Yes, I know what you meant, but the bottleneck is not the 32MB memory card. Blizzard designed the game to work with it.
The bottleneck is that the base mini configuration comes with 256 MB of RAM installed, and WoW is a memory pig.
Even with 512 MB installed, you start paging off the hard drive, and the hard-drive on the mini is a high-latency 4200 RPM notebook drive. Every time you start using virtual memory space (which is almost always if you play WoW with less than 768 MB), it's a huge performance hit.
Tell your friends to try more RAM, and they will discover that the ATI card in the mini actually out-performs the nVidia card in the iMac G5, in spite of having half the video memory.
Mark Cuban was one of the few dot-com millionaires smart enough to cash in his chips and leave the table before the bust.
He went on to buy the Dallas Mavericks and make a big jackass of himself ever since, but the sort of jackass who is fun to have around at a party.
He has been fined by the NBA for unsportmanlike conduct more than any other owner... probably more than any team owner in the history of sports.
He recently produced a "reality TV" program which was sort of a low-rent version of the Apprentice, in which he gave a million dollars away, making the contestants do really stupid shit and eliminating the losers on the basis of his own fickle whims.
Pepsi and Coke both spend billions on advertizing, yet nobody ever really changes their favorite soda as a result of those ads.
The purpose of 90% of "brand identity" ads is not to sell you the product, but to sell potential investors on how well the product is doing. If there's a lot of awareness about your company, people are more inclined to own a piece of it... Which is why BASF and Siemens both run lots of TV ads in spite of having almost no consumer products to sell to the typical TV viewer.
I found that the old spatial way of "organizing" things in the old MacOS quickly broke down when you started dealing with a large group of files.
Column View is clearly the future, and the icon view is simply there for the sake of the warm fuzzy feeling it gives old Mac heads.
Kind of like how OS X still lets you have mounted hard drives and media disks on the desktop, even though it's completely redundant as of 10.3 and just about the worst way to access them now.
When you open the new finder window, all drives are there in that NeXT-style left-hand window, complete with their own "eject" buttons for dismounting, and the ability to use the column view to drill deeply into any of them. This new paradigm makes the old desktop icons a completely obsolete method of access. The first thing I do with any new Mac I get is turn desktop mounting off.
It was a spiffy metaphor at the time, but I drop files into directories like "Home" "Documents" "Movies", etc these days. I have no use for a shortcut which allows me to drag things into the Root level of my hard drive.
Already been done. I took an iPod with me last time I flew on a Northwest 747 out of Minneapolis. For several hours, I was listening to the iPod at jet-propelled speeds in excess of 200 MPH. It worked perfectly.
You may now worship me for my '1337 hax0r m4d ski11z. I'm off to write an article about it for 2600 Magazine...
He may have had a centrist presidency, but he was no centrist.
I don't give a damn about his motivations. The end result was two terms of nearly consistant centrist governance.
Several of the examples you gave of his radical liberalism were Republican-sponsored acts and/or bills which enjoyed vast bipartisan support.
Limiting gun clips, for example, was Bill Bennett's idea when he was Bush the Elder's "Drug Czar."
You can say he was no conservative, but you can't really call the administration which came up with the "Don't ask, don't tell" compromise and nationalized Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson's welfare plan an extremely liberal one, either.
Between the "no child left behind" act, adding free drugs to Medicare, and establishing a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, Bush the Younger has advanced big-government liberalism far more than Clinton ever could have.
The tax cuts are big fun, but until I see spending cuts to go with them, I consider the Bush administration's stewardship of the budget to be vastly inferior to Clinton's, as far as the conservative agenda is concerned.
GTA isn't a great work of art. Don't pretend that it is.
I didn't say it was. You asked for a great literary work which depicted hooker killing, and I provided an important novel in which the central character was a "lady killer" in both senses of the phrase.
No, he is not depicted to specifically kill a prostitute in the book, but that's splitting hairs.
I think it's disingenuous to say that GTA is also a veiled criticism of our society.
Not that I did, but now that you mention it, it appears that you never tuned in to the "talk radio" station in Vice City. Not the greatest work of satire in history, but clearly biting criticism of our society.
