The hype surrounding cables has absolutely NO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH to back it up. It has been proven time and again that when you take away the prestigious name brands and have people listen to various cables in a double-blind test, the differences between high-end and standard zip cord mysteriously disappear.
All you have to do is train your dog to sit/stay obediently, then get him to take the shots for you until the ammo runs out. You're free to pillage the room unmolested after that.
I call hypocrisy. And you think your cat likes you, really? After all, if it finds you non-threatening it has been hard-wired to rub its scent on you -- which is basically a means of marking its territory.
I don't want to start a dog vs. cat debate, but I'll say this: you try to state your case eloquently, but you can't spit-polish shit.
This of course will spark a backlash from tech-fearing dogs everywhere. Just how long will it take for one of them to become the Una-barker and start sending exploding poop packages to unsuspecting researchers?
Watching the cards fly around is half the fun! I have OCD, so I like to make sure exactly 52 card fly off the stacks when I win. To that end, I've still got a PC with a turbo button on it. When I'm about to win solitaire, I disable the button so the counting goes easier.
I tried to do something like this once, but I kept running into the problem of differential voltages in the pulse-modulated ion core. I think they must have shunted the positrons through the floating point pathways, thus creating an artificial singularity in which the laws of EE no longer apply.
I personally couldn't stand it if my neighbor (with a standard CRT television) found out who the big winner of American Idol was 60 milliseconds before I did!
CmdrTaco needs to update his vocabulary. If the subject is alive before the procedure, but dead afterward -- that's murder! Or at least a malpractice lawsuit.
Yes, we all need more devices competing for airspace with our wireless networks. With RF remotes, when your neighbor powers up his home theater system and pops in the latest action explode-a-rama, you get knocked offline before you complete your blog entry dedicated to bitching about neoghbors with subwoofers. Wee haaaw!
Since the G5 towers were all part of a supercomputer, you can rest assured that all the wires and circuit pathways have been sufficiently burned-in. Nothing sucks more than getting a new computer and having to leave it crunching numbers for a week or more until it reaches peak performance....
But they're already doing this! Sure, it's all top secret and very hush hush, but you don't really think all those solar flares happening all by themselves, do you?
Oh man. You've swallowed the "You're still free as long as you're being good" line hook, line, and sinker.
The biggest problem with preventing illegal or otherwise bad activities is the people who decide what's illegal and bad. Sure, we normally vote on such things so any restrictions are all our fault anyway, right?
Think about WWII Japanese concentration camps and present day Guantanamo. In times of crisis (and for undetermined periods thereafter), we are not a democracy.
Now I'll take your counter arguments and have at them one by one:
Beating people up is illegal and considered immoral. If I do it, I can be punished - but that does give people to right to take over my mind and control how I can move my arms.
Right, but if there was a way to prohibit people people from beating other people up that did not restrict anything else they might like to do. What would be so wrong about using it?
Let's say there was some arm-controlling system in place. Somehow a criminal discovered how to circumvent it. he is standing right in front of you asking for your money. You are completely defenseless because you are still bound by this system.
Driving too fast is illegal and considered immoral. If I do it, I can be punished - but that does not give people to right to remote control my car.
There's no need to remote control your car, just disable your car from going over the speed limit. If you weren't planning on breaking the law, why should you care about driving that fast? Every speed you were planning on driving at is available isn't it?
There's a tornado approaching from behind at about 60MPH. You're on a country road. The speed limit is 55MPH. Too bad -- you're dead.
Slandering others is illegal and considered immoral. If I do it, I can be punished - but that does not give people the right to control what I can say.
Same deal as beating people up. I'm not claiming these things are possible, but what would be wrong with them if they were.
Whether or not something is slander is a court-testable case. Courts decide what is slander or not. If you were unable to say certain things because they could possibly be considered slanderous -- that's a serious restriction of freedom.
Mastering with a "louder is better" mentality is akin to overexposed photography: the details get washed out and are lost.
Just like a nicely balanced black-and-white photograph will have black blacks (but not too black) and white whites (but not too white), a well-mastered CD's content should fall between the media's minimum and maximum dynamic range.
