to me. Not even $5 for all but a handful of sites, because I have debts and not a lot of income.
More importantly, I don't click on enough ads to bring those sites $5 a year in revenue, so I don't think I should pay them directly more than I bring them from ad clicks. This is the most important point as far as I'm concerned. If I bring a site $1 a year in ad revenue, I don't think I'd pay them more than $2 a year to avoid ads.
Tiny Menu is a really good idea, unless you've got FoxyTunes to control your music player. I think FoxyTunes defaults to the bottom of the browser window. Well I don't like that because I'm too likely to pop up the Start menu bar by accident. So I dragged FoxyTunes up to fill all that space next to Firefox's menu.
Instead of Unread Tabs, I suggest Tab Mix Plus. It adds lots of Tab functionality, and it lets the font of unread tabs be any color the user wants. I find italics are harder to read, but Tab Mix Plus would let me do that if I wanted to, along with Bold, and Underline as well.
Okay, but what about sites like fark, slashdot, and IMDB? I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads. Unless it was only a dollar a year per site or something really, really low like that. If everybody blocks ads, the only way for them to keep offering free content is if users pay for it.
everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.
Except for the many compact digital camera users who are annoyed with Canon and the other manufacturers refusing to add RAW capability to compact-sized cameras. Canon actually removed RAW from the G7, which the G6 can do. Which is really frustrating, because compact cameras are small enough to comfortably fit in a jacket pocket or bag because they aren't three inches thick.
Movie theaters in the Bay Area don't do what you suggest. I don't see how ambient light helps. If I'm looking at the screen, I want to be absorbed in what I'm seeing. Black surroundings helps that.
I'm guessing what you're talking about has to do with the black levels on the screen being not-black-enough to match the room? Even so, again, why don't movie theaters do it? Like I said, I get absorbed watching the screen in a theater or at home, and don't want to be distracted by the room.
Could you clarify what situation needs streaming mp3 recompressed for multiple bitrates on the fly? Wouldn't it make more sense to do that ahead of time? Or are you talking about the music channels over digital cable and satellite? Do those channels get compressed on the fly like the rest of the video streams?
MP3 is trivial. No more than 5 or 10 minutes to do an entire album. Or maybe 3 minutes. Video is where it's at. Turning home movies into h.264 video takes a ton of computing power and time. Get a GPU assisting a CPU encoding an hour of DV into h.264 in only fifteen or thirty minutes and the video scene will be all over it.
As for ALT+UP, I don't use keyboard commands when I'm leaning back from the keyboard doing casual stuff like surfing and moving files around. Cut and Paste are programmed to my mouse. I use keyboard commands for word processing, Photoshop, stuff like that.
Proud to say I owned a Cyrix 266 actually running at 209MHz. Saved a good amount of money over a Pentium II, and I was quite satisfied with it's performance compared to my friend's Pentium 150MHz, and later a PII 400MHz. Performance was as expected in-between the two.
Of course that was the best Cyrix ever got compared to Intel's products at the same time. Obviously all downhill from there.
How much is the computer correcting? It's not like the control surfaces are wildly changing their angles every second, are they?
I understand that without constant monitoring and adjustment the F-22 will roll or pitch over from horizontal to vertical and fall out of the sky. But if the plane is flying level and stable, and had manual control in case the fly-by-wire failed, could the pilot react and maintain stable flight? Maybe even do really gentle banks to adjust course?
What degree of flight corrections though? It's not like the control surfaces are wildly changing their angles every second, are they?
I understand that without constant monitoring and adjustment the F-22's wings will perhaps slide over from horizontal ( --- ) to vertical ( | ) and fall out of the sky. But if the plane is level and stable, and had manual control in case the fly-by-wire failed, could the pilot react and maintain stable flight? Maybe even really gentle banks to adjust course?
How many more patrols? Five times as many? To seriously reduce auto theft would take a hell of a lot of resources. Additionally it's generally a non-violent crime. As far as priorities go, it should be down the list from violent crimes.
I repeatedly played through the adventure game Grim Fandango because it's a 2-3 hour-long interactive movie with terrific characters, acting, and plot.
Most long RPGs have tons of extraneous story and unimportant quests. Distill the game down to 20 hours and make it awesome without the lame quests and unnecessary plot lengthening and I'll replay it again and again because it's just so FUN.
I'm not going to play if the gameplay is stupid. You said it yourself. Grinding is stupid and not fun. Levelin can be fun. Grinding by definition, is a grind, a chore, a bore.
What about replayability? What if it took 10 hours each time, but then you could play it differently? Or maybe even if you played it the same way, it was just so much fun?
Ya know, similar to how most SNES and Genesis games were. They cost $35-$50, and only took 1-5 hours to beat. They were FUN though, and replaying them was FUN. I'm talking about most of them, not Populous or Final Fantasy, most of them.
A lot of the fun comes from building up from nothing into a self-made super-powerful being of your design and improving your inventory as you go. While the start of the game might not have the fun of being able to put up a good fight you instead get a decent storyline (hopefully) that keeps things interesting and makes you want to keep going. That's why BG and games like it work - you might be a piss-ant at the start but you get a good story from beginning to end.