I have not played GTA:SA yet (I'm an X-Box owner), but the story in III and VC is clearly inspired by dark mafia films.
One fun (and very challenging) way to play the game is to try to complete all the missions without killing any cops or innocent bystanders. If you want to impose even tougher morals on yourself while playing, only steal cars from gangsters.
Not that there's anything wrong with it if somebody wants to drive a Mafia Sentinal on the sidewalk to mow people down at high speed, then wait for the ambulance and steal that for another joyride. Remember: Those aren't real people on the screen, just little digital cartoon characters.
Well, she's not from New York. She's from Little Rock.
Also, speaking as a right-wing kook, I consider to the Clintons to be very centrist.
Apart from an aborted attempt at nationalizing health care (which GWB has made great strides towards in his wake anyway), Clinton was a very centrist President.
Look at all the conservative reforms he signed into law: A capital gains tax cut. Welfare Reform. Free trade agreements. Corporate deregulation. The list goes on. Not to mention two years out of eight with a budget surpluss while still keeping top marginal income tax rates under 40%, and pushing for manditory use of the "V-chip."
Bush the Elder can only wish he had conservative credentials like that.
Bill and Hillary talk a good enough game at the right to convince most of the liberal base of the party that they are really still the same couple of "dirty hippy" 60's radicals they always have been, who are only in the disguise of suit-wearing, cookie-baking, friends of Big Business... but as Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out, you tend to become who you pretend to be, and Hillary's been wearing those power suits for a long time now.
I was one of those who though President Clinton should have resigned as soon as it became clear that he was criminally in contept of court, but in most other regards I thought he served his nation (and the centrist movement) fairly well most of the time.
If I was a centrist, rather than a radical libertarian, I probably would like him even more.
of course it takes a village to properly raise a child. do you somehow think that the child's entire world experience is controlled by their parents?
Nonsense.
The village is simply the setting in which the child is raised. The job of the parent is to raise a kid capable of coping with the time he or she will spend wading through the cesspool of humanity's lowest common denominators.
i was absolutely stunned when i was waiting in line to buy my copy of GTA-SA, when a 12-ish year old was getting his mother to buy it for him.
Some exceptional "12-ish year olds" can handle sex and/or violence and understand the difference between entertainment and reality.
This is why a parent can accompany their kids to R-rated movies.
That kid's mom might have simply been a lazy person who was not paying attention to the sort of game she was buying for her kid.
Parents frequently make the same mistake with comic books. I recall once, in the late 80s, standing next to a woman who was thinking of buyng a Batman comic for her kid. I quitly grabbed a copy and flipped it open for her to a page in which Robin bitterly threw a man to his death off a high-rise balcony, and explained to her that the target market for most of the comics she was looking at was young adults. She thanked me and started carefully looking for something a little more suitable for her little urchin.
On the other hand, it could be that this mom has taken the time to teach her kid morals, ethics, and the difference between fantasy and reality, and while a child enjoying such a game might offend your sensibilies, she might have a more permissive world-view about that sort of thing. Plus, for all you know, the kid was a very young-looking 15 or 16.
...and which books would those be? Exactly which great works of literature talk about what a great idea it is to have sex with a prostitute and then kill her?
A Clockwork Orange.
It's irony, but anybody who spends any time reading Slashdot knows that written sarcasm isn't always obvious to less-than-careful readers.
Ban the bible, lest the citizens learn to stone rapists, murders, and maybe even the politicians to death.... on second thought, that doesn't sound half bad.
I don't see how playing GTA is any worse than enjoying an episode of The Sopranos.
We are invited to sympathize with Tony Soprano as he:
- Covers up the murder of a stripper by one of his henchmen. - Kills and decapitates the very same henchman for mistreating an animal he liked. - Shatters the knee of a gambler who owes him money - Bankrupts the father of his daughter's best friend - Cheats on his wife with multiple partners
Why don't people complain about The Sopranos they way they do about GTA?
Because people understand that The Sopranos is intended for adults. GTA and games like it are also intended for adults, but there are a lot of people out there who don't understand that.
"Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them..."
Wow. Sounds like those children have some really crappy parents. My brother would never let his daughter play a game like Grand Theft Auto.