The parallels between photography and music start to fall apart when you bring normalization into the picture. If you are familiar with Photoshop, you know that you can tweak the blacks and whites in a photo so that the blacks are black and whites are white with the Level tool. This is normalization. When you normalize, you either expand or compress the information to fit between a maximum and a minimum value. This works great with photos, but not as well with music, especially if the source material is bad.
If your source material is not recorded at the proper levels for CD mastering, normalization can definitely put it in the proper range, but it comes at a price. If the source is too quiet, normalization will raise the noise floor and may introduce or enhance undesirable artifacts. If the source is too loud, normalization can compress the sound so the differences between loud, medium, and quiet are not as distinct as they should be. Imagine a smooth gradient from white to black suddenly becoming scrunched towards the edges so there is a wide band of mushy gray in the middle).
All this can be summed up with the phrase: junk in, junk out
isn't the point of a "case mod" to make the new case look better than the original case? I wouldn't be caught dead with such a fugly tetrahedron on my desk, glowing or not!
If I were to somehow distill the inner workings of my mind and figure out the process my brain goes through when determining whether or not I enjoy a particular game, these criteria would be on the checklist (in no particular order). A Yes answer to each of these makes it a winner in my book.
Is the level-to-level progression of gameplay suffiently complex that I don't feel like I'm following a dotted line from start to finish?
Is the AI sufficiently clever that I'm not able to quickly determine and exploit its weaknesses?
Is the single-player scenario/storyline engrossing, or does the game's appeal rely solely on internet play?
Do I get to use my brain, or are rapid motor skills enough to get me by?
Would I watch a movie or read a book based on the game's storyline?
Does the wow-factor of cool graphics do more than just spit-polish a steaming lump of excrement?
There are more criteria, I'm sure, but that captures a large chunk of them. There are very few games I've played that meet those criteria (this includes non-FPS titles):
anything by Bungie (particularly the Marathon series)
the Myst series
Diablo I and II
Deus Ex
Medal of Honor
Splinter Cell (cool stealthy gameplay)
and perhaps Castle Wolfenstein, but the final boss is waaaaay too easy.
Since when is competition a bad thing? Are you a bitter winemaker or something (not bitter wine, bitter you)?
Also, you make it sound like the entire coast of CA is covered with grapes. That's simply not true. Sure, there are pockets of "mass-grapeage" up and down the coast, but you can go for miles and miles without seeing a single vine.
Re:Do they have...
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Out of curiousity, anyone use the 1 button thing with Linux on the Apple laptops? How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device???"
Slashdot Mirror
Even better than the real thing....
>ln /foo/bar/say_it_aint_so ~/say_it_aint_so
The "analog sound" -- which basically equates to rolled off high frequencies -- can easily be replicated digitally.
The last thing I need is all my windows crashing.
The hype surrounding cables has absolutely NO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH to back it up. It has been proven time and again that when you take away the prestigious name brands and have people listen to various cables in a double-blind test, the differences between high-end and standard zip cord mysteriously disappear.
All you have to do is train your dog to sit/stay obediently, then get him to take the shots for you until the ammo runs out. You're free to pillage the room unmolested after that.
I call hypocrisy. And you think your cat likes you, really? After all, if it finds you non-threatening it has been hard-wired to rub its scent on you -- which is basically a means of marking its territory.
I don't want to start a dog vs. cat debate, but I'll say this: you try to state your case eloquently, but you can't spit-polish shit.
This of course will spark a backlash from tech-fearing dogs everywhere. Just how long will it take for one of them to become the Una-barker and start sending exploding poop packages to unsuspecting researchers?
Watching the cards fly around is half the fun! I have OCD, so I like to make sure exactly 52 card fly off the stacks when I win. To that end, I've still got a PC with a turbo button on it. When I'm about to win solitaire, I disable the button so the counting goes easier.
I tried to do something like this once, but I kept running into the problem of differential voltages in the pulse-modulated ion core. I think they must have shunted the positrons through the floating point pathways, thus creating an artificial singularity in which the laws of EE no longer apply.
I personally couldn't stand it if my neighbor (with a standard CRT television) found out who the big winner of American Idol was 60 milliseconds before I did!
I can swear that I've seen a waste-powered DeLorean somewhere before...