Provided the RPG doesn't involve fighting rats or other weak creatures that are uninteresting while I'm fighting them. Out of a hundred levels, start me off at ten or twenty please. If my character is age 16, that's good for at least level 5 right out the gate. A 16 year old can swing a bat and kill a rat, a bat, even an angry dog.
Oh, and the progression doesn't need to take 50 hours or 100 hours. I can care about a movie's characters after 2. Developers that make a level or dungeon twice as long as is fun suck ass. If I'm half way through the level and don't want to kill anymore, that level is too damn long. Unfortunately developers want to slap "50 hours of gameplay" on the box and make buyers think they got their money's worth, even though they just wasted extra hours of their life grinding through boring shit. That's why it's called grinding after all.
Doesn't Vista's Aero Glass render text and icons as 3D textures, so they scale evenly? I know too many relatives with 17 or 19" LCDs running at 800x600 because otherwise the text is too small for their liking. In XP, even if they change Windows' to Large Fonts, icons are too small to be readable, as are many apps.
So would you say you're addicted? In real life, even people who have bumper stickers saying "I'd rather be skiing/diving/golfing" still enjoy an occasional alternate pastime. They love their sport, but they'll go out bowling, biking, or just drinking with friends. If you can't bring yourself to try another game after several years of play, you may have a problem.
Before MS started cutting back at Longhorn, they talked about the four pillars that would support the OS. Aero Glass was one of them. Redoing the file system was another, but it got cut. Did MS get a second pillar into Vista? What were the others, and might they make it into Vienna?
Consider all the Windows users who have a monitor and do not want to buy an new one integrated into a Mac. In four years if they want to buy a new machine they don't want to buy another new screen unless they have someone to give the iMac to. A headless minitower Mac with decent performance would still give Apple plenty of profit.
Just look at how they gouge customers $75 to get the 256MB version of the Radeon X1600. The damn card is barely worth $90!
Slashdot Mirror
If you're picking on my choice of words, good for you, I barely care.
Otherwise, either the site is going to have to pay for users' bandwidth, or some users will pay for the bandwidth. Perhaps what you're pointing out is that only some users could pay to support the site? In which case it would be like Fark.com, but without the ads. My point remains that someone is going to have to pay.
I did pay /. five dollars, but it was for the extra journal options, not for ads. I don't block any ads from pages so my subscription won't expire.
Like you say, other sites only offer premium services that cost at least $15 a year. I simply do not feel the site is worth that much to me. Not even $5 for all but a handful of sites, because I have debts and not a lot of income.
More importantly, I don't click on enough ads to bring those sites $5 a year in revenue, so I don't think I should pay them directly more than I bring them from ad clicks. This is the most important point as far as I'm concerned. If I bring a site $1 a year in ad revenue, I don't think I'd pay them more than $2 a year to avoid ads.
Define better.
For example, Google's shuttles don't run between 11am and 3:30pm.
Tiny Menu is a really good idea, unless you've got FoxyTunes to control your music player. I think FoxyTunes defaults to the bottom of the browser window. Well I don't like that because I'm too likely to pop up the Start menu bar by accident. So I dragged FoxyTunes up to fill all that space next to Firefox's menu.
Instead of Unread Tabs, I suggest Tab Mix Plus. It adds lots of Tab functionality, and it lets the font of unread tabs be any color the user wants. I find italics are harder to read, but Tab Mix Plus would let me do that if I wanted to, along with Bold, and Underline as well.
Okay, but what about sites like fark, slashdot, and IMDB? I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads. Unless it was only a dollar a year per site or something really, really low like that. If everybody blocks ads, the only way for them to keep offering free content is if users pay for it.
everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.
Except for the many compact digital camera users who are annoyed with Canon and the other manufacturers refusing to add RAW capability to compact-sized cameras. Canon actually removed RAW from the G7, which the G6 can do. Which is really frustrating, because compact cameras are small enough to comfortably fit in a jacket pocket or bag because they aren't three inches thick.
Movie theaters in the Bay Area don't do what you suggest. I don't see how ambient light helps. If I'm looking at the screen, I want to be absorbed in what I'm seeing. Black surroundings helps that.
I'm guessing what you're talking about has to do with the black levels on the screen being not-black-enough to match the room? Even so, again, why don't movie theaters do it? Like I said, I get absorbed watching the screen in a theater or at home, and don't want to be distracted by the room.
Could you clarify what situation needs streaming mp3 recompressed for multiple bitrates on the fly? Wouldn't it make more sense to do that ahead of time? Or are you talking about the music channels over digital cable and satellite? Do those channels get compressed on the fly like the rest of the video streams?
MP3 is trivial. No more than 5 or 10 minutes to do an entire album. Or maybe 3 minutes. Video is where it's at. Turning home movies into h.264 video takes a ton of computing power and time. Get a GPU assisting a CPU encoding an hour of DV into h.264 in only fifteen or thirty minutes and the video scene will be all over it.