Perhaps, Senator Clinton, this is what comes of trying to get the "village" to raise a child. There are a lot of jerks in any given community who will happily sell violent soft-core pornography to children at $60 retail.
About half of the theaters in the Twin Cities now run 20-minute blocks of ads before movies. I choose not to go to them. When one of the other theaters in town runs even one non-preview ad before the film, I talk to the management afterwards and politely inform them that I will not continue to come back if they continue the practice.
Those who don't mind the ads can go put up with them, it's up do you. This is not a boycott I'm trying to start or anything, just the choice I personally decided on.
Oh... and Tivo fees are a waste of money, too. EyeTV 500 + Mac mini + TitanTV gives me High-Def PVR features built into the same system that plays my DVD's, music, other video files, and even lets me play WoW on my big living room screen, all with no monthly fees. Those who want to go an even cheaper route than I took can build themselves an X-Box media server.
Yes he does, but as I completely disagree with his conclusions, it's rather unfair to have be being the person presenting his case as a "Devil's Advocate." I suggest you take a little time to read their arguments yourself, if you care. There's a couple wonks writing for National Review who base their views on very similar arguments.
Personally, I'm too much a libertine pro-freedom ass to stomache more than a few pages of all this "what's best for preserving civilization" crap. They raise some good points, and back it with fairly sound logic, and may even ultimately be correct... but I'm not convinced of it, and if I'm going to err, I prefer to err on the side of individual liberty.
Re:What's wrong with finder?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bah!
More "It's still not done the Tog way, therefore it sucks" whining.
The core complaint:
Any window can still be "transformed" from a "file browser" to a "regular folder" and back again at any time.
I call that a Good Thing. The only possible objections are based on old-school MacOS Human Interface Dogma^H^H^H^H^H Guidlines zealotry.
Let me know when Ars starts complaining about something that matters.
Oh, sorry. I thought we were talking about utility, not eye candy.
I forgot that, as a Mac user, I'm only supposed to care about the eye candy, and if the "brushed metal" theme somehow offends my senses, then the whole experience is worthless.
Speaking as a long-time mac user myself, I love the Finder's column view, especially with the side-dock icons.
It's everything I once envied about those who could afford a NeXT system back in the day, but better.
A launch terminal button on the force quit dialog (apple-option-escape) so I could kill processes and shut down cleanly when the finder decides that it is not responding and no amount of "finder relaunches" will do a damn thing.
Why not just keep terminal.app in the desktop's Dock? I have it there on most of my Macs, and it's very handy. Frequently-used apps is what the Dock is there for. Your problems seem to be mostly related to fighting against it.
Current society places a high value, right or wrong, on the idea of children being raised, whenever possible, by both of their biological parents together.
Many of our marriage laws are written specifically to make this the most likely situation for as many children as possible.
Before making a persuasive case for "alternative" marriages, "no-fault" divorce laws, prenuptual agreements, removing tax breaks, or anything else which might reduce the percentage of children who are raised by their two biological parents, you must begin by establishing that the conventional view regarding the ideal way to raise a child is incorrect.
Whenever defending gay marriage or simplified divorces, you must keep in mind that you are making a case against the high value placed on the traditional family. Until a majority of Americans agree that a child is not specifically better off being raised by both biological parents, you can expect pretty much no movement on any of these issues.
This is why the gay marriage amendments were shot down in every state where they were put on the ballot in 2004, in spite of the fact that allowing gays to marry seems to many of us like the obvious "right thing to do" from a libertarian rights perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Worst.
Playstation.
Accessory.
Ever.
Call me when they have a peripheral to go with Hentai games.
Yes, I know what you meant, but the bottleneck is not the 32MB memory card. Blizzard designed the game to work with it.
The bottleneck is that the base mini configuration comes with 256 MB of RAM installed, and WoW is a memory pig.
Even with 512 MB installed, you start paging off the hard drive, and the hard-drive on the mini is a high-latency 4200 RPM notebook drive. Every time you start using virtual memory space (which is almost always if you play WoW with less than 768 MB), it's a huge performance hit.