CmdrTaco needs to update his vocabulary. If the subject is alive before the procedure, but dead afterward -- that's murder! Or at least a malpractice lawsuit.
Yes, we all need more devices competing for airspace with our wireless networks. With RF remotes, when your neighbor powers up his home theater system and pops in the latest action explode-a-rama, you get knocked offline before you complete your blog entry dedicated to bitching about neoghbors with subwoofers. Wee haaaw!
Since the G5 towers were all part of a supercomputer, you can rest assured that all the wires and circuit pathways have been sufficiently burned-in. Nothing sucks more than getting a new computer and having to leave it crunching numbers for a week or more until it reaches peak performance....
But they're already doing this! Sure, it's all top secret and very hush hush, but you don't really think all those solar flares happening all by themselves, do you?
You can't send people to the moon because of those damn Van Allen Radiation Belts!
Oh man. You've swallowed the "You're still free as long as you're being good" line hook, line, and sinker.
The biggest problem with preventing illegal or otherwise bad activities is the people who decide what's illegal and bad. Sure, we normally vote on such things so any restrictions are all our fault anyway, right?
Think about WWII Japanese concentration camps and present day Guantanamo. In times of crisis (and for undetermined periods thereafter), we are not a democracy.
Now I'll take your counter arguments and have at them one by one:
Let's say there was some arm-controlling system in place. Somehow a criminal discovered how to circumvent it. he is standing right in front of you asking for your money. You are completely defenseless because you are still bound by this system. There's a tornado approaching from behind at about 60MPH. You're on a country road. The speed limit is 55MPH. Too bad -- you're dead. Whether or not something is slander is a court-testable case. Courts decide what is slander or not. If you were unable to say certain things because they could possibly be considered slanderous -- that's a serious restriction of freedom. Touche, mon frere.Sounds to me like you'd really love the White Stripes. All the incidental noise and none of the polish -- pure musical honesty.
Mastering with a "louder is better" mentality is akin to overexposed photography: the details get washed out and are lost.
Just like a nicely balanced black-and-white photograph will have black blacks (but not too black) and white whites (but not too white), a well-mastered CD's content should fall between the media's minimum and maximum dynamic range.
The parallels between photography and music start to fall apart when you bring normalization into the picture. If you are familiar with Photoshop, you know that you can tweak the blacks and whites in a photo so that the blacks are black and whites are white with the Level tool. This is normalization. When you normalize, you either expand or compress the information to fit between a maximum and a minimum value. This works great with photos, but not as well with music, especially if the source material is bad.
If your source material is not recorded at the proper levels for CD mastering, normalization can definitely put it in the proper range, but it comes at a price. If the source is too quiet, normalization will raise the noise floor and may introduce or enhance undesirable artifacts. If the source is too loud, normalization can compress the sound so the differences between loud, medium, and quiet are not as distinct as they should be. Imagine a smooth gradient from white to black suddenly becoming scrunched towards the edges so there is a wide band of mushy gray in the middle).
All this can be summed up with the phrase:
junk in, junk out
isn't the point of a "case mod" to make the new case look better than the original case? I wouldn't be caught dead with such a fugly tetrahedron on my desk, glowing or not!
Since when is $471,000,000 (that's 471 million) almost 1/2 a trillion? Did you forget what comes after million? Count with me:
hundred
thousand
million
BILLION
trillion
If I were to somehow distill the inner workings of my mind and figure out the process my brain goes through when determining whether or not I enjoy a particular game, these criteria would be on the checklist (in no particular order). A Yes answer to each of these makes it a winner in my book.
There are more criteria, I'm sure, but that captures a large chunk of them. There are very few games I've played that meet those criteria (this includes non-FPS titles):
Since when is competition a bad thing? Are you a bitter winemaker or something (not bitter wine, bitter you)?
Also, you make it sound like the entire coast of CA is covered with grapes. That's simply not true. Sure, there are pockets of "mass-grapeage" up and down the coast, but you can go for miles and miles without seeing a single vine.
"Out of curiousity, anyone use the 1 button thing with Linux on the Apple laptops? How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device???"
With key modifiers, silly. alt-click, ctrl-click