What is the breadcrumb bar?
As for ALT+UP, I don't use keyboard commands when I'm leaning back from the keyboard doing casual stuff like surfing and moving files around. Cut and Paste are programmed to my mouse. I use keyboard commands for word processing, Photoshop, stuff like that.
Proud to say I owned a Cyrix 266 actually running at 209MHz. Saved a good amount of money over a Pentium II, and I was quite satisfied with it's performance compared to my friend's Pentium 150MHz, and later a PII 400MHz. Performance was as expected in-between the two.
Of course that was the best Cyrix ever got compared to Intel's products at the same time. Obviously all downhill from there.
How much is the computer correcting? It's not like the control surfaces are wildly changing their angles every second, are they?
I understand that without constant monitoring and adjustment the F-22 will roll or pitch over from horizontal to vertical and fall out of the sky. But if the plane is flying level and stable, and had manual control in case the fly-by-wire failed, could the pilot react and maintain stable flight? Maybe even do really gentle banks to adjust course?
What degree of flight corrections though? It's not like the control surfaces are wildly changing their angles every second, are they?
I understand that without constant monitoring and adjustment the F-22's wings will perhaps slide over from horizontal ( --- ) to vertical ( | ) and fall out of the sky. But if the plane is level and stable, and had manual control in case the fly-by-wire failed, could the pilot react and maintain stable flight? Maybe even really gentle banks to adjust course?
Why can't a human keep it in the air from monitoring attitude and airspeed displays?
time to get a camera then. they're cheap. find a used one.
How many more patrols? Five times as many? To seriously reduce auto theft would take a hell of a lot of resources. Additionally it's generally a non-violent crime. As far as priorities go, it should be down the list from violent crimes.
Replayability.
I repeatedly played through the adventure game Grim Fandango because it's a 2-3 hour-long interactive movie with terrific characters, acting, and plot.
Most long RPGs have tons of extraneous story and unimportant quests. Distill the game down to 20 hours and make it awesome without the lame quests and unnecessary plot lengthening and I'll replay it again and again because it's just so FUN.
But these games shouldn't be catering to the 5% of masochists who think "no pain, no gain" and want to grind. The other 95% of us don't.
I'm not going to play if the gameplay is stupid. You said it yourself. Grinding is stupid and not fun. Levelin can be fun. Grinding by definition, is a grind, a chore, a bore.
What about replayability? What if it took 10 hours each time, but then you could play it differently? Or maybe even if you played it the same way, it was just so much fun?
Ya know, similar to how most SNES and Genesis games were. They cost $35-$50, and only took 1-5 hours to beat. They were FUN though, and replaying them was FUN. I'm talking about most of them, not Populous or Final Fantasy, most of them.
A lot of the fun comes from building up from nothing into a self-made super-powerful being of your design and improving your inventory as you go. While the start of the game might not have the fun of being able to put up a good fight you instead get a decent storyline (hopefully) that keeps things interesting and makes you want to keep going. That's why BG and games like it work - you might be a piss-ant at the start but you get a good story from beginning to end.
Provided the RPG doesn't involve fighting rats or other weak creatures that are uninteresting while I'm fighting them. Out of a hundred levels, start me off at ten or twenty please. If my character is age 16, that's good for at least level 5 right out the gate. A 16 year old can swing a bat and kill a rat, a bat, even an angry dog.
Oh, and the progression doesn't need to take 50 hours or 100 hours. I can care about a movie's characters after 2. Developers that make a level or dungeon twice as long as is fun suck ass. If I'm half way through the level and don't want to kill anymore, that level is too damn long. Unfortunately developers want to slap "50 hours of gameplay" on the box and make buyers think they got their money's worth, even though they just wasted extra hours of their life grinding through boring shit. That's why it's called grinding after all.
Doesn't Vista's Aero Glass render text and icons as 3D textures, so they scale evenly? I know too many relatives with 17 or 19" LCDs running at 800x600 because otherwise the text is too small for their liking. In XP, even if they change Windows' to Large Fonts, icons are too small to be readable, as are many apps.
So would you say you're addicted? In real life, even people who have bumper stickers saying "I'd rather be skiing/diving/golfing" still enjoy an occasional alternate pastime. They love their sport, but they'll go out bowling, biking, or just drinking with friends. If you can't bring yourself to try another game after several years of play, you may have a problem.
Before MS started cutting back at Longhorn, they talked about the four pillars that would support the OS. Aero Glass was one of them. Redoing the file system was another, but it got cut. Did MS get a second pillar into Vista? What were the others, and might they make it into Vienna?
Consider all the Windows users who have a monitor and do not want to buy an new one integrated into a Mac. In four years if they want to buy a new machine they don't want to buy another new screen unless they have someone to give the iMac to. A headless minitower Mac with decent performance would still give Apple plenty of profit.
Just look at how they gouge customers $75 to get the 256MB version of the Radeon X1600. The damn card is barely worth $90!