Tell your friends to try more RAM, and they will discover that the ATI card in the mini actually out-performs the nVidia card in the iMac G5, in spite of having half the video memory.
Not being able to play WoW isn't a big enough justification for the thousands I would need to upgrade
Install more memory.
I play WoW all the time on a 1.42 GHz mini ($600) with 1 GB of RAM installed (under $200), and it runs great at 1280x720 on my HDTV projector.
550 is "in excess" of 200, and lowballing the number saved me the trouble of googling for the exact figure. :P
Who the hell is Mark Cuban....?
Mark Cuban was one of the few dot-com millionaires smart enough to cash in his chips and leave the table before the bust.
He went on to buy the Dallas Mavericks and make a big jackass of himself ever since, but the sort of jackass who is fun to have around at a party.
He has been fined by the NBA for unsportmanlike conduct more than any other owner... probably more than any team owner in the history of sports.
He recently produced a "reality TV" program which was sort of a low-rent version of the Apprentice, in which he gave a million dollars away, making the contestants do really stupid shit and eliminating the losers on the basis of his own fickle whims.
Pepsi and Coke both spend billions on advertizing, yet nobody ever really changes their favorite soda as a result of those ads.
The purpose of 90% of "brand identity" ads is not to sell you the product, but to sell potential investors on how well the product is doing. If there's a lot of awareness about your company, people are more inclined to own a piece of it... Which is why BASF and Siemens both run lots of TV ads in spite of having almost no consumer products to sell to the typical TV viewer.
I found that the old spatial way of "organizing" things in the old MacOS quickly broke down when you started dealing with a large group of files.
Column View is clearly the future, and the icon view is simply there for the sake of the warm fuzzy feeling it gives old Mac heads.
Kind of like how OS X still lets you have mounted hard drives and media disks on the desktop, even though it's completely redundant as of 10.3 and just about the worst way to access them now.
When you open the new finder window, all drives are there in that NeXT-style left-hand window, complete with their own "eject" buttons for dismounting, and the ability to use the column view to drill deeply into any of them. This new paradigm makes the old desktop icons a completely obsolete method of access. The first thing I do with any new Mac I get is turn desktop mounting off.
It was a spiffy metaphor at the time, but I drop files into directories like "Home" "Documents" "Movies", etc these days. I have no use for a shortcut which allows me to drag things into the Root level of my hard drive.
...still no jet-propulsion hack.
Already been done. I took an iPod with me last time I flew on a Northwest 747 out of Minneapolis. For several hours, I was listening to the iPod at jet-propelled speeds in excess of 200 MPH. It worked perfectly.
You may now worship me for my '1337 hax0r m4d ski11z. I'm off to write an article about it for 2600 Magazine...
He may have had a centrist presidency, but he was no centrist.
I don't give a damn about his motivations. The end result was two terms of nearly consistant centrist governance.
Several of the examples you gave of his radical liberalism were Republican-sponsored acts and/or bills which enjoyed vast bipartisan support.
Limiting gun clips, for example, was Bill Bennett's idea when he was Bush the Elder's "Drug Czar."
You can say he was no conservative, but you can't really call the administration which came up with the "Don't ask, don't tell" compromise and nationalized Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson's welfare plan an extremely liberal one, either.
Between the "no child left behind" act, adding free drugs to Medicare, and establishing a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, Bush the Younger has advanced big-government liberalism far more than Clinton ever could have.
The tax cuts are big fun, but until I see spending cuts to go with them, I consider the Bush administration's stewardship of the budget to be vastly inferior to Clinton's, as far as the conservative agenda is concerned.
I let my 9 year old daughter play it, guess what she did?
My neice is considerably younger than 9.
She drove around in the taxi giving people rides or the fire truck/ambulence helping people...
When she watched me play it she kept telling me "No don't shoot the people!!! Don't drive on the sidewalk!!! You're not supposed to be the bad guy!!"
What a great kid! You must live in a terrific village!
... or maybe your parenting skills played some small role in how she's turning out. Call me crazy, but I think it might have been a factor.
Heh... Henti tapes on the shelves the children's video section? What a sick prank. Sounds like Tyler Durden was working at your local video store.
GTA isn't a great work of art. Don't pretend that it is.
I didn't say it was. You asked for a great literary work which depicted hooker killing, and I provided an important novel in which the central character was a "lady killer" in both senses of the phrase.
No, he is not depicted to specifically kill a prostitute in the book, but that's splitting hairs.
I think it's disingenuous to say that GTA is also a veiled criticism of our society.
Not that I did, but now that you mention it, it appears that you never tuned in to the "talk radio" station in Vice City. Not the greatest work of satire in history, but clearly biting criticism of our society.
I have not played GTA:SA yet (I'm an X-Box owner), but the story in III and VC is clearly inspired by dark mafia films.
One fun (and very challenging) way to play the game is to try to complete all the missions without killing any cops or innocent bystanders. If you want to impose even tougher morals on yourself while playing, only steal cars from gangsters.
Not that there's anything wrong with it if somebody wants to drive a Mafia Sentinal on the sidewalk to mow people down at high speed, then wait for the ambulance and steal that for another joyride. Remember: Those aren't real people on the screen, just little digital cartoon characters.
Well, she's not from New York. She's from Little Rock.
Also, speaking as a right-wing kook, I consider to the Clintons to be very centrist.
Apart from an aborted attempt at nationalizing health care (which GWB has made great strides towards in his wake anyway), Clinton was a very centrist President.
Look at all the conservative reforms he signed into law: A capital gains tax cut. Welfare Reform. Free trade agreements. Corporate deregulation. The list goes on. Not to mention two years out of eight with a budget surpluss while still keeping top marginal income tax rates under 40%, and pushing for manditory use of the "V-chip."
Bush the Elder can only wish he had conservative credentials like that.
Bill and Hillary talk a good enough game at the right to convince most of the liberal base of the party that they are really still the same couple of "dirty hippy" 60's radicals they always have been, who are only in the disguise of suit-wearing, cookie-baking, friends of Big Business... but as Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out, you tend to become who you pretend to be, and Hillary's been wearing those power suits for a long time now.
I was one of those who though President Clinton should have resigned as soon as it became clear that he was criminally in contept of court, but in most other regards I thought he served his nation (and the centrist movement) fairly well most of the time.
If I was a centrist, rather than a radical libertarian, I probably would like him even more.
of course it takes a village to properly raise a child. do you somehow think that the child's entire world experience is controlled by their parents?
Nonsense.
The village is simply the setting in which the child is raised. The job of the parent is to raise a kid capable of coping with the time he or she will spend wading through the cesspool of humanity's lowest common denominators.
i was absolutely stunned when i was waiting in line to buy my copy of GTA-SA, when a 12-ish year old was getting his mother to buy it for him.
Some exceptional "12-ish year olds" can handle sex and/or violence and understand the difference between entertainment and reality.
This is why a parent can accompany their kids to R-rated movies.
That kid's mom might have simply been a lazy person who was not paying attention to the sort of game she was buying for her kid.
Parents frequently make the same mistake with comic books. I recall once, in the late 80s, standing next to a woman who was thinking of buyng a Batman comic for her kid. I quitly grabbed a copy and flipped it open for her to a page in which Robin bitterly threw a man to his death off a high-rise balcony, and explained to her that the target market for most of the comics she was looking at was young adults. She thanked me and started carefully looking for something a little more suitable for her little urchin.
On the other hand, it could be that this mom has taken the time to teach her kid morals, ethics, and the difference between fantasy and reality, and while a child enjoying such a game might offend your sensibilies, she might have a more permissive world-view about that sort of thing. Plus, for all you know, the kid was a very young-looking 15 or 16.
A Clockwork Orange.
It's irony, but anybody who spends any time reading Slashdot knows that written sarcasm isn't always obvious to less-than-careful readers.
Ban the bible, lest the citizens learn to stone rapists, murders, and maybe even the politicians to death. ... on second thought, that doesn't sound half bad.
I don't see how playing GTA is any worse than enjoying an episode of The Sopranos.
We are invited to sympathize with Tony Soprano as he:
- Covers up the murder of a stripper by one of his henchmen.
- Kills and decapitates the very same henchman for mistreating an animal he liked.
- Shatters the knee of a gambler who owes him money
- Bankrupts the father of his daughter's best friend
- Cheats on his wife with multiple partners
Why don't people complain about The Sopranos they way they do about GTA?
Because people understand that The Sopranos is intended for adults. GTA and games like it are also intended for adults, but there are a lot of people out there who don't understand that.
The key part of the sound bite:
"Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them..."
Wow. Sounds like those children have some really crappy parents. My brother would never let his daughter play a game like Grand Theft Auto.
Perhaps, Senator Clinton, this is what comes of trying to get the "village" to raise a child. There are a lot of jerks in any given community who will happily sell violent soft-core pornography to children at $60 retail.
Some people accept it, but not all.
About half of the theaters in the Twin Cities now run 20-minute blocks of ads before movies. I choose not to go to them. When one of the other theaters in town runs even one non-preview ad before the film, I talk to the management afterwards and politely inform them that I will not continue to come back if they continue the practice.
Those who don't mind the ads can go put up with them, it's up do you. This is not a boycott I'm trying to start or anything, just the choice I personally decided on.
Oh... and Tivo fees are a waste of money, too. EyeTV 500 + Mac mini + TitanTV gives me High-Def PVR features built into the same system that plays my DVD's, music, other video files, and even lets me play WoW on my big living room screen, all with no monthly fees. Those who want to go an even cheaper route than I took can build themselves an X-Box media server.
Yes he does, but as I completely disagree with his conclusions, it's rather unfair to have be being the person presenting his case as a "Devil's Advocate." I suggest you take a little time to read their arguments yourself, if you care. There's a couple wonks writing for National Review who base their views on very similar arguments.
Personally, I'm too much a libertine pro-freedom ass to stomache more than a few pages of all this "what's best for preserving civilization" crap. They raise some good points, and back it with fairly sound logic, and may even ultimately be correct... but I'm not convinced of it, and if I'm going to err, I prefer to err on the side of individual liberty.
Bah!
More "It's still not done the Tog way, therefore it sucks" whining.
The core complaint:
Any window can still be "transformed" from a "file browser" to a "regular folder" and back again at any time.
I call that a Good Thing. The only possible objections are based on old-school MacOS Human Interface Dogma^H^H^H^H^H Guidlines zealotry.
Let me know when Ars starts complaining about something that matters.
Oh, sorry. I thought we were talking about utility, not eye candy.
I forgot that, as a Mac user, I'm only supposed to care about the eye candy, and if the "brushed metal" theme somehow offends my senses, then the whole experience is worthless.
Speaking as a long-time mac user myself, I love the Finder's column view, especially with the side-dock icons.
It's everything I once envied about those who could afford a NeXT system back in the day, but better.
A launch terminal button on the force quit dialog (apple-option-escape) so I could kill processes and shut down cleanly when the finder decides that it is not responding and no amount of "finder relaunches" will do a damn thing.
Why not just keep terminal.app in the desktop's Dock? I have it there on most of my Macs, and it's very handy. Frequently-used apps is what the Dock is there for. Your problems seem to be mostly related to fighting against it.
Current society places a high value, right or wrong, on the idea of children being raised, whenever possible, by both of their biological parents together.
Many of our marriage laws are written specifically to make this the most likely situation for as many children as possible.
Before making a persuasive case for "alternative" marriages, "no-fault" divorce laws, prenuptual agreements, removing tax breaks, or anything else which might reduce the percentage of children who are raised by their two biological parents, you must begin by establishing that the conventional view regarding the ideal way to raise a child is incorrect.
Whenever defending gay marriage or simplified divorces, you must keep in mind that you are making a case against the high value placed on the traditional family. Until a majority of Americans agree that a child is not specifically better off being raised by both biological parents, you can expect pretty much no movement on any of these issues.
This is why the gay marriage amendments were shot down in every state where they were put on the ballot in 2004, in spite of the fact that allowing gays to marry seems to many of us like the obvious "right thing to do" from a libertarian rights perspective.
P.J. O'Rouke made very much the same argument, going as far as to call the President a mythical "God-King" figure.
(I believe "Parliament of Whores" is the book in which he makes this case, but I can't recall for certain.)